Ben has presented many speeches about sculptures and art topics along with other inspirations and issues.  Contact him if you would like to invite him to speak at your group's event.  As an avid environmentalist, he presented this motivational speach at a Toastmasters meeting.

I’m so small

I’m so small.  I don’t mater.  Just a tiny dot on this remarkable planet so what I do means nothing.  The earth has a fever, trying to burn off the incessant infection called humanity, trying to destroy the belligerent bipeds that stretched far beyond their acceptable balance point.  We had our warnings: floods, famine, diseases.  Keep within the reasonable bounds or suffer the resulting crush. 

We are clusters of proverbial tics on the ass of the world, biting and chewing, creating itches and irritations so intense that mother earth is scratching and shaking in an escalating attempt to eliminate us.  Next step, burn us off.  It won’t require intense fire and brimstone to cleanse this contamination, a few degrees is all that’s needed to tip the world rhythms into droughts and typhoons, to tip the balance in favour of insects and infections.  Humanity had its chance, now its time to clean up them along with their mess.  Earth had no problem wiping the massive dinosaurs off the planet when they got out of hand.  Obliterating the human irritant will be an easy task.

Like helpless creatures as we cry to Orwellian big brother for resue.  Save us from our past, preserve our future.  The response: a fleet of prostituted scientists spewing words of comfort while the Harpers and Obamas dole out tax breaks for us to go buy ice cream cones.  We foolishly accept their funds, clapping our hands and giggling with excitement as the ice cream drips down our chins, distracted from the puddles of excrement seeping through our shoes.

We pray to our gods for help, to save us, the chosen ones from the disastrous consequences of our fellow heathen roommates.  Be it Christ or Ala or Buddha or Brittany, our gods must be furious at the mess we made in the gift of Eden.  Strip the land, poison the water and foul the air.  Imagine you are a parent who goes out for a nice evening, leaving the kids alone in a beautiful home and when you return you find that they’ve smashed the furniture, flooded the floor and putrid odours pack the air.  You’d be furious.  How do you think your god feels and what he wants to do to us the ungrateful little dweebs?

I’m so small, so insignificant, one solitary soul in a sea of seven billion.  I can’t do everything.  I could do nothing but that doesn’t fit who I am so I choose to do my tiny bit, my infinitesimal contribution to save the world.  I bought a bicycle and cycled to work amidst the Hummers and autos on steroids blasting between red lights, emitting clouds of poison gases while I contemplated if there is an indirect correlation between the size of a man’s vehicle and the size of his male member.  I persisted by pedalling enviro-rides through the thick air, day after day because that is who I am.  I persisted by repeatedly turning down my home’s winter thermostat one more degree until my family morphed into a pack of arctic wolves, covered by thick, furry sweaters.

I looked up to see a jet flying overhead, powered by turbines the size of whales spewing more septic sludge into our atmosphere in one minute than I flush down the toilet in a year.  I don’t expect all humanity to stop pissing on our world.  Perfection is unattainable.  There will always be some selfish baron-brains urinating in our communal drinking fountain and although it tarnishes the taste, it won’t kill us.  Not if most of us to stop.

I persist because that is who I am.  Who I am, Who I am, not Sam or cat but Who I am.  Yes, that invisible Who in the Seuss world about to face annihilation is me.  Our world is about to be destroyed but our problem is different.  It’s not an elephant holding us in its trunk that puts us at risk, it the belligerent behemoths running the world and all their void skull followers; big business, big government, big oil, big plagues of parasites sucking the life juices out of mother earth leaving lethal levels of oil, smog and desolation in their wake.

I can’t prove that its last call time for humanity but I know that the sixties hippy toting a sign declaring that the world will end tomorrow was on the right track.  He just had the wrong day.  I was overwhelmed with dread and didn’t know what to do so I asked my big brother Paul.  Being two years older gave him sage-like wisdom that I counted on to get me through troubling times as a toddler and the following years as well.  I said to him, “Our air is polluted, our waters are putrid, our food is poisoned, we’re killing ourselves but I’m so small, what can I do?”  Without hesitating a second, he replied with omnipotent insight, “You’re fucked.”  Paul was always good with words.  He had assessed the situation, slicing though it with laser precision to unveil the hidden truth.  But the problem is that I don’t want to be fucked.  I can’t participate in this mass murder-suicide that entwines us.  I refuse to sip from the cup of cyanide laced Kool-Aid while dancing in circles until we all fall down.  I refuse to sit idly by and let the enviro-slobs murder me with their daily dumpings.  I am small but I continue to ride my bike through smog thick air.  I continue to turn the thermostat down one more degree, continue to conserve every cup of water like the precious entity it is.  If the pollution wins and I die prematurely it will not be a natural death, it will be measured murdered.  But I will have done what I could because that’s who I am.  Who I am, Who I am, a tiny voice performing tiny acts.  I’m so small that what I do means nothing… except to me… and maybe to you.