Archive | August, 2020

Hack Attack:  Meeting this Cyber-Insecure Moment, Dr. Robert Zuber

30 Aug

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The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.  Jane Addams

In the underworld, reality itself has elastic properties and is capable of being stretched into different definitions of the truth.  Roderick Vincent

It must be, I thought, one of the race’s most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that “it can’t happen here” — that one’s own time and place is beyond cataclysm. John Wyndham

And you all know, security is mortals’ chiefest enemy.  William Shakespeare

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and few minutes of cyber-incident to ruin it.  Stephane Nappo

Hackers find more success with organizations where employees are under appreciated, over worked and under paid.  James Scott

Sometimes children do not realize by how fragile a thread their security hangs.   Mary Balogh

We are now well into six months of a pandemic that continues to evolve in both its biological and social impacts.   Scientists continue to learn more about transmission modalities, treatment options and the short and long-term health consequences of infection. Moreover, their investigations have revealed the mental health effects associated with our COVID-necessitated social isolation, from physically-distanced partners to children who stare at computer screens much of the day, pausing only to eat their lunch at an all-too-familiar kitchen table devoid of the happy noises of their friends and other classmates.

For many people I know the novelty of endless zoom meetings and other internet-tethered communications necessitated by this pandemic has long worn off.  We recognize the huge advantage that some of us in this world enjoy in the form of an ability to hold most of our own world together thanks to an abundance of digital access.  But there is fatigue and frustration as well, fatigue that some of the temporary accommodations we have made seem destined to become permanent; frustration that the inequalities and injustices now plaguing our societies seem destined to grow wider as our digital divides persist and our digital vulnerabilities grow.

Such vulnerabilities are related in part to the nature of our security-challenged digital playing field but more to our own “nature” as human beings, specifically our uncanny ability to “repurpose” resources that can enhance human possibility to ends which are self-interested at best and nefarious at worst.

Indeed, internet-based social media in our time has become something of a gold standard for such perversely repurposed resources.   The same platforms that allow us to stay connected to loved ones in the far-flung corners of the world; the same platforms that allow us to conduct “business” that we can’t now conduct over coffee or lunch; the same platforms that allow us to weigh in on political and social issues in ways we could not otherwise; such platforms have also become portals for the economic exploitation of disenfranchised persons and the virtual obliteration of personal privacy, as well as for the often-anonymous expression of every conceivable social grievance, conspiracy theory, bullying and character assassination, and incitement to hatred and violence.

I can’t speak for others, but there is no other place in my twittered life where I am exposed to nearly as much vile rhetoric, unchained egos and ideas which have more in common with propaganda than an honest (and dare we say humble) search for truth.  The fact that we have “made up our minds” about so many things frequently translates online into seductive sales pitches and threats against those whose minds are made up in a different direction.  We are all so smart, it seems, so full of righteous indignation, so willing to jump on any opinion that confirms our ill-conceived prejudices rather than explore ideas which might help us find a richer path.  And in a time which longs for those who can sift through the debris enabled by ideological bubbles filled with people willing to ask the first question but never the next one, what we have encouraged instead are people too comfortable with partisan security, anxious to use the internet to hurl critiques and condemnation but not to reflect and discern, not to strategize about ways to narrow the many chasms that we too have had a role in creating.

As most competent cyber security experts would surely confirm, there is digital danger in this moment for all of us, a moment when hacking and other online manipulations are directed at a wider range of personal and physical targets, and where we as a people seem often to be burying our collective heads in the sand while suppressing our will to “seek the good for all,” to address with conviction common and interconnected threats and not only the ones that challenge our tribe.

One of the positive developments at the UN in recent years has been its attention to such common security threats and related abuses associated with online portals.  In many parts of the UN system – from the General Assembly’s First Committee and Group of Governmental Experts to the Office of Counter-Terrorism (OCT) and the Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate (CTED), the UN has for some time been seized of the many security challenges associated with these portals, from disruptions to medical facilities and other civilian infrastructure to the luring of vulnerable young people into extremist movements and soliciting the resources needed to perpetuate their activities.

These concerns have recently found their way into Security Council deliberations with leadership from cyber-sophisticated Estonia and current Council president Indonesia. States are coming to realize that weapons and other physical manifestations of our violent inclinations are only one piece of the international security puzzle we are still not doing enough to solve.  After all, medical facilities can be disabled by hackers as well as by air strikes.  Power and water infrastructure can be rendered inoperative by cyber criminals as well as by missile launches.  Weapons can be neutralized (or even launched) through cyber manipulations as through direct military commands.

