Film: Revolution Requires Forgiveness

Dr Amber Johnson
Founder, 
The Justice Fleet

How do you fight back against injustice and hatred? Amber Johnson is on a mission to start a dialogue about radical forgiveness, going into neighborhoods to engage their communities in discussions about implicit and explicit bias, social identity, and communicating across difference.

Her Justice Fleet is a series of interactive exhibits, housed inside box trucks, that foster communal healing through art, play, and dialogue.

Can one person make a difference and start a social justice revolution? Can the Justice Fleet use forgiveness as a tool to create dialogue between diverse audiences and what can museums learn from radical forgiveness?

Thank you. Funny enough my snowball says ‘Tools to help make my museum library more inclusive and [unintelligible 00:00:20]’. It’ll be up there, but you didn’t put your name on it. Whose print is this? Alright, I see you. Alright, thank you so much for having me, it is an absolute honour and a pleasure to be here and to start things off. It’s wonderful to know that someone thought my ideas were important enough to create the culture of the day, so that’s beautiful. Alright, is that working? There you go. So do you remember when you learned how to do your job? Who remembers that as a child? It might have been college, it might have been one day of orientation, maybe it was a month long orientation training, who knows? You probably maybe learned a lot more about your job in the streets or behind closed doors, in those meetings, in a lecture, but regardless, all of us learned how to do our jobs. So I’m an academic, so learning how to do my job involved find the big questions and answer them using system and research, right. There is a way to do this, it must look a certain way, it must feel a certain way, it must read a certain way, if it doesn’t look or read those ways it doesn’t count. Does this sound familiar? I thought so.

So an example, you’ve all answered a really big question, right, so you have questions in history, what happened, you answer questions in information, what is, you answer questions about ideas, what ought to be, and you answer questions on aesthetics, what makes something good, and how you piece together those answers must look a certain way, it must be designed a certain way, it must fit in a particular space and must read a certain way, and it must make people feel, our new word, ‘swanky’, okay. But let me ask you this, when did you learn how to bring your whole self into your exhibit? I never learned how to dig deep into myself, find the things that matter to me and use those things to refuel my big questions, right. We are told what questions count as big questions, but how many of those questions ask us to dig deep into who we are, to think about what it means to be ourselves, right? We are all told, our field as academics and as museum people, it’s supposed to be objective, there’s no room for space, we’re just teaching, but I think we can all agree that’s why we’re here, that time for just teaching has long passed.

So I think about the idea that museums are unusual or should be unusual, I think about this specific conference as a place to answer the questions of what does it mean to be unusual and why we can’t afford to do that. I think about museum of impact and museum response, I think about my own work, and I think about the current state of our world. Like yesterday morning you had to [lure] an entire group of people to a conference, do what happened in Vegas, there are still people that don’t have water and electricity in Puerto Rico and Mexico, there’s still devastation there. Who has the privilege to be [moved]?

So today I want to talk to you about how do we do that, how do we bring our whole selves into our work spaces and what does that look like, right, what does it mean to say ‘This is all of me and I’m going to put all my junk on the table’, right? So a lot of time you talk about an inclusion and diversity, inclusion and diversity, inclusion and diversity, right? What does that mean? It doesn’t really mean anything, it means you can have a seat at the table but this table was pre-designed not necessarily for you, I hope you can find a spot to fit, if you don’t fit, well, make yourself fit, don’t cause so much trouble or we’ll find someone else to sit in your seat. So when we are bringing ourselves into our work spaces what then do we have to leave out in order to fit into that seat, what are we not bringing to the table, how can we bridge the gaps between what we’re leaving out and what matters to us? So this is the work of radical, a lot of times you use inclusion again as a seat at the table, but if we’re not bringing our whole selves to the table what are we actually including? We’re including an idea or a stereotype or a bias, or something that seems appropriate, right, for that table. So radical inclusion is actually a deeply personal act, we like to talk about inclusion as a systemic or an institutional act but it’s actually a personal act. So radical inclusion requires bringing the whole self to the table, so that the dirty, nasty questions that nobody wants to answer, ‘Who am I? What matters to me?’ I’m talking the big things that matter and the little things that matter. How do you engage in self care, how do you take care of yourself, because we don’t talk about that work, right, we don’t talk about that at the water hole; the water hole, you should stop using that metaphor. What are my social identities and how do they impact the work that I do, right? As a queer, black, gender fluid person my social life can directly impact the work that I do, but if I can’t bring my whole self to the table how am I supposed to allow it to influence my work?

