Last week, the annual Stirling speaker at my college was former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. Despite being no fan of the Bush administration, I went along to the lecture out of curiosity and came away pleasantly surprised. Rice is clearly a very intelligent woman and as I pursue my studies into Civil Rights, it is inspiring as she said in the lecture, that a woman who grew up in Birmingham, Alabama not being able to eat a hamburger at a lunch counter, eventually through hard work and determination became the first African American woman to become Secretary of State.
In talking politics, her speech to me seemed rather scripted and frankly I lost interest slightly when she began to talk foreign policy (particularly when she said that China will never be more powerful than America due to it's fear of the internet). She urged all of us, who were fortunate enough to be sitting in that lecture at one of America's leading liberal arts colleges to find what we are good at and what we want to do and do it whilst also suggesting that we try and do things which we know will be hard sometimes. She also hoped we would talk with people who have different views to those that we might have (at which point myself and a guy with whom I had had a heated debate on religion the week before shared a knowing look). I guess she did exactly what she set out to in her talk, she inspired everyone in that room not to take the precious education that we are gaining for granted, but to use it to do something good so that when we leave this world we will have made it a little bit better.
