Child prodigies make me feel inadequate

So ideaCity 2010 has come to a close. At a first timer at this conference I have to say it far exceeded my expectations.

The final pod of the night ended with something sure to make the rest of us feel inadequate….child prodigies. We heard from the world’s youngest educator, 12 year old Adora Svitak, 14 year old blog sensation Tavi Gevinson and YouTube sensation Natalie Tyler Tran.

Adora Svitak discussed what it actually means to let a kid be kid. The kid herself mused that while some people would say that letting kids be kids means letting them run wild, Adora feels that responsibility is not a bad thing and stopping a kid from achieving their dreams by telling them to “wait until they grow up” only squashes their dreams.

This insightful educator talked about how her own life would have been different if she had been told “wait until you are older to publish that book” “when you are older you can give seminars and educate”. Instead, her needs and wants were cultivated and flourished.

While I think that children need responsibility I couldn’t help but sit back and think that the 12 year old didn’t fully appreciate the uniqueness of her own life, the financial situations some kids are under, or the fact that at 12, the responsibility of making your bed, your lunch, and doing your laundry was enough. I admire Adora for everything she has done, she is a remarkable child, but not all children are like her and not all children want her life.

Am I saying we shouldn’t allow children to express themselves, experiment with their dreams, and be constantly encouraged? Absolutely not. I’m just saying we do it with a bit of realism. Today’s children don’t need to be sheltered they need to understand what goes on in this world, that war exists, that racism, sexism, homophobia, disease and lots other bad things exist, but it needs to be a slow drip. We can’t turn on the tap of “reality” and fill their glasses to the brim, we have to provide a steady stream and let them gradually drink.

Natalie Tyler Tran is a hilarious, down to earth individual who notices the funny things in society I think we all notice, the difference is, she’ll put her face on the internet and say “what the hell was that??” While she didn’t find herself remarkable and I did. We often overlook the great power humor has. It can heal us, give us a new perspective, relieve our stress, or just allow us some fun. While Natalie didn’t think her humor merited her being with people like Adora Svitak, I would say she possesses the greatest knowledge of all, the ability to make people laugh.

If you haven’t watched any of Natalie Tyler Tran’s YouTube videos, do it now. And then do it again when you are having a bad day, cause it’s a pick me up almost as good as coffee.

-Stephanie

Creating ideaCity 2011

The conversation breaks are supposed to the time where myself, Victoria and Reinisa feverishly run to our laptops and start typing away our content to the web world, but in the last few sessions I’ve become obsessed with people watching. People watching in the sense that at such an amazing conference with so many different opinions, it is amazing to see all the minds come together. The British environmentalist talking with the youtube sensation and the former escort talking with the 14 year old teacher. A woman who lived for two years and 20 minutes in a biosphere walking around with her coffee talking to the energy conservation people (for that I give her credit because I feel like after two years and 20 minutes locked on 3 acres of land I wouldn’t be capable of any human interaction.

Amid the great food, massages and mimosas is where ideaCity truly exists. I feel like the ideas for next years conference are going to spawn from these conversations and it  is these moments amid the mimosas that keep conferences like this going. The psychic talking to Margaret Atwood and the magician and the scientist are perfect examples of why theses conferences are truly necessary. It’s also interesting to watch almost everyone try and figure out the scores of the latest World Cup games.

I thought about trying to bring an actual post about a specific speaker or issue, but instead I’m choosing this visual which I feel is almost more inspiring. The creation of next year’s conference.

Our final pod features child prodigies in which my 26-year-old self will sure feel inadequate, but will no doubt prove to be inspiring.

-Stephanie

Sounds you’d never expect from a uke

There’s been some pretty neat entertainment so far during the conference, but I think I discovered my new favorite performer; Jake Shimabukuro.

Shimabukuro does stuff with a ukelele that I can’t help but think nearly nobody would expect. Showcasing the flexibility of the little instrument, he took us through some tango, a sweet soft piece, a taste of rock, and George Harrison’s  ’While my Guitar Gently Weeps.’

The suprising heartiness of the uke was also rather apparent, namely during the tango piece. The tiny instrument took a beating, with strong chords that seemed like they would be the death of it. By the end of the barrage, it didn’t even have to be tuned.  And the sound coming out of it was far from stereotypical. Just goes to show you that it’s not the size of the instrument… it’s how you use it.