This week, officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the UN’s Institute for Disarmament Research briefed the Security Council on the “diverse and devastating destructive effects from cyber operations” on infrastructure and other public goods ranging from health care and other “vital services” to finance and (of particular concern in the US at the moment) elections.   And as the European Union warned, the “malicious intent” behind cyber-attacks does more than damage targets – it raises general levels of hostility and mistrust in what St. Vincent and the Grenadines reminded is our increasingly globalized world.  And given the times we are in and what the Netherlands rightly maintained is our “unprecedented dependence” on the internet, there is no reason for any of us to assume that a digital “cataclysm” will somehow, if by magic, bypass us.

We need to make sure that we are addressing the threat in full not in part.   To do so, we would do well to hold together what appear to be three pillars of cyber-concern.  The UN and its many partners know that we can bring more resources and expertise to bear in fighting malicious infrastructure hacking; but also to the task of mediating a social media environment which has fast become a swamp of narcissism, bigotry, conspiracy theory, extremist ideology, and “trollers” ruining reputations just for the fun of it.

But there is another piece to this puzzle, another responsibility raised by Russia and other states in the Council this week but communicated quite succinctly by Costa Rica – that while we are increasing cyber-space security we must also close a digital divide that robs so many of their potential:  robbing community farmers and medical practitioners of the information they need to grow more and heal better;  robbing children of the ability to maintain some vestige of educational progress and social connection without exposing themselves, their teachers and their families to a potentially deadly virus.

I was particularly moved this week by the image of two young children, sitting on the curb of a fast-food restaurant, trying desperately to secure enough band-width to log in to instruction that other classmates could easily access from home.  This is but one small instance of a digital divide that is expanding not shrinking and that (even as I write) is relegating perhaps millions of children to abandon the schooling their communities fought so hard to provide, the schooling these children will need in order to hold their own in this uncertain, unequal and threat-saturated world.

The social and security consequences of this persistent divide constitute a digital threat as grave as any other.  We have more than enough expertise at hand to both responsibly secure and fully enable access to digital spaces.  There is no time like the present to put that expertise to work.

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Playing Taps: Honoring Beleaguered Humanitarian Responders, Dr. Robert Zuber

23 Aug

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A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.  John A. Shedd

I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back. Erica Jong

Ultimately, thickened skin leaves you numb, incapable of feeling the highs and lows of life. It leaves you rough like a rock and just as inanimate. Michael Soll

If you want relief from pain just strive to touch more of every part of life.  Bryant McGill

The Doctor knew exactly what to do when he heard horrible screaming – run towards it and help.  A.L. Kennedy

May we always be burdened with thinking of the suffering of others, for that is what it means to be human.  Kamand Kojouri

He presented justice as a psychological relief.  Jill Leovy

This past Wednesday was World Humanitarian Day as declared by the UN, a time to reflect on those who, unlike most of the rest of us, run towards the screams of the distressed and unfolding emergencies rather than away from them; who bring skills and determination to often-complex crises that make the survival of persons in grave need more likely even as they make their own survival less so.

For persons, like myself, who now spend too much of our lives “tapping” on a keyboard and too little time immersed in the multi-dimensional struggles of real persons in real time,  we can experience bits of lingering sadness that are hard to shake.   My social media accounts are filled with stories of misery that humans insist on inflicting on each other, lives sacrificed to the pursuit and maintenance of power, victims of a wide range of causes including and especially armed conflict but also what the Dominican Republic (and other Security Council members) referred to this week as a “triple threat,” (to Somalia in this instance, but applicable to other peoples and places as well) — COVID infections, climate-induced flooding/drought and locust plagues.

From Cameroon to Yemen and from Afghanistan to Syria, the carnage that fills my various feeds and those of other “keyboard tappers” can be hard to process.  Moreover, the institutions we have collectively entrusted to manage conflict threats have succeeded in little more than “baby steps” towards measures that can ease humanitarian burdens for both those who provide relief and especially for those who require it.  We often fail to prevent conflict or stem it in its earliest stages.  We often fail to heed the climate-related warnings that make it harder and harder for subsistence farmers to subsist and coastal islands to survive.  We often fail to protect children from violent extremism and abuse with no effective plan for how to manage the trauma that will impact their decisionmaking long after their surface wounds have healed.  We often fail to swap out militarized responses to community unrest with more nuanced approaches to policing that better balance community mediation, conflict prevention, last-resort coercion and a commitment to the justice which is its own “psychological relief.”

These diverse and persistent ills represent cries of pain, injustice and deprivation that cause some to close their hearts and others to leap forward in support. In this latter category are those providing provisions for those displaced by storms or violence and now confined to makeshift shelter; the bomb squads carefully defusing explosives placed in public squares; the medical care provided in facilities shaking from bomb blasts; the drivers of convoys running a gauntlet of roadside threats including well-disguised explosive devices; the peacekeepers attempting to keep the peace even when there is clearly no peace to keep; the police effecting emergency rescue of persons trapped in cars involved in horrific crashes or sinking quickly to the bottom of lakes; the military units sent in to free victims from the control of terrorists; the NGOs risking their own lives to ensure that persons traumatized under rubble are freed or that persons with disabilities can escape harm once the warning sirens sound.

