This I Believe: Argument Essay Packet
What are the important personal beliefs that guide you in life? How did you develop those beliefs, and how
do they manifest in your daily life? As you read the following essays consider that, as well as how these
essayists create their arguments to make you understand their beliefs, understand the importance of it, and
anything that might make you adopt that belief in your own life.
Be Cool To The Pizza Dude by Sarah Adams
http://thisibelieve.org/essay/23/
If I have one operating philosophy about life it is this: “Be cool to the pizza delivery dude; it’s good luck.”
Four principles guide the pizza dude philosophy.
Principle 1: Coolness to the pizza delivery dude is a practice in humility and forgiveness. I let him cut me
off in traffic, let him safely hit the exit ramp from the left lane, let him forget to use his blinker without
extending any of my digits out the window or towards my horn because there should be one moment in my
harried life when a car may encroach or cut off or pass and I let it go. Sometimes when I have become so
certain of my ownership of my lane, daring anyone to challenge me, the pizza dude speeds by me in his
rusted Chevette. His pizza light atop his car glowing like a beacon reminds me to check myself as I flow
through the world. After all, the dude is delivering pizza to young and old, families and singletons, gays
and straights, blacks, whites and browns, rich and poor, vegetarians and meat lovers alike. As he journeys, I
give safe passage, practice restraint, show courtesy, and contain my anger.
Principle 2: Coolness to the pizza delivery dude is a practice in empathy. Let’s face it: We’ve all taken jobs
just to have a job because some money is better than none. I’ve held an assortment of these jobs and was
grateful for the paycheck that meant I didn’t have to share my Cheerios with my cats. In the big pizza
wheel of life, sometimes you’re the hot bubbly cheese and sometimes you’re the burnt crust. It’s good to
remember the fickle spinning of that wheel.
Principle 3: Coolness to the pizza delivery dude is a practice in honor and it reminds me to honor honest
work. Let me tell you something about these dudes: They never took over a company and, as CEO,
artificially inflated the value of the stock and cashed out their own shares, bringing the company to the
brink of bankruptcy, resulting in 20,000 people losing their jobs while the CEO builds a home the size of a
luxury hotel. Rather, the dudes sleep the sleep of the just.
Principle 4: Coolness to the pizza delivery dude is a practice in equality. My measurement as a human
being, my worth, is the pride I take in performing my job — any job — and the respect with which I treat
others. I am the equal of the world not because of the car I drive, the size of the TV I own, the weight I can
bench press, or the calculus equations I can solve. I am the equal to all I meet because of the kindness in
my heart. And it all starts here — with the pizza delivery dude.
Tip him well, friends and brethren, for that which you bestow freely and willingly will bring you all the
happy luck that a grateful universe knows how to return.
Sarah Adams has held a number of jobs in her life, including telemarketer, factory worker, hotel clerk and
flower shop cashier, but she has never delivered pizzas.
The Virtues of the Quiet Hero by John McCain
http://thisibelieve.org/essay/20724/
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I believe in honor, faith, and service — to one’s country and to mankind. It’s a lesson I learned from my
family, from the men with whom I served in Vietnam and from my fellow Americans.
Take William B. Ravnel. He was in Patton’s tank corps that went across Europe. I knew him, though, as an
English teacher and football coach in my school. He could make Shakespeare come alive and he had
incredible leadership talents that made me idolize him. What he taught me more than anything else was to
strictly adhere to our school’s honor code. If we stuck to those standards of integrity and honor then we
could be proud of ourselves. We could serve causes greater than our own self-interest.
Years later, I saw an example of honor in the most surprising of places. As a scared American prisoner of
war in Vietnam, I was tied in torture ropes by my tormentors and left alone in an empty room to suffer
through the night. Later in the evening, a guard I had never spoken to entered the room and silently
loosened the ropes to relieve my suffering. Just before morning, that same guard came back and retightened the ropes before his less humanitarian comrades returned. He never said a word to me.
Some months later on a Christmas morning, as I stood alone in the prison courtyard, that same guard
walked up to me and stood next to me for a few moments. Then with his sandal, the guard drew a cross in
the dirt. We stood wordlessly there for a minute or two, venerating the cross, until the guard rubbed it out
and walked away.
To me, that was faith: a faith that unites and never divides, a faith that bridges unbridgeable gaps in
humanity. It is the faith that we are all equal and endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights to life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is the faith I would die to defend.
