Archive | July, 2020

Dragnet: Climate’s Grip on the Security Sector, Dr. Robert Zuber

26 Jul

Poll: Riot gear for police at protests?

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. Soren Kierkegaard

Ecological healing is all about the healing of relationships.  Charles Eisenstein

History is humankind trying to get a grip.  Kim Stanley Robinson

We must remember that this is not a fight we can win just by fighting.  Charles Eisenstein

We cannot choose the times we live in, but we can choose the stories we tell and live by. Sally Gillespie

When we begin a deeper journey into earth care, sometimes we are struck by the breadth of ruin, even ugliness, that it is our challenge to recover and redeem.  LL. Barkat

Birds start falling. Bees lie dying.  Mary Flanagan

On Friday, as the excellent presidency of Germany nears its end, the Security Council took up the issue of “climate and security,” a thematic relationship which the Council is under more and more pressure to address, especially from its elected members.  The manner in which it was addressed in this session, however, speaks volumes regarding both the policy strength of some delegations and the limitations of the Council in articulating a clear role for itself within our global system of response, one that encourages that all aspects of that system to function at maximum effectiveness.

The UN is, of course, primarily a negotiating platform, but as stated by Germany’s Foreign Minister Maas, some things are not negotiable and “we cannot negotiate with nature.”   But while we cannot negotiate with our climate, we can clearly cause it damage and, by extension, cause grave damage to ourselves and other life forms.  As Belgium made clear, this is no abstract matter but a crisis that both impacts and creates vulnerable people worldwide with “aggravated costs,” as Tunisia and Indonesia both noted, which will likely only increase at least in the near term.

There was broad recognition in this Council debate regarding what Belize referred to as the “indiscriminate consequences” of climate change, impacts (as underscored by Niger and others) that fall largely on regions, states and peoples already vulnerable to conflict and COVID-related threats. Such areas have generally contributed little to the climate crisis yet must live with the heat and the drought, the unpredictable rains and insect plagues that make an often- tenuous relationship to viability ever more so.

There were clear calls to action on Friday, especially from small island states who continue to watch nervously as their sea levels rise while large states continue their out-sized consumption and relentless production of greenhouse gases and other environmental pollutants.  There were also calls for the Council to remain fully seized of the data on climate linkages and impacts, with many supporting the appointment of a special UN envoy on climate and conflict.  But there is still concern in some quarters (including here) that the Council does not fully grasp the role it can play as an enabler of climate action underway in other parts of the UN system, not to mention in communities worldwide, keeping in mind the distinction between what the Council does itself and what actions it encourages in others. In our view, Council enabling – not controlling – effective climate action in diverse settings remains one key to our common survival.

But what of the specific climate-conflict nexus?  There was consensus on this Friday that climate change does not “cause” violence per se, but rather “exposes existing vulnerabilities” to which we have not paid sufficient attention and, as noted by a Niger military official, places the often “tenuous balance” between regional groups under considerable strain.  UN Assistant Secretary General Jenca, representing the Secretariat, underscored the degree to which climate threats expose “deep grievances” which often fester in societies and which can erupt in violence unless they are properly addressed.

While this debate added value in terms of basic nexus contours, it did not directly address (aside from comments on the role of peacekeepers) the impact of climate-related “grievances” on the security sector itself, those tasked with ground-level security functions in communities which, in a growing number of instances, are watching their livelihoods blown away by sandstorms or migrating to waters cool enough to sustain minimal oxygen levels. And where governments are either indifferent or lack a trusted presence, communities may well prefer to defend their interests and manage their difficult affairs on their own, interpreting government security as simply one more coercive element seeking to maintain “order” but not honor promises, adding another level of restriction to an already constrained existence, and this at the point of a gun.

In society after society, we have seen the impact of overly-stretched law enforcement, police which have been weaponized and politicized; police asked to perform security functions in tenuous situations far above their pay grade; police which have been encouraged by political leadership to focus on the coercive end of their mandate and not the conflict prevention and community-responsive elements; police who in many instances are barely required to grasp the letter of the law and even encouraged to ignore both the spirit of the law and abuses of that law committed by other officers.

