This 25th anniversary year of TED was my fifteenth, and it had especially poignant relevance since in the middle of TED I made a 20-hour turn-around from Long Beach to New York and back to participate at my first grandson's bris, the ritual circumcision that is required to take place on the eighth day after birth.
Leo Sam Tritt
TED and the birth of my grandchild have merged into a single holistic experience, with the extraordinary messages of TED speakers giving me hope for the future of little Leo Sam Tritt and his generation who are being born during this economic meltdown and most challenging period our world has seen possibly since the depression and World War 2, and definitely since the tumultuous 1960s and the Cold War.
TED speakers from Bill Gates and author Elizabeth Gilbert to The Art of Possibility co-author Rosamund Zander and Bennington College President Liz Coleman spent little time and paid little attention to the economic challenges we are all experiencing. Put in the context of TED the words of teenager Darius Weems, who was born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a fatal genetic disorder. dare to hope for a better future. Listening to TED speakers and interacting with an extraordinary group of TED colleagues inspires greater hope and confidence that the generations being born in the 21st Century will manage the resources of nature and mankind far better than those born in the 20th Century. This period of great transformation, we can dare to believe, should empower us… not handicap us.