My determination to act with honor and integrity impels me to work in service to my country. I have
believed that the means to real happiness and the true worth of a person is measured by how faithfully we
serve a cause greater than our self-interest. In America, we celebrate the virtues of the quiet hero — the
modest man who does his duty without complaint or expectation of praise; the man who listens closely for
the call of his country, and when she calls, he answers without reservation, not for fame or reward, but for
love.
I have been an imperfect servant of my country and my mistakes rightly humble me. I have tried to live by
these principles of honor, faith and service because I want my children to live by them as well. I hope to be
a good example to them so that when their generation takes our place, they will make better decisions and
continue to pave the path towards righteousness and freedom.
John McCain is the son and grandson of Navy admirals. After graduating from Annapolis as a naval
aviator, McCain was shot down over North Vietnam and spent five years as a prisoner of war. He has been
a U.S. Senator from Arizona since 1986 and ran for President in 2000 and 2008.
The Making of Poems by Gregory Orr
http://thisibelieve.org/essay/21249/
I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that
come with being alive.
When I was 12 years old, I was responsible for the death of my younger brother in a hunting accident. I
held the rifle that killed him. In a single moment, my world changed forever. I felt grief, terror, shame and
despair more deeply than I could ever have imagined. In the aftermath, no one in my shattered family could
speak to me about my brother’s death, and their silence left me alone with all my agonizing emotions. And
under those emotions, something even more terrible: a knowledge that all the easy meanings I had lived by
until then had been suddenly and utterly abolished.
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One consequence of traumatic violence is that it isolates its victims. It can cut us off from other people,
cutting us off from their own emotional lives until we go numb and move through the world as if only half
alive. As a young person, I found something to set against my growing sense of isolation and numbness:
the making of poems.
When I write a poem, I process experience. I take what’s inside me — the raw, chaotic material of feeling
or memory — and translate it into words and then shape those words into the rhythmical language we call a
poem. This process brings me a kind of wild joy. Before I was powerless and passive in the face of my
confusion, but now I am active: the powerful shaper of my experience. I am transforming it into a lucid
meaning. Because poems are meanings, even the saddest poem I write is proof that I want to survive. And
therefore it represents an affirmation of life in all its complexities and contradictions. An additional miracle
comes to me as the maker of poems: Because poems can be shared between poet and audience, they also
become a further triumph over human isolation.
Whenever I read a poem that moves me, I know I’m not alone in the world. I feel a connection to the
person who wrote it, knowing that he or she has gone through something similar to what I’ve experienced,
or felt something like what I have felt. And their poem gives me hope and courage, because I know that
they survived, that their life force was strong enough to turn experience into words and shape it into
meaning and then bring it toward me to share. The gift of their poem enters deeply into me and helps me
live and believe in living.
Gregory Orr has taught at the University of Virginia since 1975, where he is Professor of English. He is
the author of nine collections of poetry and is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and
Guggenheim fellowships.
Always Go to the Funeral by Deirdre Sullivan
https://thisibelieve.org/essay/8/
I believe in always going to the funeral. My father taught me that.
The first time he said it directly to me, I was 16 and trying to get out of going to calling hours for Miss
Emerson, my old fifth grade math teacher. I did not want to go. My father was unequivocal. “Dee,” he said,
“you’re going. Always go to the funeral. Do it for the family.”
So my dad waited outside while I went in. It was worse than I thought it would be: I was the only kid there.
When the condolence line deposited me in front of Miss Emerson’s shell-shocked parents, I stammered out,
“Sorry about all this,” and stalked away. But, for that deeply weird expression of sympathy delivered 20
years ago, Miss Emerson’s mother still remembers my name and always says hello with tearing eyes.
That was the first time I went un-chaperoned, but my parents had been taking us kids to funerals and
calling hours as a matter of course for years. By the time I was 16, I had been to five or six funerals. I
remember two things from the funeral circuit: bottomless dishes of free mints and my father saying on the
ride home, “You can’t come in without going out, kids. Always go to the funeral.”
Sounds simple — when someone dies, get in your car and go to calling hours or the funeral. That, I can do.
But I think a personal philosophy of going to funerals means more than that.