And across the world those same police are now being sidelined and their reputations scarred by more coercive and unaccountable forces that have no interest in local communities aside from suppressing its dissent and misrepresenting the identity and intent of its protesters. From Cameroon to Portland, we have seen instances of unidentified agents who have increasingly become a tool of regimes seeking to maintain a repressive grip or impose one anew, forces asked to parachute into situations which may be antagonistic already but which their own coercive responses merely inflame.

Grievances at community level are deep now, as deep as I have ever seen them.  Many people are angry, afraid, abused, finding themselves isolated in circumstances worse than anything previously conjured up in their nightmares.  Those grievances in some instances apply as well to the security sector, to law enforcement tasked with maintaining “order” in situations where government officials have clearly not done their jobs, officials who are neither “getting a grip” on current threats nor interested in helping the rest of us to do so. In such a scenario, only authoritarians can possibly claim victory.  The rest of us are left with a series of bad choices, including to arm ourselves to the teeth or hurl projectiles at “enemies” about whom we know little and care even less.

As St. Vincent and the Grenadines said Friday in the Security Council, “action is all that counts now.”  But what is the action envisioned for often anti-democratic governments, edgy citizens and an over-stretched security sector?  What “counts” now?   One pathway is suggested by UN Police which is committed in principle to “the reform, restructuring and rebuilding of host-state police” and which measures this in more “representative, responsive and accountable policing that protect and serve the people.”

In this angry, authoritarian age these principles almost seem old school.  But as we seek to “live forward” in treacherous times, it is important to reaffirm understandings shared from at least a segment of our past – that the “fight” we now seem so intent on waging cannot be resolved through fighting alone. It will be hard enough to restore some measure of trust in a security sector and its leaders that too often manufacture enemies in the public domain, that bury basic tenets of racial representation and accountability, and that allow under-trained, over-militarized forces to clutch state-of-the-art weapons they are much too willing to use.  But we are compelled to try.

The climate healing that is so urgent now is directly related to equally-urgent healing in our communities, a healing premised on restoring the quality of our relationships to each other, but also to protecting the biodiversity struggling to survive, and to mitigating all of the social and personal “ugliness” which we have yet to “recover and redeem.”  But we cannot do so, we may never do so, so long as these fissures exist between a public at its wits end and a security sector that cannot be certain, especially now, who or what it is protecting, whose interests it is actually serving.

We need to restore faith in each other and we need to do so without delay.  For while we hurl tear gas and insults across artificial barriers, while we brandish heavy weapons that merely reinforce the resolve of other weapons-bearers, the social stresses inflamed by our sick climate continue to mount. Birds are falling; bees are dying; fish are abandoning their traditional habitats; islands are drowning; crops are failing.

At this painful time, when the stories we write and tell are much too dystopian and too little hopeful, we would do well to restore an UNPOL version of policing which many in the security sector thankfully still affirm: inclusive, accountable, responsive. But the bar of our collective inaction is too high, at least short term; and as Council members noted in passing and as confirmed at last week’s High Level Political Forum, frustrations and vulnerabilities stemming from our habitual climate negligence are likely to get worse.

This is the conflict-climate nexus that the Council needs to address:  a degraded climate leading to food insecurity, displacement and inequality, but also to a legitimate and largely unaddressed impatience for dignity and change that now seems destined to pit diversely distraught communities against a security sector increasingly equipped for militarized responses and egged on by an aggressive breed of authoritarian leadership.

If we are ever to recover what we have ruined in our world and in ourselves, this is the time. If ever there was a “fight” that cannot be resolved through fighting,  this is the one.

 

 

Tags: , , , ,

Midsummer Dream: Inspiring Honest Progress on Development and Peace, Dr. Robert Zuber

19 Jul

Imagine if we had no secrets, no respite from the truth. What if everything was laid bare the moment we introduced ourselves?  Catherine Doyle

So it became the law of universe, to have the profoundest of the words cloaked in the darkest of the masks.  Jasleen Kaur Gumber

We all become what we pretend to be.  Patrick Rothfuss

Masked, I advance.  Rene Descartes

How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn’t the mirror hostile enough?  Jeanette Winterson

Done with hiding and weary of lying, we’ll reconcile without and within.  John Mark Green

It is a sultry mid-summer morning in New York City, a Sunday following an intense and difficult week both for my country and for the United Nations system as a whole.