How do they impact how others see me, right, so how do people see me because of my social identity, how do people see you because of your social identities, right? Are you silenced, are you erased, are you dismissed? What are we leaving out, what are we not bringing to the table? When we choose to leave something out it requires us to compartmentalise, so we put those bits and pieces of us that don’t ‘fit’ into the museum world or don’t fit into the classroom or the academic space or don’t ‘fit’ into our jobs for fear of losing our jobs, we put them into little, teeny-tiny compartments and we stow them away. Do you have any idea how much invisible labour it requires to keep parts of us hidden? If you weren’t engaging in that labour what could you be doing with that energy? Most of us don’t want to show those compartments because we feel shame, we feel hurt, we might feel like we’re bad people, but what happens if all of us show our compartments? We being to realise that our compartments look a hell of a lot alike and that a lot of us suffer from anxiety and depression, that a lot of us have some weird fantasies, right? Now they become not so weird, now they become not so terrible, now we can talk about them. How good would it feel to just put all your shit on the carpet right now and just let it down? That is the work of radical inclusion, so how do we bring that into our workplace so that we don’t have to engage in those acts of invisible labour that keep us from being the very best versions of ourselves?

Radical inclusion is also institutional though, so the first step is bringing your whole self to the table, so for radical inclusion at the institutional level requires a lot of other people to bring their whole selves to the table, right? So we can say we’re inclusive and diverse, but what can’t someone say or do because of their social identities, what can’t someone say or think because of their mental health in that moment, and how are we compensated for that, right? So radical inclusion requires us to allow people to bring their whole selves to the table, our whole self at that table, and now you can start engaging in new ideas. Now once we’ve invited all of these diverse others to this table with their whole selves we can’t just leave it there, so the seat at the table metaphor is really not good, right, because what do we do with people once they sit down, right, how you engage people? Are we engaging them in ways that support them also, are we understanding how their social identities are impacting the way we see their work, right? ‘Why do you keep asking those same questions, can’t you move on, we’ve already talked about that?’ You have to understand that your understanding of their social identities is directly impacting how you see their work, right, and that’s do social lives, how is implicit and complicit bias keeping you from understanding and loving your co-workers fully? This is the work of radical inclusion.

So I like to use the metaphor of a dinner party, I’m going to a dinner party, yay. Right, so radical inclusion looks a little bit different when we go to a party, so a lot of the time when we’re invited to a dinner party you get an invitation in the mail, the meeting has been set, seat assignments have been set, you show up looking fabulous, you sit down and you eat, probably with a fork, a knife, you’ve got like six pieces of silverware, I get confused sometimes, you might have seven, you might have one, who knows, everything’s set. That’s what diversity looks like, how we practice it now, that’s what inclusion looks like. Radical inclusion says first let’s ask people, ‘Do you want to have a dinner party?’ ‘Yeah, I want to have a dinner party’. ‘Okay, well what do you like to eat? Let’s plan the menu together, right, and once you’ve planned that menu let’s think about a time and a place and location that is convenient and conducive to the type of engagement people want to partake in. Once we choose that time and place and location let’s go shopping for a ingredients together with our whole selves, that way you pick the paprika up off the table, I can say “Wait, pause, I’m allergic to that, is there something else we can use to colour the soup?”’ ‘Absolutely there is, red number two’.

So once you sit down to eat we have a plethora of utensils for all of those who have been invited, right, we’ve got some chopsticks, we’ve got fingers, you maybe have some forks and knives and spoons, and we’ve got different things for people to eat with according to what matters to them, right. We might be eating off a family self platter, maybe we each have our own individual plates, maybe we sit on the floor and eat picnic style, right. So the point is we don’t take for granted that anything is appropriate any more, right, and so once we finish our meal and we’ve had our beautiful conversations then the next step is to assess, ‘How did you like this meal?’ I guarantee you, if the host is there and everyone leaves, the host will paint a beautiful picture of the best dinner ever, because that’s what we do, we tell stories that serve our best interest. So if we don’t assess using radical inclusion we don’t actually know how our dinner turned out. So what does that mean? That means that you have to include people from the very beginning of your idea, through the whole entire implementation of your idea, and through the entire assessment. What are we going to do, how are we going to do it and how are we going to assess it? So gone are the days of ‘I’m going to invite my black friend, my gay friend, my conservative friend, my Jewish friend, my Muslim friend, I’m going to feed them pork and fish with a knife and fork, right, like we can’t do that. So I think about radical inclusion in the workplace, so scrap the dinner table and now just put your work ideas; idea, implementation, assessment. There are people involved from all walks of life throughout the entire process. That in and of itself is radical inclusion, right, that is, and of course that’s not what it’s about.

Alright, so I had a friend, Tracy, she’s from the Deep South with a Deep South accent, she’s said ‘If I’m going to bring my whole self to the table you’re going to have to forgive me. Hell, I’m going to have to forgive myself!’ So that’s where we should give radical forgiveness, right, radical inclusion requires radical forgiveness, because when you are asking someone to open up and show you the depths of everything they are you can’t sit there and be judging on them, right, because it’s like [noise], ‘I’m good’, right, so radical inclusion requires radical forgiveness. So radical forgiveness is the profound notion that we don’t have to live and carry pain, fear, hurt, anger, hate, we don’t have to carry those things on our horses, right. We have 100% of the choice in how we act and react to outside stimulation, right, we choose how to act, we choose how to be, so we can choose to put some of that stuff down or we can choose to carry it with us. As we carry those things with us they become toxic, people who work as activists die much faster. Why? Because their job is toxic, because they’re holding those things inside.

So we talk about radical forgiveness as a selfless act, so think like bible, forgiveness, turn the other cheek, ‘Ah don’t worry about it’, it’s not quite that, but it is suggesting that it doesn’t require us to give to others or it doesn’t require us just to give to ourselves, it’s selfless in that you can grant forgiveness to others, right, allowing people to bring their whole bodies into a [stasis]. That’s a selfless act, literally saying ‘Come as you are, all of you’, but it’s also really selfish, because if you do carry these things around that’s toxic, and so putting them down those things is a selfish act, right. So it’s selfless in granting forgiveness but it’s also selfish, right, in giving forgiveness to yourself. So together these things create freedom from our past, because again we think about all of our past traumas as a backpack that we carry around, every time we take a piece of that compartment out, a piece of that backpack out, we put it down and that backpack becomes lighter and lighter and lighter.

Now there’s lots of misconceptions about forgiveness, and the first one is that it doesn’t absolve. So this is extremely important, forgiving someone for an injustice does not mean you don’t have to hold them accountable, saying ‘I’m sorry’ does not erase consequences, saying ‘I’m sorry’ does not erase intent or impact, right. So we can be forgiving creatures and still hold systems and people accountable for the injustices that they create. Forgiveness can begin before the pain and shame go away, you don’t have to feel better before you can say ‘I forgive you’, again because you’re still holding this system or this person accountable, right, so you can start letting things go before your pain and shame go away. It doesn’t require an apology, you cannot sit around waiting for someone to apologise because that apology may never come, we definitely live in a world of the non-apologists, you know what I’m talking about. ‘I’m sorry you really felt offended’, that’s not an apology. Most people don’t apologise because it’s hard, it’s hard to admit when we do something wrong, from the depths of our soul, that impacted on them, other people’s souls. So don’t wait for an apology. It doesn’t mean forget it, forgive and forget is a really common statement, if someone takes your cookie and you go get another one, you forgive that they took it, what’s going to happen when you come back with that cookie? They’re going to have the cookie, they’re going to take it again, right. So if you forgive injustice and the injustices that happen that allows us to create a space for those injustices to continue. So I’m not saying forget your trauma, I am saying reorient your mind to your trauma so that it doesn’t cause you so much pain and send you into a trigger moment and keep you from living your best life.

Then finally, it’s not a one-stop shop, everyone’s process is different and it is extremely fluid, you might have to repeat some processes a few times, right. Maybe you start at the end and you work your way back to the beginning, there really is no [unintelligible 00:16:22]. So these are some pathways to forgiveness, the things that we do, because people tell us ‘forgive’ all the time but they don’t always tell us how to do it. So these are steps that you can use to chart your own path to forgiveness, so being mindful, being mindful in every interaction, understand that you cannot take your bias away, we were born into these biases, these biases live with us for our entire lives, but you can stop in a moment and be mindful and say ‘I am seeing you as a stereotype, I want to shift that stereotype and look at you as the whole complex person you are’, right. The bias doesn’t go away, I’m biased towards my dog, there’s lots of stories that involve poop around that, I won’t share them now for the sake of time, but it hit me one day when I was trying to do something for the dog and I was angry, and I realised I’m mad at the dog for doing what dogs do, dogs bark and dogs poop, why am I so mad? Because I’m biased, I’ve been teaching how not to be biased for 13 years, it dawned on me, you cannot not be biased but you can be mindful, be mindful of that.

Recall things, right, think about what occurred and intentionally say ‘What actually happened here?’ and then reprocess, cognitive restructuring, ‘Can I see this experience from a different place, can I understand what happened from a different perspective, multiple perspectives?’ My mum used to always tell me growing up ‘There’s three sides to every story, yours, theirs and the truth’, right, and we never actually know the truth because all we have is multiple people’s perception; unless you’re like on reality TV or something and you all fight around the camera, maybe.

Alright, allowing yourself to feel, I struggle the most with this one, I tell people I don’t have feelings, my heart is made of steel, and it’s a big lie. I’m terrible with feelings, I don’t even like people singing happy birthday to me, I’m just ‘Ah, I want to go’. Steel, okay, but you have to feel, if you’re going to let some stuff go you’ve got to learn to let it go, right, so you have to allow yourself to feel, feel the rage, feel the anger and the hurt that are painful to you, feel the good things too, feel all of it, especially understanding, I think that we punish ourselves when we’re happy, when there’s a crisis. Feel the happy, because the happy allows you to keep going, right, you need the joy to keep going in these times. Gift yourself the ability to let go, right, put those backpacks down and let those things go, free yourself from the negative emotions that keep you from loving and accepting yourself and others, right, free yourself. Again you can do this whilst still holding systems accountable, right.

And then finally, evolve, heal and replace. Replace is really important, because we keep telling people ‘Oh let it go, let it go, let it go’. Well if you let everything go what’s going to be left, right? So as you let things go you have to re-imagine these experiences from other perspective and then put them back, so when something traumatic happens maybe you’ve learned a beautiful lesson, put the lesson back, right, not the feelings of the trauma. Maybe you went through something traumatic and made a new friend, put the friend back, right, not the feelings of the trauma. So you have to replace your traumas with good things, good stories and good memories to keep refuelling yourself.

So there’s personal pathways to forgiveness then, right, so those are like the broad general strokes, these are the questions that we ask people to get them to think about their complicit bias and the way in which they contributed to unjust societies and how to start to let those things go. So first, what kind of biases and prejudices do you have? This is the part where you have to be really honest with yourself, right, because all of us, every single person in this room is biased and prejudiced, right, because we grew up in a world that teaches us to be that way? How are those thoughts preventing me from loving others and myself more fully? So we pass up a lot of potential beautiful friendships because someone looks different, smells different, sounds different, and we don’t want to be different, right, so is that preventing us from loving ourselves and others more fully? Some of us have biases against ourselves, against our religion, against our own race, against our own gender, right, that is preventing us from loving ourselves more fully. Am I ready to forgive myself and others for having these thoughts? When you think about it in that same perspective of radical inclusion and everybody bringing their shit to the carpet, the next step is forgiveness, understanding that this is a normal process, we’ve all been socialised to be this way, so let’s start forgiving each other for having these thoughts and start replacing them with new ones.

Can I hold myself and others accountable while practicing radical forgiveness? That’s a personal question, for some people that’s really difficult, right, because some people are non-confrontational, they really want to walk away, but when we do that it’s kind of like forgiving, that created space to let it keep happening again, so some of us have to be really brave and say ‘I might not be ready today, but maybe tomorrow’. Who or what do I need to forgive, right? It can be an institution, it can be a person, it could be an event, an experience. Am I ready? Yes, no, maybe, never, soon, right, again everyone’s process is different and the journey towards attempting to forgive is just as important as forgiveness having happened, okay, because the journey is still healing in and of itself. So maybe the answer is never, but maybe one day. Then what’s my first step in forgiveness? Thinking back to those pathways, why don’t you start by just recalling what happened, maybe I need to start with mindfulness and being mindful of my own body and other bodies, maybe I need to be mindful of the community, maybe I just need to start letting stuff go because I already know what I need to let go, right, where do you want to start? Then how does holding on to these feelings affect me and others, right, because you bring all your stuff with you to every conversation, you just attempt to hide it? Then how do I know that forgiveness has occurred? For me it feels like a weight has lifted, right, I can move through the world thinking about this thing without breaking down or being paralysed by my own guilt and thoughts of sadness.

So my project is The Justice Fleet, and we are essentially taking all the things I just … [presentation slides stop]. I broke the thing, maybe they’ll come back. So I’ve been teaching about forgiveness for 10 years in the classroom, and one day I was like ‘You know, this is a transformative process, I should not be so stingy and I should take it out to people who maybe can’t afford to go to college or don’t work for the college or are already in college’. So I wanted to make it mobile, so I started working on building a mobile social justice museum. So it starts with the radical forgiveness exhibit, so we go out into communities, we have the things you just saw, five huge retractable signs, and then we put out tables with paint and canvas supplies, and we very explicitly ask people to paint their bias. Oh here it goes. So paint your bias and ask for forgiveness, or paint how someone has a bias towards you and grant forgiveness. There’s slides of great picture, beautiful canvases that have been painted. So when I initially set out to do the project I was concerned, because I’d do 14 weeks of a 16 week class, so I’ve spent 14 weeks with my students, they know me, I know them, we have been very transparent in disclosing our biases, we’re having these conversations. So how do people respond when they don’t know at all? What I found in our very first club is people have a lot of shit to let go, and I give them the prompt, and then the thing builds, right. So we pop up our signs, we hang a line, and we give people the canvas, the paint and a clothes peg, so we tell them ‘Paint your bias as you’re feeling, so paint how others have been biased towards you and grant forgiveness and then put it on the line’, and you’d be so surprised when you tell people ‘You are now part of the museum exhibit’.

So we’re in the middle of populating this exhibit as we go, so we’ve gotten canvases, I’ll just tell you about some of them since you can’t see them, we’ve gotten canvases, a lot of people paint about gender and the gender binary and what it means to live off that binary and granting and asking forgiveness, lots of [unintelligible 00:25:05] gendered people actually are granting forgiveness and asking forgiveness for being biased towards gender binary people. We get lots of them around Muslim identity and apologising for treating Muslims as stereotypes. We’ve gotten canvases around homelessness and seeing homeless people, they’re just beggars who only want money and drugs, and not focusing on the social constructs that created homelessness in the first place. People literally just sit down and do this, so these things are already very heavy on people’s minds and people’s hearts, they just needed a space to let it go.

So we pop up all over the place, last week we were in Baton Rouge, today we’re in Portland, we have the exhibit right here and it’s already got some canvases populating it, so I welcome after this, well not directly after this but in between, to go. We’ve just brought markers, they’re paint markers, this time, so it’s much faster. We’ve been to Carbondale, done lots of pop ups in St Louis, we are currently working with the Neighbourhood Policing Committee in Ferguson, the Ferguson Neighbourhood Policing Steering Committee, who have been charged with redirecting policing in Ferguson to avoid another [Mike Brown]. My video didn’t work so I don’t know what’s next! Oh why does it keep doing that? I broke it again, I just pushed the next button. Well I’ll tell you about our big goals, so we’ve got some big goals, one of those goals is to build three more exhibits, so we have funding for the next one and that’s on radical imagination. So we’ll be giving people a bucket of toys and asking them to build their just world, what is a just world look like, and then once the groups have built their world we will break them down, right, what social systems did you perpetuate that are harmful and why do you think you did that, right, because a lot of that is also ingrained, and then what social systems did you come up with that challenge these harmful practices? Oh, big goals; okay, I’m scared to push the button, do you want to push it for me? Boom, right. So where was I? So now that you’ve created this idea what resources do you need to implement it, let’s go out and build it, right? So it might be something as simple as a community garden, it might be the neighbourhood policing taskforce that are first responders instead of the police, who knows what people will come up with. What I do know though is that when you give people the space to imagine, with toys and play, there’s nothing at stake, and so their imaginations really do run wild, versus telling someone ‘I’ve got $100,000 to fix homelessness in St Louis’, it’s not so good. So we’re trying to create an environment that invites imagination in ways where there are no risks, then we say ‘Boom, we’ve got some resources, let’s go and do it’.

Another goal is to build an exhibit on Black Girl Magic, so we want to take an old school bus and fill it with toys that affirm black girls, books by and for black girls, and artwork by and for black girls, and just have beautiful conversations about how beautiful it is to be a black girl magic. I know I grew up in a space where I was constantly trying to emulate white people so that I could be accepted and revered as someone ‘worthy’ of being included in spaces like this, and it wasn’t until I became an adult that I realised how much labour that costs. So the goal is to produce the labour for black girls so they start off loving themselves and not feel like they have to look like or feel or be like anyone else.

Then the last one is an exhibit on transfuturism, so using Afro featurism as an aesthetic, which is essentially an art form that imagines the black body and a future without colonisation or dehumanisation or oppression, right, so a liberated future for black bodies. It’s all speculative though, so let’s imagine that. My argument is that when you are trans you are doing that in the lived body, right, you’re not speculating, you are living a future free from the confines of the gender binary. So this project, I will be photographing trans and gender binary people, getting their oral histories, and then working with a trans woman, Afro futurist artist in Ohio, who will transform them into superheroes, right, so these are people that we should look up to, because in reality all of us fail at femininity and masculinity, literally all of us, like I’ve asked people … these ideals. So if you look at trans folk and gender nonconforming folk as a blueprint we can see something possible when we decide to not think of ourselves as failures but as possibilities, right, as things that create identity versus trying to [fit into the main].

Then our really, really big goal is an endowment, where we can give money to people who have ideas for their own fleets. So I always like to ask folks, if you could build a fleet what would you build, what would your fleet focus on? So I’m going to ask you right now, if you could have your own mobile exhibit what would you focus on, what would it look like, what problems would it tackle, how would you include your whole self in your exhibit? This isn’t a rhetorical question.

Audience: [Unintelligible 00:31:00]. What you were saying earlier, come as you are, and the exhibit is actually a white canvas and people come with what they are, and together we create the exhibit. So my first attempt was the second renovation of the Children’s Museum in Mexico City, it’s a zone called My Family, My Home, and it was to talk about you and your family and paint or transform this space so we can understand what your family and your home looks like, right. So we had this discussion with the designer, let’s put a toilet in, I’m like ‘In my country everybody has a toilet’, that’s a privilege or a tool of privilege, right, don’t put it, let’s open our minds to a white canvas. I’m going to Mexico City in two weeks, you know, and the toilet is there. When you think the kids have been using that big toilet, it’s a real toilet, they’re like ‘Oh god, a toilet!’ This idea of people as exhibits, a white canvas, and let’s work together.

Speaker: Anyone else want to share with me? Yeah.

Audience: [Unintelligible 00:32:20].

Speaker: Yes, one more, go ahead.

Audience: I’ve been thinking a lot about how we deal with justice and access, and how a lot of people don’t really know, don’t have the skills to feed themselves well, [unintelligible 00:32:57], I think museums could facilitate cooking demonstrations or growing, farming demonstrations to show how to reconnect to some of those skills that are common in older generations.

Speaker: One of the most cool exhibits I heard was my artist actually, I didn’t even know this about my artist, his family is from the Appalachian Mountains, and up in that region they suffer from this thing called Mountain Dew Mouth from consuming too much Mountain Dew and it literally rots the inside of the mouth. So he wants to take Mountain Dew cans and soda bottles and have the residents turn it into art, to have a conversation about Mountain Dew Mouth. Like that’s beautiful, that’s art, that’s play as a form of activism. So yeah, I am very thankful again for being here and for talking with you all. I hope that we can think about the next 24-48 hours as a safe space to bring our whole selves, if everyone does it none of us will feel weird. That’s a charge, I guess if one person does it we’re probably going to have a problem and that person might even get kicked out, so let’s not be those people. So I’m asking you to walk out of here with your whole self, I’m asking you to be ready to allow other folks to bring their whole selves, acknowledging with intention that people probably don’t look like what you think they should look like, right, and that we all have our bags, and I’m asking you to start putting them down with intention, forgive yourself for you bags, forgive your whole self for showing up today, forgive others, because all of us are going to make mistakes on this path because we’re not used to being our whole selves, and hopefully, as we become our whole selves over the course of today, you can grow and start creating a world we want to live in. Thank you.