Taking the temperature of society.
There were two recent experiments (linked below) where individuals walked around cities for 10 hours each and just filmed the experience; recording the reactions of the chance encounters they had with others.
One was a Jewish man wearing a kippah and tzitzit walking around Paris and the other was a woman walking around New York. Both of them walked silently and did not respond to anything said or done by any one else.
Allowing for the fact that the videos produced from this are edited down from 10 hours to a handful of minutes and thus tend to exaggerate the number and importance of negative reactions it seemed to me to be a brilliant way of just getting a quick measurement of what society is actually like, and what the experience of being a different person is like, for different people.
It is a question to begin with: where are we now? Before we ask what we think we need to do next.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wor ... -10-hours/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morn ... -new-york/
yrs,
rubato