ACT Model Essays >>>>> Essay #2 >>>>> Counterpoint: >>>>> Refusing the Offer, Seizing the Opportunity to Transform Society Now

ACT Model Essays                     

 

Prepared for students in the

New Salem Educational Initiative

 

By Gary Marvin Davison, Ph.D.

Director,

New Salem Educational Initiative

 

Essay #2

Counterpoint: 

Refusing the Offer, Seizing the Opportunity to Transform Society Now   

 

As a student of the past, the offer to lead my life in another time and place would be very tempting.  There are many historical figures whom I admire, so that the chances to meet them or even to live during the time or in the place of their impact would be extremely appealing.

 

I find the ancient Greeks, for example, to be an amazing people and the 5^th century BCE replete with great thinkers and institutions that have forever influenced our world.  To listen to Socrates expound on the need to think through the nature of existence and each person’s role in life would be sublime.  To sit in the Academy of Plato, hearing him question his pupils (among whom I would be honored for inclusion) incisively, leading them to ponder the qualities of the Philosopher King or the nature of the Good or the perfections of other Forms would be an opportunity to dwell with a near approximation of Brilliance.

 

And there are so many engaging people and temporal circumstances tempting me to opt for their time and place.  As a radical feminist, I am in awe of Marie Le Jars de Gournay for having written the treatise, Equality Between Men and Women in the 17^th century.  I would have loved to have sidled up along Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott in their 19^th century assertion of the right of female suffrage, ultimately yielding success in the 20^th century (1920, 19^th Amendment).

 

To be sure, there are many other enticing people and eras:  the Roman Republic and Empire spanning 500 BCE to 500 CE, the Enlightenment of Newton, Rousseau, Locke, and Voltaire during the 17^th century and 18^th centuries;  the quest for African American citizenship by pioneer civil rights advocates W.E. B. DuBois and A. Philip Randolph.  As in the case of the seminal feminist suffragettes, these leaders stir me in my activist proclivities and draw me to their sides in their time at early 20^th century in the United States.

 

And yet, for all of these temptations, I marvel at the opportunities to activate my energies in the here and now.  Only in the late 1960s, very specifically from 1968 forward, have women and long-dispossessed groups had an open road to equality of citizenship in the United States.  And only in this very year of 2019 are a bevy of female and nonwhite males (Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, others;  Corey Booker, Julian Castro, Andrew Yang) viably contending for a major party’s (Democrat) nomination for the presidency.  The issues, moreover, are vital:  a planet to save, violence to abate, spiritual values to assert across religion and creed, education of all to advance, technology to direct toward beneficial human purposes.

 

Given the fact that knowledge of nutrition, exercise, and medicine gives me an opportunity to live longer than would be the case in past eras, the importance of the now ultimately trumps the enticements of the past:

 

Despite those enticements, I would opt for my present lifetime and opportunities for transformation, with some reluctance turning down the offer of another time and place.