At the UN, the High Level Political Forum (HLPF) and its focus on implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) came to a close; the Security Council held a discussion on the pervasive problem of “sexual violence in conflict” with briefers including UN Envoy Angelina Jolie; and the annual Nelson Mandela lecture was turned over by the Foundation bearing his name to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres who proceeded to outline what seemed to be an endless series of urgent global challenges from a podium in New York rather than in South Africa.

In the aggregate, these UN events highlighted the urgency of effective multilateral engagement while calling attention to the policy areas where such engagement has not yet produced sufficient results; has not brought justice for victims, has not overcome health disparities or digital divides, has not resolved conflict consistently or reversed most human-inflicted damage to our climate, has not ensured welcoming borders for displaced persons seeking refuge from armed conflict or grave rights abuses.

Indeed, one of the subtexts of the HLPF as it drew to a close is the number of sustainable development commitments which seem to be headed in the wrong direction – certainly on climate but also on food security, on the protection of civic space, on societies which are genuinely inclusive of cultural minorities, persons with disabilities, and other groups too often destined to remain on national margins.  Thankfully, there was no attempt at the close – including by Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed — to deflect attention from the reality of our current deficiencies, especially on development finance, but nor was there any lack of rhetorical support for the UN’s role at the center of fulfilling the promises on sustainable development made to global constituents.

As most UN watchers will recognize, at least in part, talk can be a bit cheap around the UN, perhaps even more so in the digital realms to which UN events have been confined over these past few months. An insight from Egypt this week, that this not the time to “make a point” but to “make a difference,” actually served to underscore a problem which has long plagued the UN – that “difference” is made at national level, that the power of implementation resides in national capitals, and that progressive-sounding words by UN diplomats are as likely to mask government intentions as to clarify them.

This rhetorical mask-making is often well-represented in UN policy engagements.  Diplomats come to New York to represent national interests and to hopefully do so in a way that does not needlessly jeopardize the possibility of multilateral breakthroughs.  But the job also involves creating impressions of countries more progressive in their outlook than is often the case, creating in effect the mask that hides realities at national level including, at times, realities which even directly contradict the policies advanced by national diplomats in multilateral settings.

Such policy mask-making affects many states far removed from Egypt.   My own country, for instance, continues to posit itself as a beacon of justice and freedom in multilateral settings despite the many instances in which we have twisted our own values, let alone those of the UN Charter, to serve mostly partisan interests.  This is not a phenomenon unique to this current administration, and yet we must be clear that authoritarian tendencies sweeping parts of the planet expose masks of progressive multilateralism that diplomats continue to wear and whose contours the UN is desperate to maintain.

In my own country, there are images in abundance of men in military garb (and with no identification) beating and tear-gassing lawful protesters.  There are images of leadership deliberately suppressing COVID-19 information under the absurd guise that if you don’t count an infection, it never happened.   In a country where so many have given so much of themselves to advance the values that we say we cherish, the refusal to wear masks to prevent viral spread has somehow been turned into a symbolic exercise of American “freedom,” a misleading and ultimately risky dimension of this expertise-denying, scapegoating and conspiracy-obsessed cultural moment where we all believe what we choose, and where much of what we “believe” is indulgent of the grievances of our tribe. We forget that cloth coverings are not the principle masks we routinely employ to confound others regarding who we really are and what we really care about.

All while distancing itself from the work of UN agencies and failing to fulfill core responsibilities as the “host state,” my country continues to do what many other countries at the UN do, exhibiting masks of progressive multilateralism with scant expectations that policies espoused in Turtle Bay will be reflected in policy commitments in capital.  And since the UN is dependent on its funding from these very same states, its arsenal of coercion beyond expressions of normative intent is highly circumscribed.

But as conflicts resist resolution and some development goals threaten to recede into functional indifference, UN leadership seems to be reaching a point of considerable frustration, if not outright panic.  SG Guterres has been a bit over-exposed of late, but he has also been increasingly strident in promoting the SDG “blueprint” for the world, rightly highlighting some of the many changes that we need to make now to ensure a greener, healthier planet with forms of governance that “deliver better,” and with divides digital, gendered and economic which are finally being narrowed.

