Speeching

I thought of a topic.
For junior English, we had to make a five minute speech according to some criteria, and then some of the juniors go on to a contest. I'm crashing the party.
I loved this contest because I love the art of rhetoric; I think speech-making is a really valuable method of communication that people can't utilize, and speaking a piece of writing out loud to an audience uses so many cool techniques that you can't put anywhere else. Sure, Patrick Henry's address to the House of Burgesses still reads incredibly well on paper 250 years later... But imagine what it must have been like to be in the audience. Novels can change lives, poems can change lives, music can change lives, but never in the same way a speech can. It can be so direct, so amazingly concise and pull directly at what the audience was thinking--it can change history in a minute. What else is that powerful? A bombing could, maybe, relegating a place and its people to a few sentences in a history book. I have no doubt in my mind that some speeches, in their time, affected the speaker's world in the same way a missile would have, even more so because the effects of words often last longer than a few scars on the earth.
Obviously, I don't have that kind of talent. If I did, I could actually develop something vaguely resembling interpersonal communication skills. I do, though, like writing something down to talk to people about, and this contest is a handy little chance to have fun with that.

Archimedes' principle, roughly, I think, states that the volume of an object can be measured by the amount of mass it displaces; the contours, shape, and capacity of an unknown object can be found by, rather than observing the space it does occupy, observing the space that it doesn't.
Isn't it the same with the human being? And, if so, shouldn't we grapple with things that are, by definition, larger than us so that we both change and define our limits and ourselves?

Wooaaah. Heavy speech stuff there. I can't wait to get crackin'.

L