Annnnnnd some pictures!

 

-Reinisa

A Moment to Remember

Moments, moments to appreciate, moments to ponder and moments to go for gold. I just had a moment.

I was outside on one of the few breaks given at Ideacity and I was thinking about how tired I am and how disappointed I am in my lack of forwardness, my lack of interviewing presenters. Wondering where the little Barris on my shoulder screaming “Go get it!” was. When a little boy off to the side of the building started playing the violin.

He was walking around in small circles, pacing and playing. He kept switching from what sounded to me like classical violin to a more fiddle sounding music. So it sounded as if he was playing happy, playing sad, playing happy, playing sad. All the while walking in a circle.

This made me think about things like ‘The Great Circle of Life’, life and death, karma, winning, loosing and eventually brought me back to the conference.

Tan Le has invented a device with Emotive, an Australian company that is worn on one’s head and gathers the electrical fluctuations from ones scalp. Using these fluctuations one can do things with one’s mind, like move a wheelchair, or play a video game. Which means one day I too might be able to play the violin with my mind.

I could also win an Olympic gold medal, like Ashleigh McIvor, with my mind. She spoke about uncertainty and what she may do with herself now that she has achieved her goal.

This ties back into circles and my uncertainty. I am going to achieve my goals right now, I am going go interview somebody because I can’t stay stationary, I have to move along my circle.

Another moment, just now just as I was writing that sentence Michelle Rainey of the B.C. Marijuana Party just walked over here and told me to get out there and talk to people. I’m coming Ideacity!

Victoria Gray

Biocity

After being condemned for his involvement with the Nazi party during WW2 philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote about technology in the 20th century. This is a huge theory and it concerns people used as technology, but it starts by talking about human’s relationship to technology and nature.

In the beginning of the century people used technology as a way to further nature. A way to use nature to their advantage. Think of a watermill, that thing attached to a house, powering something using the river. the mill did not disturb the river, it worked with it.

Then people turned to raping the land in order to get what they wanted. Think about the way a place looks after it has been drilled for oil. It is dead, there is nothing left.

Dr. Rachel Armstrong spoke today about meshing technology with a biological/chemical substance to create a city that not only thrives, but helps us survive. She wants people to stop beating nature and all the materials we use into submission. She believes that instead we can use the materials we have in accompaniment to natural substances to create a living city, that gives back to us and to nature.

It sounds very complicated and very sceincy. Something I have mentioned I don’t really understand, but I understand Heidegger.

I think we can use nature as well as give back to it. It doesn’t have to be as complex as science and chemistry. It can be as simple as ecowalls and solar power. Not that she is wrong, but for those of us who don’t understand we can think small and create big change in our own little ways.

Victoria Gray

Diane Francis tells us what’s really hurting our environment

Diane Francis is holding the missing piece of the climate change puzzle, and no one wants her to talk about it.

While there is a lot of talk everywhere about renewable energy, recycling, reusing and the new fashion bag trend known as reusable grocery bags, Diane Francis points out we are overlooking a crucial part of our ecological issues: the amount of people crowding our planet. Overpopulation is contributing to the decline of our planet as we continue to take over parks, marshland, and other natural land sources to erect more housing for our over-crowded planet. Suburbia is killing mother earth.

Not surprising at all, when Francis published her article speaking out against overpopulation, people were less than amused. Religious group in particular had issues with Francis’s take on birth control, and her ghastly mention of China’s one-child policy. While the assumption seems to be that China, who has instituted a one child economic policy, rips pregnant women from the streets and forces abortions on them, Francis clears that myth. What China does is educate their women on the benefits to having only one child, not only to themselves economically, but to China as a country and in turn the world. In providing birth control to their women, China offers them choice.

Surprising to me, another country instituting a one-child policy and going so far as to open abortion clinics to give their women choice is Rwanda. Rwanda, despite being a country made up of mostly Christians, and a company whose major hospitals were built by the church, has managed to reach a compromise for the sake of their country and its citizens.