Responses to Guterres’ agenda have often been borderline effusive.  Diplomats seem to affirm the value of his pronouncements, agreeing (as with Morocco) that the world we are obligated to build is one which must be built together.   But laying out our urgent circumstances is only part of the responsibility of leadership, leadership which the CEO of the Mandela Foundation noted yesterday is now more prone to consolidating power than inspiring people to contribute their best. We are now only rarely inspired to lower our masks and take up our practical duties to justice and sustainability, to move beyond rhetoric and help build that “new social contract” called for by the SG which can help guarantee that promises made by leadership are also promises kept.

One of the week’s most striking moments for me was in the Security Council where a civil society activist, Khin Ohmar, was describing the sexual violence that routinely occurs in Myanmar and which is grounded in “structural gender discrimination” which the Council has done relatively little to address. “I am not the first person to bring this issue to your attention,” Ms. Ohmar observed.  “You’ve heard this all before.”

We have indeed heard it all before: on sexual violence, yes, but also on climate and hunger, on refugees and torture, on oceans and weapons.  We’ve heard it over and over, more times than we can count and certainly more than we can psychologically process, descriptions of a world that is careening into an uncertain future where both human rights and development progress are under considerable strain and where all of the hand-wringing we do has not affected “root causes” nearly as much as it needs to.

Frankly, this narrative of dysfunction has begun to wear us down. We don’t need more recitations of our half-failures so much as we need inspiration to re-energize our most important commitments, including the task of ensuring that investments of our time and treasure are fully relevant to the problems we wish to address.  And we must also find the means to inspire UN diplomats to direct more multilateral energies back home, to remind their own leaders that the real key to preserving multilateralism is not about the quality of our UN statements but about the willingness of states to put into more urgent practice the values that attracted them to multilateral frameworks in the first place.

Inspiration at this moment is one of the rarest of commodities, that Mandela-like combination of passion and honesty which believes in human potential even as it cuts through our masks of misleading rhetoric, our tendency to “hide” behind protocol and position, our feeble attempts to reconcile from a distance, our ability to hear only what we want to hear and then act on only a small portion of that.  As the SG likes to say, “time is not on our side.”  What we have to say in response is that higher levels of inspiration will be required if we are to make the best possible uses of the time we have left.

Tags: , ,

Erdogan, Islamism and the Hagia Sophia Controversy, By Professor Hussein Solomon

15 Jul

Editor’s Note:  Global Action’s interest in the protection of cultural heritage (specifically from destruction and misuse by terrorists) was awakened by an initiative introduced in 2015 by Italy and Jordan.  A quote by then UNESCO Director-General, Irina Bokova, impressed us at the time and which this important reflection from Professor Solomon called to mind:  “Culture is on the frontline of conflict – we must place it at the heart of peacebuilding,” she noted.  As Solomon intimates here, the recent decision by Turkey’s president to shift the status of Hagia Sophia does not further peacebuilding interests or, for that matter, the religious interests of Turkish Islamists. 

There is a wonderful story about Caliph Umar which I am particularly drawn to as a Muslim. Following the siege of Jerusalem between 636 and 638, the Patriarch Sophronius agreed to surrender the city only on condition that he surrendered to the Caliph personally. Caliph Umar duly traveled to the city, accepted the surrender and provided a guarantee of civil and religious liberty to all Christians residing there. Moreover, following almost half a millennium of oppressive Roman rule, the caliph allowed Jews to return to live inside the city. Caliph Umar’s ten-day sojourn in Jerusalem was important for another reason too, which has great relevance to contemporary times as we now struggle to reside in multi-faith communities. One day, during Muslim mid-day prayers, Patriarch Sophronius invited the caliph to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Caliph Umar, however, politely declined the invitation fearing that it might endanger the Church as a place of Christian worship. In other words, he feared that Muslims might use his prayer in the Church as a reason to convert the church into a mosque.

