Last week I was tipped off about a digital future conference, Unfinished Live, at the Shed (in Hudson Yards, NYC) which was “exploring the Collision of Technology, Art, Ideas, and Impact.”
Wednesday, September 21 marks the 40th anniversary of the first celebration of the International Day of Peace in 1982 and has been designated Peace Week 2022.
I was a child during the tail end of the Vietnam War. I remember seeing it on the television in our living room. I was told the war was happening far away but here it was in my living room before my very own eyes. It didn’t seem that far away to me and it certainly wasn’t far away for the people on the screen.
As a child, I could not comprehend why this was happening. What did the people in Vietnam do to deserve this? I felt confusion, and dread, and was deeply upset. Even after the war supposedly ended i remember there were years of people fleeing – the refugees the news referred to as “boat people”. Why? Why war when peace is clearly so much better?
There’s been a lot of attention paid to pronouns in recent years. He and she now have a lot of company. It’s becoming more common to meet a person wishing to be referred to as “they” in reference to their “personal gender pronoun”. And there are other personal pronouns that include the likes of ze, per, and ve to name a few. At first, I had a hard time understanding the meaning and importance of this development although I do remember growing up in the 70s when the honorific “Ms” came more into vogue and women began making their preference clear. I think it’s healthy to question tradition – to be in dialogue as to why we do things the way we do, what it means, and to be in inquiry as to what serves us and how.
Personally, i’ve always wondered about the pronoun “i” or capital “I” as we’ve all been instructed to write it. Why must “i” be this way?
What does a culture of inquiry mean? It means we have practices in place where we can get under the implicit and explicit assumptions that run our everyday lives. And the benefit is a greater sense of context and meaning – both of which are antidotes to the machine world we live in. With this, we share with your the BreakBread prompt for the month of August as food for inquiry. Let us know what you come up with!
An amazing time? I suppose it depends on who you’re talking to.
