Forum 2000 Conference

Today Nobel laureates and distinguished civil leaders from around the globe convened at the Prague Crossroads - a deconsecrated church that now hosts a variety of cultural events - and discussed issues of human rights and democracy in Asia. Panelists included the Dalai Lama, three Nobel laureates, two former presidents, and a boatload of academics, dissidents, and dignitaries.

Due to a confluence of events (including an alarm clock failure and the twenty-minute boot-up of a Dell POS) my roommate and I were about an hour and a half late to the conference, so we missed the opening remarks. By the time we got there the Dalai Lama was making his last few comments before the moderator, my professor Jan Urban, brought the first panel to a close. Wine and cheese followed, during which I received an enthusiastic low-five from His Holiness (which made my semester/life).

The parts of the discussion that I did catch stressed, among other things, that education is a necessity (its absence is "a form of genocide"), that an active civil society is essential in a democracy (elections mean little on their own), and that continued dialogue especially with perceived enemies is key.

The conference was especially refreshing after reading the Communist Manifesto (I am now officially in college), which presses that the whole of enlightenment thinking is merely a "social and political constitution adapted to [the free market]," along with many other such ideas that feed and stimulate the mind's natural tendency toward cynicism. This conference relaxed that primitive and paranoid animal, and gave me hope and a will to participate at some point in "civil society," though I know that seems out of character.