Islamists such as Turkish strongman President Erdogan revere the Rashidun or rightly guided caliphs such as Umar and seek to emulate them. Sadly, with his decision to convert Istanbul’s iconic Hagia Sophia into a mosque again, Erdogan is moving in the opposite direction of Caliph Umar. Originally, built by Emperor Justinian I in 537, it lies at the spiritual heart of Orthodox Christianity. Following the Ottoman conquest of then Constantinople in 1453, it was converted into a mosque. Under the staunchly secular leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Hagia Sophia was converted into a museum that transcends different faiths and cultures with its minarets on the perimeter and Byzantine Christian mosaics adorning it. Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s most famous novelist opined, “To convert it back into a mosque is to say to the rest of the world unfortunately we are not secular anymore. There are millions of secular Turks like me who are crying against this but their voices are not heard”.

So what is driving Ankara’s desire to open the Hagia Sophia to prayers once more. For some, it is a cynical political act. With an economy in free fall, with growing repression and corruption, Erdogan is trying to once again appeal to his devout Muslim base. For others, the conversion of Hagia Sophia back to a mosque is in keeping with Erdogan’s 2012 declaration that his aim is to raise devout generations of Muslims. If one accepts the former explanation, the Hagia Sophia controversy, will only result in a short-term bump in Erdogan’s flagging popularity. It will do nothing for the structural reforms urgently required for the economy. It will not reverse the corruption and nepotism which has characterized his rule nor assist in creating a freer society.

If one accepts the latter argument that Hagia Sophia’s conversion into a mosque is all about Islamizing Turkish society, the most interesting aspect of Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) political dominance is actually how effectively they have contributed to secularizing Turkish society. An April 2017 report discussed at the Turkish Ministry of Education noted that more and more youth at the state sponsored “Imam Hatip” schools were turning to deism – a belief in God but not religion – whilst others were increasingly turning to atheism. It would seem that Turkey’s Muslim youth has found the AKP’s “archaic interpretations of Islam” unappealing. Whilst Ankara was angered by the report, disputing its findings, Mustafa Ozturk, a progressive Islamic theologian, agreed with the contents of the report arguing that a younger generation of Turks have grown disillusioned with the Islamist worldview. The findings of the report were also echoed by an exhaustive Pew Survey of the Muslim world which found that a paltry 12 percent of Turks actually desire shari’a to be the official law in their country. A 2019 poll of Turkish youth found that they were less religiously conservative, less likely to fast, pray or, if female, cover their hair. A 2020 poll found that only 12 percent of Turks indicate trust in Islamic clerics suggesting that Erdogan and the AKP is increasingly out of step with their own society. Perhaps most tellingly, another recent survey of youth who support Erdogan’s AKP found that almost half want to emigrate from Turkey. Their country of preference is Switzerland – not Saudi Arabia.

This trend has prompted renowned Turkish author Mustafa Akyol to opine that despite, or perhaps because of, its attempts to re-Islamize Turkey, the AKP has only served to accelerate its secularization. This would suggest that the Hagia Sophia may well become a museum again in the not so distant future.

Tags: , ,

Blood Lines: Binding our Multilateral Wounds, Dr. Robert Zuber

12 Jul

Srebrenica

Our wounds can so easily turn us into people we don’t want to be, and we hardly see it happening.   Sue Fitzmaurice

What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.  bell hooks

What’s left of kisses?  Wounds, however, leave scars.  Bertolt Brecht

“Let it go, David. It will only stir up old wounds.” Who cares about old ones? It’s the new ones that bleed.  Christopher Pike

There’s no antibiotic for the ridding of distress, and no alleviation of these intervals of pain we must encounter. Crystal Woods

Just because his own wings were burnt, it didn’t mean he had to burn others’.  Dean Wilson

Grant us wisdom, grant us courage for the living of these days. From the Christian Hymn, “God of Grace and God of Glory”

This was a week on UN video screens full of irony and rhetoric at times both emptier and less convincing than most of those who “took the floor” probably imagined.

It was a week when the UN’s Economic and Social Council took formal stock of our still-uneven “progress” in fulfilling our sustainable development responsibilities; when the Security Council labored well into the weekend to adopt a measure that will provide only partial relief for the millions of Syrians caught in a decade-long conflict that the Council has been unable to end; and when we commemorated the horrific crimes committed 25 years ago in Srebrenica, crimes which have not yet been fully prosecuted, crimes which still require families to search painfully for both the remains of loved ones and a full accounting of what took place, who was involved, who turned a blind eye to a looming massacre that ripped the worlds of so many apart.