We do not do enough to honor this work even if we don’t always approve of every tactic deployed, even as we feel compelled to echo sentiments of the UN’s Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate this past week that all efforts to address terror threats and even provide support for victims must be more cognizant of obligations to respect and uphold human rights.   Those who run towards people in crisis have a special place in our hearts, especially as some of us “tappers” are no longer equipped to respond to crisis-related need in the way that we once might have done.

And yet in this time of unresolved violence, insufficiently addressed climate threats and a pandemic that shows little sign of vanishing, we fear that too many have allowed ourselves to become “rough like a rock,” blaming our legitimately-frustrating personal circumstances for the decision to touch less of life, not more, to listen a bit too much to the “pounding” in our hearts rather than to the cries of those whose rights and aspirations have been steamrolled by power-obsessed governments, their overly-muscular security forces, and the economic, social and health-related unrest that are keeping all of us on razor’s edge.

It would take more than an annual day to sufficiently appreciate the motives of those who respond first and best to the crises that beset so many in our human family.  At the same time, we must acknowledge that such crises seem to be expanding, not shrinking; that the numbers and needs of people in distress are growing, not diminishing.  For all the remarkably courageous work being done by those who care more when too many of the rest of us could care less, there seems to be no end in sight to the burdens that global circumstances place on these responders. We create food insecurity faster than we can deliver provisions.  We create war victims faster than we can provide physical and psychological healing.  We traumatize children faster than we can guarantee their safety (or their education for that matter).  For all the metaphorical babies we pull from the river, more and more are being thrown in at its source.

One gets the clear sense in these times that our hero/heroine responders are waging a struggle destined to be forever exasperating, doing what they can to rescue populations from oblivion while policymakers and those of us who “play taps” around them largely fail to stem the deadly tide, to remediate the injustice, to care sufficiently for those enduring what UN Special Envoy Pedersen this week referred to as “mass indignities” inflicted too often in large measure through our own collective negligence.

At its most appropriate, the courage of humanitarian responders should facilitate the plugging of temporary gaps until those with power and influence establish and implement the norms and laws that can ensure longer-term relief.  However, such responders and their clients have largely been consigned to a Godot-like wait for policies to take effect which can ensure that our current emergencies have an actual end point.

As such there is still work for those of us who perhaps “tap” too much and respond too timidly. For it is clear, to me at least, that honoring humanitarian and other first responders is in large measure about reducing the burdens which often overwhelm their craft.  From mask wearing and other counter-COVID measures to mitigate the strain on overwhelmed hospital workers to more women-led mediation efforts to transform community conflict before it graduates into armed violence, there are many burden-reduction strategies we can help to identify that offer hope to besieged persons and their care-givers.  But we must also insist on more from political leadership, including more urgency on conflict and climate, on poverty and biodiversity, threats that already strain humanitarian and peacebuilding responses to their breaking point.

We “tappers” in our mostly safe harbors indeed have an important role here, albeit a subordinate one: to insist that governments and policymakers cease misappropriating humanitarian assistance as an excuse to ignore their urgent peace and climate responsibilities, urging leaders to do much more to keep all those metaphorical babies from being thrown the river in the first place. After all, doctors working in makeshift clinics cannot make the bombing cease.  Convoy drivers cannot heal the climate that now steals crops and livelihoods.  Peacekeepers and aid workers cannot force governments and non-state actors to fairly and expeditiously honor peace agreements.

We are probably getting all we can expect from our first responders and humanitarian workers.  However, we still have a right to expect more from our political leadership at national and multilateral levels. Security Council members this past week discussed in the context of Syria whether cross-border closures or sanctions were the primary cause of the misery of Syrians.  The true answer of course is a decade of horrific armed violence which neither sanctions nor cross-border relief has the capacity to resolve.

Thus we “tappers” must play our role in ensuring that expectations for sustainable peace take the form of tangible policies to bring relief for besieged peoples, offering communities both a safer and more prosperous path forward and granting some well-deserved respite for the humanitarians who have put so much on the line to give communities that chance.

