Maximum Ride

Max was told to make a speech to the congress in Washington DC starting on pg.244 chapter 73 it goes a little like this: I cleared my throat and looked down at my speech."Thank you for inviting me here today," I said, my voice sounding nothing like me. "I'm here to testify about things I've seen and experienced myself. I'm here because the human race has become more powerful than ever. We've gone to the moon. Our crops resist diseases and pests. We can stop and restart a human heart. And we've harvested vast amounts of energy for everything from night-lights to enormous super- jets. We've created new kinds of people, like me.

But everything mankind"-I frowned-"personkind has accomplished, has had a price. One that we're all gonna have to pay." I heard coughing and shifting in the audience. I looked down at my notes, and all the little black words blurred together on the page. I just couldn't get through this.

I put down the speech, picked up the microphone, and came out from behind the podium."Look," I said. "There's alot of official stuff i could quote and put up on the screen with PowerPoint. But what you need to know, what the world needs to know, is that we're really destroying the earth in a bigger and more catastrophic way than anyone has ever imagined."

" I mean, I've seen a lot of the world, the only world we have. There are so many awesome and beautiful things on it. Waterfalls and moutnains, thermal pools surronded by ice and snow as far as you can see. Beautiful beaches with sand like white sugar. Fields and fields of wildflowers. Places where the ocean crashes up against a white mountainside, like it's done for hundreds of thousands of years.

"I've also seen concrete cities with hardly any green. And rivers whose pretty rainbow surfaces came from an oil leak upstream. Animals are becoming extinct right now, in my lifetime. Just recently i went through one of the worst hurricanes ever recorded. It was a whole lot worse because of huge, worldwide climatic changes casued by...us. We, the people."

I suddenly remembered a catchy (if annoying) sond I'd heard over and over in a Saturday morning cartoon- the one that was supposed to teach kids about the Constitution. The words of the preamble, which were quoted in the song, came flooding back to me. "'We the People of the United States," I began. "'in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.'" The room was silent. I looked around at all of the faces. " A more perfect union? While huge corporations do whatever they want to whoever they want, and other people live in subway tunnels? Where's the JUstic in that? Kids right here in America go to bed hungry every night, while other people get four-hundred-dollar haircuts. Promote the general welfare? Where's the general welfare of strip-mining, toxic pesticides, industrial solvents being dumped into rivers, killing everything? Domestic tranquility? Ever sleep in a forest thats being clear-cut? You'd be hearing chain saws in your head for weeks. The blessings of liberty? Yes. I'm using one of the blessings of liberty right now, my freedom of speech, to tell you guys, who make the laws, that the very ground you stand on, the house you live in, the children you tuck in at night are in immediate, catastrophic danger."

I took a deep breath, really getting warmed up. The flock was standing all around me, and Mom and Jeb were off to one side. I glanced at Mom, and she looked so proud. I hoped that Angel wasn't turning into a bird of paradise, and that Nudge wasn't making pens fly towards her. And if there was a God, Gazzy would not demonstrate his new skill right here in front of Congress. "Every minute of every day, cars belch exhaust. Factories spew toxins into the air, land, and water. We've cleared millions of square miles of forests, rain forests, and plains, which means tons of topsoil is just washing away. Which means loos of animals and plants, and increased fires, floods, and coastal disintegration. Just by stuff people have made, created, we're raising the overall temperatue of the entire atmosphere! What do you plan to do when it's destroyed? Can we all hold our breath until we get a new one?" No one shouted out an answer.

"the problem is here, now," I went on. " Nine of ten hottest years ever recorded have happened in my lifetime. I'm fourteen. More or less. There have been record-setting weather extremes across the globe- tornadoes, hurricanes, typhoons, droughts, wildifires, tsunamis. We're warming up the planet, and the planets ice is melting. If only fifty percent of the worlds ice melts, countless rivers and streams will overflow and then dry up, killing hundreds of thousands of people from disease and starvation. The ocean water level will rise anywhere from four feet to maybe twenty feet. How many of your favorite vactaion sports would be under water? Want to see the Effiel Tower by canoe? Do any of you own beach houses? Kiss 'em goodbye. And not two hundred years from now. Soon. Maybe within this lifetime."

I swallowed and wished I had an Icee or something like that." We can't reverse this disaster, even if we all pitched in now and did everything we could, which, faceit, we'er not going to do. A small percentage of us will do stuff, and other people will ignore the problem and hope they're dead before it gets really bad. But there are things we can do that would at least help. It would mae a difference.

" The US could ratify the Kyoto treaty. Pretty much every country in the world, except us and Australia, has ratified that. I know our time here is limited. In general, we need to pay more attention to what we do, what we buy, who we buy it from. Use compact fluorescent lightbulbs. If every house in America replaced just one of it's regular lightbulbs with a compact fluorescent, it would be like taking a million cars off the road. I mean, how hard is that? I can do the math, and I've never even gone to school!

"Look into other kinds of power. Windmills, watermills, solar power- every year corporations pay a jillion dollars in legal fees to avoid getting fined for pollution violations. What if they took a tiny percent of that money and put it toward coming up with better energy sources? Right now America looks like a fathead,shortsighted, gas guzzling, arrogant blowhard to the rest of the world. And Sweden looks all clean and tidy and progressive. I mean, where's our sense of pride? Why can't we be the progressive leaders, showing the rest of the world how to clean up its act? why can't we, the people, get more involved and push through legistration that will help clean up our air, land, and water? Why can't we take government funds from stupid things like war and use them for programs that will develop better fuel sources?

"I'm just one kid, and not even a regular kid. But if I can come up with all of this, why can't you? Will you wait until the water is lapping at your feet?" I stopped abruptly. To tell you the truth, I could have kept them pinned in their chairs all day while i recited fact and figures. But i hoped that at least a little of what i had said would stick, and make them think.

That was all I could do to save the world.

-Hoped this suited u, or helped u, wtevr situation ur in.

-SORA =)