Equinox and the global 24 hour Connectathon
This week I first met Tim Olsson online. We had an animated talk about his initiative to do an online event during the Equinox 2023 called Connectathon. Every hour a new topic will be discussed with a few speakers, 24 topics in total. I have been invited to two of them. Hour 5 (regenerative governance) at 17.00 CET on March 20th and hour 20 (The Future Village) at 08.00 am CET on March 21st. Feel free to join by registering free of charge to this enormous chain of inspiration for a better world.
Social media impact on our youth
The Techrouter project involves 30 youth workers from 9 different countries. They came together in the Netherlands to discuss the impact of social media on our younger generations and how to create a learning mechanism to safeguard them from all the negative aspects (core value: safety and respect). Especially the early teens are vulnerable since they are still in a competitive growing up phase in which they are highly innocent, influenceable and unaware of the impact of their actions on others. In times when they should be building a positive self image the tendency is to be guided by the abundant fakeness of social media. No parental or adult embedding is there to help them because their actions are mostly invisible, they have no reference models and parents are often inexperienced in this world of virtual interactions.
A whole week of creative interaction is making the difference. Here are some photos of the process. The gathering is financed via Erasmus+. The objective is to create something that can be used in the different countries and cultures during several months, gathering feedback and linking with new programs.
Avoidable human dramas
With this powerful image the Greek visual artist Athanasia-Iris Giaxidis shows her repulsion for the atrocities and unnecessary blood shed caused by human political financial corruption, wars and powerplays.
Musical expressionist Chara Palaiologou adds her sounds to this art.
We can only agree and see to what extend our values, sense of responsibility and commitment to quality has been deteriorated over time out of financial greed, political incompetence and manipulative business practices. Wars motivated by religious and financial controls, unreliable real estate, train accidents, millions of refugees, poverty, robbery of valuable resources, killings, etc show us the level of disrespectfulness and decadency that we reached as a human species. This is no leadership, nor sustainable progress for us. This is a crime against humanity and even life on Earth. It is the end of an era of abuse, hierarchies of interests, monstrous story telling, all reflected in an image of blood, pain and death.
Can it be different? Yes, it can! But then we need to stand up, join hands and arms in a peaceful but determining way, and start building on our values together, our quality of life, or respectfulness for life in general and each of us specifically.
Sustainocracy, the new democracy 