choose an interesting topic for a conference

[Nary DD]

hi everyone,

please help me! could you provide me some topic that are interesting related to our real society?
do you think headache is seem to be a daily problem for some Khmer people?

[chesda]

Yes, sure headache is common problem in Cambodia now, cos in the city now there is much more pollution! Don't you think, you smoke everyday?

P.

[Pros_DingDong]

In our society, there are so many problems that we Cambodians have chosen to ignore rather than trying to approach them from their root causes. We tend to judge things based on labels. We lack the courage to question our own actions, behavior, and thoughts.

As we have been enjoyed the openness of communication through internet access throug which social and cultural influence from other countries flow into our minds (the young Cambodians.)
To  get exposed to the culture which stresses very strongly on individual freedom and value, we have become rebellious to the old traditional buddhist values that our parents  have cherished for their whole lives. Clearly there is a cultural clash between the two generations: the older ones have gone through all the hardship in Khmer Rouge and civil wars, and the younger ones who grow up with strong Western influence and accessible to internet. Parents have difficult time to understand their kids' behavior, something they have never seen before. And the kids blame their parents fro not understanding what they want to do.

My question is: what should parents and their kids do so that they can have better understanding of each other and arrive to make a compromise that both parties are happy with???

[Tdol]

Isn't conflict between generations fairly normal?   The internet has speeded things up, but back in the UK, every older generation has looked on the young with a degree of concern and worry, while the young look on the old as conservative and unable to understand the changing times.

[Pros_DingDong]

O yeh, definitely, cultures evolve all the time, more or less depending on the factors that affect the change, such as technological, economical, social, and political environment. As conservative as many middle-age Cambodians are, combined with the the cultural and religious conservatism adhered to the Khmer society for hundreds or thousands of years, the new culture that influence the young Khmer generation to bahave and think in such a way(renouncing the old beliefs) that the parents find it extremely hard to understand and don't know how to deal with the frictional relationship resulting from these ideological conflicts.

The relative generational conflicts among khmer people are much more dramatic than those in Western European countries, the US, and others whose cultures are already quite receptive to that kind of cultural and technological change.

[Tdol]

The intergenerational conflict in the West has been openly antagonistic and sometimes violent- Paris 1968.  You talk about your parents finding things hard to understand, but our parents found it hard too.  I was a teenager during the punk years, when the conflict was open and quite bitter, with people expressing total contempt for everything that society held dear.  The strange thing is that people now look back nostalgically at those days. Many of the changes in the West have been very recent and happened very quickly.