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Ex Tempore Speech
Nov. 10th, 2021 12:22 amUSPTO Toastmasters held a Tuesday meeting, since Thursday is a holiday this week. They were looking for speakers, and I volunteered; not wanting to write and practice a speech in advance, I offered to give extemporaneous speech on a topic someone chose at the meeting. A friend of mine assigned me the topic of the world today if Abraham Lincoln had not been assassinated. I spoke about that, and said that Lincoln may well have had Marfan’s Syndrome, which would have put him at considerable risk of dying within a few years even if he had not been shot. Also, while Lincoln would have tried to handle Reconstruction better than the execrable Andrew Johnson, whatever he did would surely have displeased some people, North and South, and in 1868, a Democrat who was at best unenthusiastic about continuing Lincoln’s policies might have been elected.
I said that I believed history to be complicated, and, in the mathematical sense, chaotic, so that one could not be sure what would have happened. With Lincoln serving out his second term, the Gilded Age, as Mark Twain called it, and the Progressive movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, would likely have been different. Then other things would have changed; for example, World War One might easily not have happened, at least not the way it did, and when it did, if Gavrilo Princip had missed his shot, or if a few men in Berlin and Saint Petersburg had made different decisions. Then, if World War Two had not happened, at least not the way it did, there might have been no Manhattan Project, no nuclear power industry, and delays in other scientific and engineering advances, so today we might have burned more coal, and have a worse global warming problem, with fewer technological tools to fix it.
Several people praised my speech for my immense grasp of history, which I think gives me too much credit. I possess some knowledge, true, but only as a layman, and what I said seemed obvious enough to me.
I said that I believed history to be complicated, and, in the mathematical sense, chaotic, so that one could not be sure what would have happened. With Lincoln serving out his second term, the Gilded Age, as Mark Twain called it, and the Progressive movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, would likely have been different. Then other things would have changed; for example, World War One might easily not have happened, at least not the way it did, and when it did, if Gavrilo Princip had missed his shot, or if a few men in Berlin and Saint Petersburg had made different decisions. Then, if World War Two had not happened, at least not the way it did, there might have been no Manhattan Project, no nuclear power industry, and delays in other scientific and engineering advances, so today we might have burned more coal, and have a worse global warming problem, with fewer technological tools to fix it.
Several people praised my speech for my immense grasp of history, which I think gives me too much credit. I possess some knowledge, true, but only as a layman, and what I said seemed obvious enough to me.