The scar tissue from this UN week was both prevalent and hard to miss.

On Syria, it was not until the dinner hour yesterday when the Council came to an agreement that preserved some measure of the “cross-border mechanism” that has been enabling humanitarian assistance to millions of Syrians, many of whom have suffered multiple displacements and now live beyond the reach of government authority. Belgium and Germany, the co-penholders on the Council’s humanitarian file, sought to re-authorize multiple crossing points to address the dire needs in the northern regions of the country.  Russia and China, on the other hand, sought to ensure that humanitarian actors work more closely and cooperatively with the Syrian authorities, seeking to replace much cross-border access with options for Syria-controlled “cross-line” assistance.  The deadlock of vetoed resolutions was broken with considerable acrimony and with final agreement on only one border crossing point.

Belgium and the Dominican Republic were especially vocal in marking yet another “sad day” for the Council.  Such bitterness as was brought out in these negotiations leaves scars in the Council that will likely test even seasoned diplomats. But the deep sadness for Syrians has been a decade in the making, wounds deeper than most of the rest of us can imagine. If we mange to help keep these people alive until some sort of permanent cease fire and peace agreement are in place –especially those children who have known little but explosions and displacement in their lives — we will surely discover that, as in other parts of the world, many wounds remain, some emanating from years of deep fear and daily uncertainty, but also from the bitter disappointment that those tasked with silencing the guns and stopping the bleeding have largely failed in their duty to do so.

The wounds of Srebrenica are of a somewhat similar order, violence a generation old which completely upended families and communities, violence which has resisted a full measure of justice or closure, crimes which are still being honored in some quarters of the western Balkans and denied altogether in other quarters; reactions which merely grow the scar tissue, pry open the festering wounds and deepen the distrust of authorities at national and international levels.  As the Germany Foreign Minister noted during Friday’s event, people are still finding ways to “play with the narratives” of what happened in Srebrenica, who was responsible both for the killing itself and for creating the political and security contexts in which such butchery could occur.

For all the “never again” rhetoric dispensed on this day, it was the Croatian Ambassador (former UN official) who asserted that such crimes can, indeed, happen again; that the scars of mass violence and discrimination are widely evident (including in places like Cameroon and Myanmar), and that this is largely due to our collective resistance to creating a strong and reliable “preventive network” which can allow us to learn lessons from past wounds more quickly, apply diplomatic and other remedies more effectively, and thereby uphold what the Bosnian president claimed are UN Charter values that have been systematically undermined through a collective “conspiracy of silence.”

There is no such conspiracy in evidence at the High Level Political Forum (HLPF), a core, annual, ECOSOC commitment taking place this week to assess our collective progress towards fulfilling obligations to sustainable development.  Instead, spoken words from diplomats and “experts” have flowed in abundance, some in the form of (for me) unfathomable clichés like “building back better” and “leaving no one behind.”  While many NGOs have used this HLPF opportunity to sell their various “products,” others have rightly called attention to the preponderance of mere reporting taking place; verbiage signifying some multilateral version of “show and tell” during which states and civil society highlight “what we’re doing” while neglecting to reflect sufficiently on the fact that we simply are not yet doing enough to heal wounds of deprivation and injustice that continue to proliferate, to stop the bleeding better than we have done so far.

Closer to home, my younger office colleagues remain painfully aware that our planet’s vital functions are increasingly on “life support.” They recognize that the current pandemic, while a massive complicating factor for sustainable development acknowledged by virtually all at this HLPF, is no excuse for failing to act on SDGs with urgency and courage. They know that we are losing ground on food security and abuses committed against children. They know about the fires blazing in an overheated Arctic, the biodiversity under siege, the corrupt authoritarianism governing more and more UN member states, the deep roots of our propensity to “burn the wings of others.”  They see our collective failures to prevent armed violence and mass atrocities and the scars suggestive of deep wounds courtesy of poverty, disease and what outgoing UN Rapporteur Philip Alston recently referred to as our blatant “disregard for human life.”

And they know first hand that the discourse in the multilateral space we co-habit is generally more political than inspirational, is more about having the right credentials than the right mind-set, is focused more on controlling outcomes rather than ensuring those best possible, is as much about preserving our status, our protocols, our careers, our funders as it is about preserving a common, sustainable future.