“Always go to the funeral” means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don’t feel like it. I
have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don’t really have to and I
definitely don’t want to. I’m talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the
world to the other guy. You know, the painfully under-attended birthday party. The hospital visit during
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happy hour. The Shiva call for one of my ex’s uncles. In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn’t been
good versus evil. It’s hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.
In going to funerals, I’ve come to believe that while I wait to make a grand heroic gesture, I should just
stick to the small inconveniences that let me share in life’s inevitable, occasional calamity.
On a cold April night three years ago, my father died a quiet death from cancer. His funeral was on a
Wednesday, middle of the workweek. I had been numb for days when, for some reason, during the funeral,
I turned and looked back at the folks in the church. The memory of it still takes my breath away. The most
human, powerful and humbling thing I’ve ever seen was a church at 3:00 on a Wednesday full of
inconvenienced people who believe in going to the funeral.
Deirdre Sullivan grew up in Syracuse, and traveled the world working odd jobs before attending law
school at Northwestern University. She’s now a freelance attorney living in Brooklyn. Sullivan says her
father’s greatest gift to her and her family was how he ushered them through the process of his death.
There Is Such a Thing as Truth by Errol Morris
http://thisibelieve.org/essay/28/
I believe in truth. And in the pursuit of truth.
When I was 10 years old, I asked a neighborhood kid who was older than me, “Which city is further west:
Reno, Nev., or Los Angeles?” The correct answer is Reno, Nevada. But he was convinced it was the other
way around.
He was so convinced that Los Angeles was west of Reno that he was willing to bet me two bucks. So I
went into the house to get my Rand McNally Atlas. The kid looked at the atlas and said, “The map is drawn
funny.” It wasn’t. Was his argument that the map didn’t preserve east, west, north and south? What kind of
map would that be? I showed him if you trace down the 120-degree west line of longitude — which runs
almost directly through Reno, Nev. — you end up in the Pacific Ocean, somewhere west of Los Angeles.
He replied that lines of longitude don’t cross the ocean.
What? I told him that the lines of longitude were there to indicate how far west or east some location was,
regardless of whether it was on land or on sea. There was one insurmountable problem, however. He was
bigger than me.
I drew a number of conclusions from this story. There is such a thing as truth, but we often have a vested
interest in ignoring it or outright denying it. Also, it’s not just thinking something that makes it true. Truth
is not relative. It’s not subjective. It may be elusive or hidden. People may wish to disregard it. But there is
such a thing as truth and the pursuit of truth: trying to figure out what has really happened, trying to figure
out how things really are.
Almost 15 years ago, I stumbled on a story about an innocent man, a man who had been sentenced to die in
the Huntsville, Texas, electric chair. And through hard work, luck and a certain amount of pathological
obsession, I was able to make the movie The Thin Blue Line and to help get him out of prison.
What kept me going was the belief that there had to be answers to the questions “Did he do it?”, “Was he
guilty or innocent?”, “If he didn’t do it, who did?” and that I could find an answer to these questions
through investigating.
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It’s not that we find truth with a big “T.” We investigate and sometimes we find things out and sometimes
we don’t. There’s no way to know in advance. It’s just that we have to proceed as though there are answers
to questions. We must proceed as though, in principle, we can find things out — even if we can’t. The
alternative is unacceptable.
I will never know whether the neighborhood kid really didn’t understand the logic of my argument about
Reno, Nev. Or whether he understood it completely and just didn’t want to admit it. Or whether he
understood it and just didn’t want to pay up. I’ll never know. All I know is I never got my two dollars.
Errol Morris is an Academy Award winning documentary filmmaker whose works include “The Thin Blue
Line," “A Brief History of Time" with physicist Stephen Hawking, and “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons
from the Life of Robert S. McNamara."
The Real Me by Katherine Bowman
https://thisibelieve.org/essay/149246/
I don’t choose to wear makeup. Some people may look at me with disdain, and others wonder why I opt out
of such a common practice. I see girls around me with perfect faces, unable to tell that they are covered
with the cloudy foundation, and with their eyes painted just right so that I find it easy to look and hard to
look away. But I myself find no yearning to be “beautiful,” or to look “flawless” simply so that others may
be more visually attracted to me. I believe that nobody needs to hide his or her true colors from others, and
I believe that hiding your true self can do more harm than good.
