Persuasive Essay On Good Will Hunting

Why shouldn’t I shoot my friends or club a baby seal? Is there any reason not to bomb a village of 1,500 people I never met and have no problem with? How is my friend going to deal with the chronic hemorrhoids he got as his battle scars? Will Hunting asks these and other questions in his speech about working for the National Security Agency, which is packed with rhetoric and somber condemnation that the NSA certainly deserves.

Will Hunting, from the film “Good Will Hunting,” was a janitor at MIT until a professor put a problem on a hallway chalkboard and Will solved it in under a day. Will was immediately taken under the wing of the professor and became a stellar mathematician. People told him that he should take a job being offered at the NSA, so he went to the interview and asked them, “Why should I join the NSA” Then he listened to their spiel about chaos mathematics and superstring theory, a spiel ended with a reversal of what Will asked. “The question isn’t why should you join the NSA, but why shouldn’t you?”

Will gave a well thought out answer, and though it was far from succinct, his answer was both bold and well directed.

He sat across from the man who just made him so many beautiful promises about the mathematics he would be able to access as an agent of the NSA, and lectured him right back with the indirect results of things done working for the NSA, the things they hope you will just not think about when you go to sign up for your first day on the job. The way he sees life (and the way life must be seen) is that even though they may never give him a tire iron and ask him to clobber Salty the Seal, if he breaks the code and as a result Salty dies, it is his fault

nonetheless.
Although being from Southie makes him a little biased against the rich and the powerful, everything Will says about the unholy trinity of corporate greed, corrupt government, and their progeny in the NSA still rings true, and the sheer quotability of his lines makes this one of my favorite scenes in the entirety of film. His use of emphatic swearing brings an interesting idiomatic vernacular to his condemnation of said trinity while adding to the impact of his rhetoric. Even having only seen the movie once, I have found myself responding to less than kosher statements with “Yeah and while we’re at it I might as well shoot my buddy and club a baby seal.”
But there is so much more to this speech than its forceful prose, it shows a serious need for a reform in the thought process of the workforce. It shows how little people think about what happens down the line because of their actions. The NSA codebreaker only thinks about the code on his desk, and the alcoholic skipper has no idea that his martinis are costing seals and hemorrhoidal veterans much more than the $13 they cost him, but don’t think this is only applicable to situations from the movies. The modern farmer thinks none of what his pesticides will do to the bodies of his buyers, and teachers think not of the stress they cause students on a daily basis. I know too many people who believe they are dumb simply because they cannot handle nightly overworking and daily reproach as a result.
Will Hunting’s speech, though it is only directly related to the lifecycle and lifestyle of a Bostonian, has tremendously important implications for everyone from Canadian potato farmers to overworked 11th graders. I feel as though I owe answers to the questions asked earlier. You should clearly not shoot your friends or club down baby seals, and for obvious reasons you should not kill people you have no problems with, but less obviously you must also consider the long term implications of your actions. Well, unless you want to be elected President.