2010 – 3rd Grade 3rd Place Winner

Tommy Slatic, California.

Is the Pen Mightier than the Sword?

When I was asked if the pen was mightier than the sword… I thought, “The sword is mightier. It can cut you and you could get stitches and an infection. A pen couldn’t do that”. Then my mom explained to me that “a pen” meant words. Are words mightier than violence?

I know that policemen nad Marines have to use weapons and violence against bad guys to protect innocent people… so there, the sword is mightier. Then I thought how my Dad, who is a marine Major in Afghanistan, e-mailed me a story about how they were tracking a bad guy who had set a bomb to try to kill my Dad’s Marines. They followed him and he ran into this big tunnel which was an entrance to a big field. Coming the other direction was about 200 farmers with rakes, pitch forks and picks in their hands. They lost the bad guy in all these people. Now the marines could have taken their machine guns and shot all these people trying to look for the bad guy, but instead my Dad used his interpreter to ask these farmers if they had seen the bad guy. They told my Dad that if the bad guy did not have a tool in his hands, he was not one of them. They found him because my Dad used words instead of violence.

Martin Luther King Jr. did a famous speech with the words “I have a dream…” Even though someone tried to stop what Martin Luther King Jr. was trying to do by killing him, his words have made a difference and made people want to make a difference. His words have lived on through generations and have been mightier than the “sword” used against him.

I think that you need to protect yourself and your family, but I think that the pen is mightier than the sword.

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