I want to tell you about my recent trip to Turkey and tell you what I experienced there. Recently, I found that Ferguson, MO, and Gaza have things in common, broadly speaking. I want to take a quote from a book entitled 'Hamas: Identity Politics, Violent Resistance, Power Politics (2013)': “the main act of resistance is ‘the voyage in’ to engage with the discourse of the colonizer and transform it so that ‘it acknowledges the marginalized or suppressed or forgotten histories’”. The worst thing we can do is sit passively back and watch things happen on the news. Most of what see or hear is false. The reporters do not mean to lie, but all that they tell are lies, fit with the colonizer’s framework. This is as true for Ferguson as Gaza. Everything that we hear and see is given with ‘spin’. Within Ferguson and within Gaza, there are many conflicting narratives and identities. Whose will we choose to listen to?

Dr. Michael Funk Deckard is Associate Professor of Philosophy and program coordinator for philosophy at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, NC. He is co-convener of Peace Theories commission of the International Peace Research Association. He was recently awarded a Fulbright to work on the relationship of art and science in the early modern period. He has taught courses in historical and environmental aesthetics, ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of religion, hermeneutics and phenomenology, applied ethics (particularly medical ethics and the ethics of war and peace), and Native American philosophy. He has two edited books, Philosophy Begins in Wonder (2010) and The Science of Sensibility (2012).

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx