big and important: one empty prompt, 25 solemn minutes and me Oct 15 '05    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Books Mildred D. Taylor - Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: A Literature Unit From $8 Olivier Dunrea - Ollie From $7 The Bottom Line On seeming vaguely profound for a grade under time pressure: a lab demonstration of decisiveness. (Part of my new job, as teacher for the Princeton Review, is to help students deal with the S.A.T. Writing Section. I teach them how, in a limited time, to take a firm position on a diffuse philosophical issue; write a compelling introduction; write a conclusion that restates the point without being too obvious in its motive that "I doubt you were reading carefully enough to remember what I just wrote unless I remind you"; and generate examples that hint, to a casual reader, that maybe they know something about history and current events beyond a few incidents they memorized. All while writing transition sentences that pretend their examples weren't totally forced. In order to teach these things, I must periodically prove that I can do them myself. What kind of writer am I before I edit or, y'know, think? Behold, dear reader.) The prompt: Psychologist William James says that a person who is generally unwilling or unable to make conscious choices is an unhappy person: "There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision". He agrees with Voltaire, who wrote "There is a certain inevitable futility in indecision". What is your opinion of the claim that making a bad decision is sometimes better than making no decision at all? Plan and write an essay in which you do not, please, quote any lyrics from Rush songs, even if they were set to excellent riffs in two or more time signatures. My essay: --------- "Today's essay question, I can almost see being posed to a deer on a much-traveled road. 'Could making a bad decision be better than not making one?', you call to her out your window, as you keep her in your headlights and push the gas steadily further to the floor. Not knowing English, she peers at you, confused: 'What if running left is better than running right? I don't have enough idea yet, not enough information. I'm as big as your car, if not as heavy: maybe I could charge! Or that might hurt. I bet I could outrun you! But dodging to the right looks so OWW! OWWWWWWWW!' "Sadly, asking this particular deer got you little philosophy of note and a smashed radiator grille. I apologize. But I do think that a bad choice often beats none at all, in a wide variety of contexts from simple everyday personal choices like whether to eat a fellow camper in a snowstorm, to larger events like the fatal passivity of John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign. "Take the storm example: imagine, for example, that you are caught far from civilization like the Donner Party was, in 1846, after they fatally forgot and turned left at Laramie. Your stakes, as the snow mounts, become clear: your only food source is your friend Bob over there. The dilemma is equally clear: eating Bob would be _wrong_, and you'd miss him, and you'd die eventually anyway (even if 50 years later after being rescued), and if you didn't go to Hell, you'd sure deserve to. The problem with hemming and hawing is: Bob faces the same choices. If you're hungry and evil enough to eat him, you'd better do it before he makes the same choice about you. If you're too ethical, you can (for one thing) reassure Bob by mentioning this; maybe you can feel noble by offering him a couple of fingers to chew on. If you choose ethically, and he eats you, you've given your health to serve others, sort of an extreme pre-emptive organ donation; you can die proudly. Otherwise, if you dither, you're just edible wuss ... or you'll starve together, muttering to yourselves. "That's a small, selfish dilemma, you say. But compare this to John Kerry's presidential campaign, another study in dithering. Kerry faced an extremely close election, and yet he raised more than $7 million that he never spent. Could he have used the money to fight off allegations against his war record, rather than pulling all ads in June and July? Could he have funded extra get-out-the-vote specialists, or fought harder in court to put more voting machines in poor (Democratic-leaning) areas? Almost certainly. In failing to spend the $7 million, he not only lost: he made it harder to solicit donations in the future. People don't trust a ditherer. "Thus whether the stake is one life, one dinner, or one or more countries, sometimes any decision is more likely to be right than passive, amoral dilly-dallying".

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