Congratulations to Shahista A of 7G for her highly commended entry to the Australian Catholics Young Voices Awards of 2022.

Here, Shahista explains her entry:

I chose to enter the digital media section where I recorded myself reading out my script and sent it out the written version which I titled ‘Future.’ What inspired me to enter the competition was when I was in English class and my teacher introduced the oral topic; record ourselves as if we are in the year 2222 giving a message to the people of 2022. We were then to give evidence by relating back to ‘WALL-E,’ a film that we had watched in class about what the future might be like.

In my script itself, I wrote about life comparing it to ‘a lead blocker, a frontline warrior, and bodyguard to the world. A doorway for free will to enter this otherwise deterministic world.’ Explaining it as, ‘a force now dead which brought order to chaos, salvaged the unsalvageable, reversed the irreversible, and worked miracles from the start.’ I explained how this thing called entropy, ‘the probability that everything will end as chaos’ started affecting life. ‘Turning life into lifeless zombies, positivity into stone. Viruses take hold of the will living inside the host, destroying the very essence of life, turning the world bleak.’ I decided to take entropy to overtake life, because last year I remember learning about entropy in my own time and remembered some basic stuff; Entropy can remain constant and increase but never decrease (Second Law of Thermodynamics), everything that can go wrong will (Murphy’s law), and simply that it was most commonly associated with disorder. I found this very fascinating and decided to include entropy in my script, calling it ‘the prohibition.’ Referring it to ‘Viruses, diseases, illness’ as ‘agents of entropy’ and described them as ‘infecting and hijacking.’ I then explained that ‘the world is bleak but bearable. You’ll need some training to inhabit it, technology moves faster than any mind can think, any eye can blink, and any light can travel. Every thought had impact and purpose, and every dream turned to reality. But so did our nightmares.’ I informed them that ‘I was able to hack the system, letting me talk to the people of the past’ and told them that I had heard about all that they did about two hundred years ago. I then ended it off with: ‘So please, I’m telling you now, don’t break your shield. Let the lead blocker block, the frontline warrior fight, and the bodyguard guard. Let the doorway open to alluring, trans-dimensional beauty in this world. Because this will not last if you do not fight with it. You are the courage and the strength that will push the stone wall through opening life to endless possibilities. The world will not survive without the help of everyone that can help, and yes you need the world but at points in time the world needs you far more then you’ll ever need it. We are polluting the air we breathe, poisoning the food we feed, we are being held captive by the things we make to help us and wasting till the world forms bleak. But as they say, “the house always wins.”
Shahista A (7G)