Is it so wrong to suggest that the world doesn’t need as many people as we are bringing to it? As someone with zero plans to have children, I go on record with my plight towards the preservation of our planet. However, as someone with two siblings, Francis’s talk left me wondering what life would have been like with even a two child policy? I’m not sure we are necessarily at the place of limiting women who want to have children, but what about those who don’t, but can’t prevent it? I’m reminded of the television show 19 Kids and Counting which airs on TLC. If you haven’t heard of it or seen it, the title is pretty self explanatory. The Duggar family does in fact consist of 19 children. The show started when they had a mere 15 little ones running around and has continued ever since. When asked why they don’t practice birth control the Duggars calmly state that they don’t believe in interfering with the plan God has laid out for them. I can’t help but wonder what happened for the plan Michelle Duggar, mother of 18 and veritable baby machine had for herself? What, as Millika Chopra spoke of this morning, was her intent?

I also can’t help but watch that show and observe other extremely large families and feel a sense of sadness for the older children, who instead of socializing, making friends and experiencing new things are simply confined to the task of helping to raise their younger siblings.

Diane Francis has received criticism that ranges from hate mail to death threats for simply stating that maybe the world doesn’t need as many people as we are putting into it, and that the time may soo be coming where our government steps in and says enough is enough for the state of our country.

When there aren’t enough spaces for future children to go to university, when there are no more places to build condos and suburbs and when parks become as over-crowded as the Eaton Centre on boxing day, will we look back and say Diane Francis was right?

-Stephanie

Rape a Woman, Win a War.

Idealists connecting at ideaCity.

“Women are one hand these fragile things that need to be protected, while on the other hand they are jezebel’s the world needs to be protected from,” Sally Armstrong.

Rape camps in Sarajevo. Women of war, women of the enemy side rounded up and put into camps where they are raped. Gang raped and tortured more than once a day. In Africa women are the victims of terrible atrocities. Armstrong named only a few disgusting things but the rape and mutilation struck me the most. For some reason the thought of having my breasts cut off with a machete is more alarming that having my arm cut off with one.

Is it that breasts are womanhood? I don’t think so. Maybe it strikes me so because you can’t do that to a man. For the goal of winning a war it may seem pointless to take the breasts of a woman, to rape a woman, but it’s not.

Take a woman’s breasts in an impoverished country and she has no way to feed, to sustain and nurture a child. If you kill the children, you rid yourself of the enemy forever. It is a smart form of genocide. A cruel form of genocide.

If you rape a women on a mass scale you stand a great chance of impregnating women on a mass scale. Get rid of the enemy by breeding your enemy out.

Sounds barbaric doesn’t it?

It has been happening for centuries. Lets go back to (pick an era…) the Vikings. Rape and pillage! that is what they are known for isn’t it? Well, great builders, great explorers, but also great warriors and everyone feared them because they would come rape and pillage.

This is something civilized people left behind.

But, wait, didn’t Australia try to breed out its native population?

Wait, didn’t Canada (yes us), try to take the native out of the child in residential schools?

Didn’t the Taliban strike down women and force them to stay in the home and wear the Burka. Did they not refuse them the ability to educate themselves?

From this I conclude that women are still and have always been a fundamental war strategy. In most cases, women and children or future children didn’t start the war. They are therefore bystanders possibly not innocent, but not involved as an entire gender.

Why is this strategy of war not being denounced in “the civilized world”?

This is something I have never heard of and I like to think I keep myself pretty up to date with the news. Why have I not heard about it?

Why? Armstrong said she gave all the evidence of ramp camps she could find to an editor and seven weeks later there were four sentences written about it. He got busy, he forgot.

He was a news maker. Media has the power to create the issues. Not just change them, but create them. Think about the TTC. One vigilante took a photo, put it online and then, all the newspaper in Toronto were publishing front page stories. All the mayoral candidates are talking about it, the provincial government is talking about it.

One vigilante reporter, Sally Armstrong gathered the information and the evidence, handed it over and nothing was done.

I want something done. I want women to rise above the status of inanimate war strategy. Email The Star and tell them you want to know more and you want to know why this is a non-issue for the world.

phone 416-869-4300

fax 416-869-4328

email city@thestar.ca

The Star was not the publication that didn’t publish the information so feel free to contact The Globe, The Post or The Sun.

Victoria Gray