There is no “antibiotic” for what distresses us as a species but we do have agency over what “the marks of our suffering will become.” We have it in our power, even now, to affect closure and healing for legacy wounds and stop the bleeding for fresh ones.  We have it in our power to end the violence, to help victims find closure, to reverse our perilous course on climate change and economic inequalities, to restore hope to young people robbed of an education, indeed too-often denied their youth in full measure.

But this will require better from the rest of us than we are now showing, greater displays of wisdom and courage, more than language reduced to clichés or weaponized for the sake of national interests and narrow political concerns, more than pious statements of remorse disconnected from visionary policy change, more than the innumerable good works that don’t yet add up to a sustainable future.

We are wounded people living in a wounded world of our own making. And as such, we have allowed ourselves too often to become the people we say we don’t want to be, the people we swore we would never become, people who hide behind personal grievances and bureaucratic protocols, people who too easily give in to the “given-ness” of our time and who allow “responsibilities” to cloud our deeper duty to fix what’s broken and ensure that “intervals of pain” are as short as we can possibly make them.

And as we struggle to manage our own “intervals,” we would do well to scan the scars on the faces of so many others, scars symbolic of their survival from the trauma that has been needlessly inflicted on them, the bleeding that, even now, holds scant promise of coming to an end. If multilateralism is to have the future we wish for it, a future of trust and effectiveness, a future of more than political rhetoric, limited crossing points and families searching for the remains of long-murdered relations, that bleeding must stop.

We simply must see to it.

 

 

Tags: , , , ,

Mind Meld:  Independent Thought in an Age of Grievance, Dr. Robert Zuber

5 Jul

fireworks

My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.  Jane Austen

When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.  Ralph Ellison

Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Bertrand Russell

The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.  Joseph Heller

When we stop doing things for ourselves and expect others to dance around us, we are not achieving greatness. We have made ourselves weak.  Pandora Poikilos

There are other words for privacy and independence. They are isolation and loneliness.  Megan Turner

It’s good to have a healthy fear of horror.  Anne Quirk

As most of you know, yesterday was Independence Day in the US, a day ostensibly for us to count our many blessings and remember those in our past who, despite their often considerable personal flaws, helped make at least some of those blessings possible.

At a moment defined by deep social division, grave economic uncertainty and a stealth virus, I’m not sure how many blessings were counted yesterday.   And yet, in my neighborhood, our verdant parks were filled with what seemed to be happy family gatherings, some in groups as large as 50, albeit with no masks to be seen or distances kept.  The otherwise majestic Hudson River at the West Harlem Pier attracted its own crowd of families, even as the waters were mysteriously punctuated with the smell of dead fish while military aircraft roared overhead, a precursor to the endless booms from fireworks, legal and otherwise, that dominated the city skies until well past midnight.

The media conferred its own messaging for the day obsessing, as it so often does, on the ways and means of the US president and his enablers, specifically their apparent willingness to fashion a re-election campaign based on some alleged “white grievance” that they feel can be successfully exploited for political purposes.

There was so much of this “Independence Day” I simply could not relate to, though not necessarily to my credit.   I felt dismayed by the unwillingness of so many people to protect themselves from a virus which has given every indication of its ability to double back on victims and mutate to further complicate treatment options.   I felt dismayed that as our national debt balloons to unmanageable levels and people cling to what little remains of their economic viability that we somehow still think that military fly-overs and taxpayer-funded political rallies (and golfing outings) are more important than clean rivers and health care access.   I felt dismayed that it is still possible for political candidates to run for office in this world based on the idea that “white people” represent some generic category of humans who have somehow or other been screwed over in the global commons, that “we” are endlessly entitled to more than our share and that it is appropriate that others “dance around us” while we delude ourselves about the sanctity and reliability of our commitment to all that is good and right in the world.

