Tournament: UCO | Round: 1 | Opponent:  | Judge:
1AC starts out with interpretation of K'naan's song, "What's Hardcore," read by Radwan.

I put a pen to the paper,
 This time as visual as possible,
 Guns blast at the hospital,
 The walls are white washed with tin rooftops,
 To show love you lick two shots,
 It's dangerous man,
 Journalists hire gunmen; there’s violent women,
 Kids trust no one cause fire burnt them,
 Refugees die in boats, headed for peace,
 Is anyone scared of death here' Not in the least,
 I walk by the old lady selling coconuts under the tree,
 Life is cheap here but wisdom is free,
 The beach boys hang on the side, leaning with pride,
 Scam artists and gangsters fiendin to fight,
 I walk with three kids that can't wait to meet God
 Lately, that's Bucktooth, Mohamed and Crybaby,
 What they do everyday just to eat lord have mercy,
 Strapped with an AK and they blood thirsty...

So what's hardcore? Really, are you hardcore?

We start off this debate by examining what energy really is. Energy is more than just coal, crude oil, natural gas, nuclear power, solar power and wind power. Why do we never push the discussion to the energy that people have, or the energy they lack. I grew up in Somalia. A nation ridden with war, violence and poverty. But even worse than my experience was the time my parents spent there. They witnessed their neighborhood go from a beautiful place called home, to a torrent wasteland. Yet they still had that energy to get up, go somewhere and do something with their lives. Energy can be that warm smile my parents gave me when we fled the country and moved to India. Searching for a new life where none of the same disregard for people’s lands exists.

Energy exists between people just as much as it is emitted from a power source.

Debate itself produces energy.

So often the energy we create is unable to effectively empower us to be agents of change in the world – we are always told to be patient policy makers that produce something worthwhile someday…but some of us don’t have time to wait around. For some of us, we need change now. For some of us, tomorrow is not promised. Not only does the current model of debate, whereby we simulate game playing so we can be effective later, discourage us from creating change now, it also discourages meaningful participation from people who experience violence on a daily basis who don’t have time to wait around for some change in their life, whose “someday” is not assured.

It’s time we assure them debate can be a space for true empowerment and synergy, it’s time we re-enegergize debate.  Not only does this model of debate have to be rethought, the way in which we have these conversations needs to find a way to bring us back to the forefront of our discussions. Too often, debaters throw around lives as a tool to play the game of policy debate, dropping nuclear scenarios like its nothing.

This process has desensitized some debaters to the largest atrocities, and leaves us unmotivated to satisfy the so called point of policy debate, to participate in politics in the future, likely because we they are convinced that, with all of the disasters associated with the political realm, there is no reason to, because everything is headed to hell anyways. We must engage in efforts to relate ourselves to the discussions we have in these spaces so when we leave the activity, whether it be for the weekend, or for good, we feel empowered and motivated to actually do things, because we view it as imperative or directly affecting our lives.

Tim Wise(White like me, 2005 pg 32-35): The purpose of competitive debate...  

This topic began with energy but has gravitated toward nuclear war scenarios, hegemony, global warming, and any other scenario that could kill us all.  This gravitation has enervated debate and left it paralyzed in the face of atrocities that we are simultaneously disconnected from and enmeshed in.

We begin our day by the way of the gun,
 Rocket propelled grenades blow you away if you front,
 We got no police ambulance or fire fighters,
 We start riots by burning car tires,
 They looting, and everybody start shooting,
 Bullshit politicians talking bout solutions, but it's all talk,
 You can't go half a block with a road block,
 You don't pay at the road block you get your throat shot,
 And each road block is set up by these gangsters,
 And different gangsters go by different standards,
 For example, the evening is a no go,
 Unless you wanna wear a bullet like a logo,
 In the day you should never take the alleyway,
 The only thing that validates you is the AK,
 They chew on Jad it's sorta like coco leafs,
 And there ain't no police...

So what's hardcore? Really, are you hardcore? 

You should vote for the team that best performatively and methodologically energizes the debate space.

In an effort to reap the benefits of competition inside the activity, we have made our agency and our bodies the collateral for our politics.  We become the zones of sacrifice for debate.  We have to recognize that this activity is affected by those same structural inequalities that the topic strategically avoids.

So it much more than saying there are zones of sacrifice inside of debate, rather there are pre-figured zones of sacrifice in debate.

Therefore, we have to begin our analysis of policy issues from the perspective of the oppressed.  Instead of talking about the world’s worst atrocities from the perspective of those who are protected from them, we should begin our analysis with the perspectives of those who have been subject to structural violence.

Brent Henze "Who says Who Says?" Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, Ed. Paula Moya and Michael Hames-Garcia, (starting off thought from the lives of the oppressed...)

Energy production seems to necessitate a zone of sacrifice, but heeding the voices of the oppressed is a way of counter-acting the assumption that zones of sacrifice are simply empty – the 1AC is a way of reading meaning and personhood into the zone of sacrifice

Foster, hip hop subverts capitalism...

I'm a spit these verses cause I feel annoyed,
 And I'm not gonna quit till I fill the void,
 If I rhyme about home and got descriptive,
 I'd make Fifty Cent look like Limp Biskit,
 It's true, and don't make me rhyme about you,
 I'm from where the kids is addicted to glue,
 Get ready, he got a good grip on the machete,
 Make rappers say they do it for love like R-Kelly,
 It's HARD, harder than Harlem and Compton intertwined,
 Harder than harboring Bin Laden and rewind,
 "to that earlier part when I was kinda like"
 We begin our day by the way of the gun,
 Rocket propelled grenades blow you away if you front,
 We got no police ambulances or fire fighters,
 We start riots by burning car tires,
 They looting, and everybody starting shooting...

So what's hardcore? Really, are you hardcore?