My mother lent me valuable advice many years ago that she still tells me even today. It was on a day just
like any other, during the beginning stages of adolescence. Girls my age had begun to wear makeup. I
didn’t quite want the responsibility of painting my face but, like any other pre-teen, I wanted to hop onto
the bandwagon: one that included popular girls, and even my closest friends.
I approached my mother that day, after noticing how the faces around me had suddenly become less
cluttered and more perfect. “Mom, can I wear makeup?” were the first words out of my mouth.
My mother—not an avid wearer herself—frowned and looked over at my youthful complexion. Pimples
had plagued my face, threatening to change its natural color to red. The only words with which she replied
were: “Why? You don’t need it.” At first I felt like she didn’t understand. All the other girls were wearing
makeup by now! I had to do it too if I wanted to fit in. But I soon came to realize that that wasn’t true.
There was nothing I was obligated to do if I wanted others to accept me. Makeup just wasn’t me, and I
didn’t need it for the approval of others.
Hiding my true face just isn’t me. I’ve always wanted to be included in the affairs of others and, when I
was young, I thought that makeup would elevate me to that status. But throughout my short years, I’ve
discovered that all it really does is waste my precious time. I’ve gotten used to the sight of people with
heavily caked makeup to the point where if I see them without makeup, I easily mistake them for someone
else: their true, exposed self.
At the beginning of the day, I don’t have to prepare myself to be someone I’m not; at the end of the day, I
don’t have to take off my mask. I want people to see the true me at every hour of the day, and to me, a bare
face says all. This I Believe.
Katherine Bowman attends Springfield Southeast High School in Springfield, Illinois, and is active in
school and community service through her school's chapter of National Honor Society. She is an American
Red Cross volunteer, and in her spare time she enjoys drawing, reading, and playing the piano.
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Superman is My Personal Savior by Greg Andree
https://thisibelieve.org/essay/68571/
I believe in Superman. In fact, I’ve accepted him as my personal savior. It sounds ridiculous, a grown man,
father, teacher, and when he contemplates his most important belief he ends up with a fictional character
sporting spandex and a cape.
It started when uncle Danny brought me to see Superman: The Motion Picture. There was a scene where a
helicopter crashes and hangs from a skyscraper. In an attempt to climb out of the cockpit Lois Lane falls.
Clark makes a quick change swooping up and away to catch her. Carrying her to safety he said: “I’ve got
you.” It was the greatest thing I’d ever seen. Stunned, Lois replies: “You’ve got me . . . who’s got you?”
Then it got better. Superman glances up as the helicopter slips and plummets toward them. Seven year old
me was terrified, but Superman catches the helicopter with one hand, and easily carries it and Lois to
safety.
I couldn’t figure out how he knew he could catch it (this was his first time out as Superman). He just knew.
I wanted that confidence. That summer my grandmother made me a cape and stitched on an “S”. I wore it
everywhere feeling super as I flew around the neighborhood. I brought that super-confidence with me when
I started second grade, and in difficult times began contemplating: What would Superman do? Asking this
led me to stand my ground with bullies, get up when knocked down, never give up, and help others where I
could.
By thirteen I’d outgrown my cape and Superman. When dad died that year my family disintegrated. I was
alone and lost, but Superman found me. Feeling nostalgic I bought a Superman comic. It wasn’t the great
literature teachers wanted me to read, but they were the stories I needed to get me through. I related to
Superman’s loss of family, world, and his overwhelming loneliness. When younger, Superman’s incredible
physical powers drew me in, but reading those comics I understood a more important aspect. While other
heroes depended on shadows of fear and force to scare people into being civilized, Superman inspired
greatness by giving people a model to aspire to. He strove to do right and be his best, to develop and use his
gifts to their greatest potential, and to always lead by example.
When I was falling Superman saved me from the worst in life. He provided a view of the world that I
otherwise wouldn’t have seen, and taught me what it means to be a good man. Because of him when
comforting my daughter my first words are always “I’ve got you”, and my students learn by seeing how I
do something, not just doing what I say. Superman taught me to find role models wherever I can, from
family to fiction. I could’ve easily been someone else, but because I chose to believe in a man that can fly it
has made all the difference in my life.
Greg Andree grew up in Fall River, Massachusetts. Comic books gave him an escape and started him
toward a love of stories. He’s now an 8th grade English teacher, and advisor to The Geek Club at his
school where he hopes he can give kids a place to fit in and be inspired to create their best selves.
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