And I felt especially dismayed that notions of freedom and independence are exploited so shamelessly by those who often haven’t given a second thought to what that means or, more pointedly, what that requires of us in return. Thus many are left to believe that we are “free” merely when we get to do what we want; and this at a time when the well-worn truism that “freedom is for persons with incomes” has perhaps never been more relevant in our recent history.  While too-many of us grind our teeth and take offense at the thought of wearing a mask or keeping physical distance, more and more face economic hardship and difficult choices between home care for children and showing up at low-wage jobs that barely meet the caring threshold.  At the same time, more and more of us are having our consumer and political preferences manipulated and massaged in ways we refuse to acknowledge or, at times, even gleefully accept. More and more of us have misplaced useful distinctions between the aesthetic and the ethical, presuming that “what we like” is what is good for us and others, that our “tastes” in things remain our “guidestar” regarding how we behave and what behavior we are willing to tolerate in the rest of the human race.

Ironically, COVID-19 has exposed fashions and fault-lines in my country (and beyond) that have actually been trending for some time.  We cultivated wariness and suspicion towards each other long before the virus compelled most of us to “keep our distance.”   Millions of people were living on the economic edge long before COVID forced (and will continue to force) a shut-down of so many local businesses and economies.   Inequalities in the political and economic realms have long been grotesque and have only increased under our current viral cloud.  We have long struggled to minimize the scapegoating that has accompanied our dubious claims of “exceptionalism” long before so many of our current “leaders” turned responsibility-dodging into an art form.  Many have suffered from sometimes debilitating levels of loneliness and social isolation that have only been made more acute through a series of lockdowns and quarantines that, in the short-term at least, promise only episodic periods of relief.

On top of this, our almost generic lack of thoughtfulness about the urgent needs of our planet and our responsibilities towards generations to come is perhaps the most tragic of this moment’s incarnations.  On the whole, where the future of our planet is concerned, we are still taking away far too much and giving too little of ourselves in return.

In this difficult present, it is apparently fine for health care workers to risk their lives to save those reckless persons for whom mask wearing has become some sort of political litmus test.  It is apparently fine for some people to attribute evil intent to others who want their country to honor promises to equal opportunity and social justice. It is also apparently OK for some people of elite up-bringing and education to denigrate and exploit the alleged “unwashed masses” whose purchases line their pockets and to whose aspirations for life they couldn’t possibly give a second thought.

I’m not sure where the “freedom” is in all of this, aside from the freedom to be mean.  The current moment speaks more loudly of our emotional fragility and cultural isolation, our manifest unwillingness to escape the ideas and expectations of our tribes, our inability to see beyond our personal grievances – legitimate and not — to a broader grievance to which we have contributed in our own way and which blithely places millions of God’s children on the precipice of ruin and despair each and every day.

On this US Independence Day weekend, I’ve gone back to review a few of the many seminal thinkers and writers who would never endorse my feeble attempts at policy and cultural analysis but who have influenced me nonetheless.  And one of their most important influences is the fierceness with which they set out to examine and overcome the impediments to genuine freedom which we routinely place in our own way.  I so admire their fortitude to gaze upon a “pit of hell” largely of our own creation; their courage to face-down attempts to intimidate and silence; their wisdom to understand the relationship between freedom and self-discovery, its healthy and the unhealthy aspects, our hidden-truths and self-deceptions; the horror in the world for which they were able to cultivate both a “healthy fear” and a determination to make the world much less horrible –much less frightening — especially for those many vulnerable persons worldwide who know deprivation more intimately than they might ever know freedom.

There are certainly levels of loneliness and isolation that can accompany such an examination, even one that is liberally coated in kindness, empathy or appreciation.  We live in an age which seems to have largely solved the territorial dynamics of self-governance but not the dynamics germane to governance of the self. Ours is a time when the “freedom” to believe what you will has little reference either to evidence or to social consequences beyond our own circles; when the numerous errors and even cowardice associated with national and global policy are mostly banal but at times rather vicious; when so many people are content to celebrate platitudes of freedom and independence, but recoil from any independent assessment of social and economic trends that they dare not exercise themselves and that they certainly do not recommend for others.

Thus there is the need, perhaps more acute than has been the case for some time, for independent minds that can challenge both social order and personal hypocrisy, that can expose the dark spaces that we seem intent on proliferating but also highlight the people and settings which are, even now, paving the way for greater freedom and justice, minds reminding us of a more connected calling and helping us sift through the debris which still impedes our progress towards a world we can all be proud to celebrate.

 

Tags: , , ,