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Mail Merge: Electoral Integrity as Peacebuilding Responsibility, Dr. Robert Zuber

16 Aug

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Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily.  Lemony Snicket

If it takes the entire army and navy to deliver a postal card in Chicago, that card will be delivered.  Grover Cleveland

But as soon as it is in back of this partition, or in a mail box, a magical transformation occurs; and anybody who now should willfully purloin it, or obstruct its trip in any way, will find prison doors awaiting him.  Ernest Vincent Wright

I do not follow politicians on Twitter; if they want to lie to me, it will cost them a stamp.  Carmine Savastano

I’ve always felt there is something sacred in a piece of paper that travels the earth from hand to hand, head to head, heart to heart.  Robert Michael Pyle

You got to stick to the bridge that carries you across. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

It was a relatively quiet week at the UN though not within some UN member states where an increasingly anxious global public could be seen on the streets in large numbers demanding leadership change in Belarus, political reform in Thailand, and upcoming elections in the US and other countries that can pass basic tenets of fairness and integrity.

Life inside the UN bubble this week was punctuated by a preventable controversy over a potential extension by the UN Security Council of the arms embargo against Iran.  A resolution circulated by the US, which received little support from other Council members during a Friday afternoon vote, was essentially an energy-wasting effort to manipulate the terms of an agreement (JCPOA) with Iran which most Council members sought to preserve and which the US had already renounced.

There was also an important Security Council discussion, hosted by Indonesia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, on the various ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted peacebuilding efforts by the UN and a range of other actors, people who are active at all stages of the conflict cycle, who are concerned both to prevent conflict and minimize its often-devastating consequences, and whose multiple activities — including efforts to preserve electoral integrity — have been complicated by a pandemic which has added layers of response complexity, extended the miseries of the most vulnerable, and provided cover for governments which would roll-back social progress and civil rights or (in the case of certain non-state actors) step up assaults on communities and authorities.

For those unfamiliar with (or put-off by) UN nomenclature, it is important to state why we have long encouraged holistic conflict responses under a peacebuilding banner.  Part of this commitment has been purely practical.  As the Security Council has been unable to adequately address conflict threats or sufficiently broaden the range of its attentions to the many causes and consequences of global violence, it has been the UN’s peacebuilding apparatus – primarily the Peacebuilding Commission – which has steadily left the post-conflict “ghetto” to which it had once been confined to now provide important and meaningful counsel to the Security Council itself but also to UN member states facing security threats of a complexity they simply cannot resolve alone.

But beyond the ability to improve the UN’s lagging capacity for meaningful conflict response, the UN’s peacebuilding architecture has broadened our understanding of the many causes and manifestations of conflict threat; but also of the diverse actors — including so many persons in our communities and civil society organizations — who have a clear and direct stake in policies and practices that can both silence the guns and ensure conditions conducive to sustainable peace such that communities will have no compelling rationale for resorting to weapons in the future.

Implementing commitments to examine the diverse causes and consequences of conflict as well as to promote inclusive participation by all with the skills to contribute to sustainable peace represents a tall task under the best of circumstances.   The “accompaniment” of states under a conflict cloud urged on Wednesday by SG Guterres is not a simple matter nor is it one (as Germany noted) that is currently being guided by thorough and honest assessments of our responses to the current pandemic and related challenges.  The Council has not yet, as underscored by the Dominican Republic, enabled a peacebuilding architecture fully inclusive of the skills and aspirations of women, youth and cultural minorities.  The Council has not yet, as noted by Vietnam, extended accompaniment sufficiently to persons with disabilities or to refugees displaced by famine, climate change, political disenfranchisement or armed conflict.  The Council has not yet, as was noted at this session by former SG Ban ki-Moon, done enough to resolve our massive digital divide or promote a global cease fire that could make our pandemic and peacebuilding responses more effective.

We are not, as warned by Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, keeping a sufficiently “watchful eye” on how global challenges in this time are both interconnected and often accelerating.  And while numerous Council members rightfully expressed concerns that terrorist and criminal elements are taking advantage of our current pandemic-stoked confusion to incite violence and sow hatred, there was little discussion of how otherwise “legitimate” governments are using what Belgium referred to as the “soaring” personal and institutional consequences of COVID as cover for security measures and policy changes that are anti-democratic at best and outright authoritarian at worst.

We certainly are feeling that negative energy here in the “host state.” Threats to our enfranchisement as citizens – including the basic integrity of our elections – are well underway as the domestic iteration of our global pandemic shows no signs of slowing or even embracing the best, if evolving, scientific and medical expertise. In a few short days this week, we have been more efficient in hauling away postal boxes and disabling mail sorting machines than in ensuring timely COVID test results or civil rights for protesters, “efficient” moves intended to manipulate election results in broad daylight.

Much has been written recently about the dismantling of a once-proud service that is particularly essential for rural residents and those dependent on the mail for medicines and other essential supplies; a service which also has long been symbolic of a government that knew it had to earn public trust. Part of that “earning” took the form of what has become “old school” reliability, the insistence that what was entrusted to agencies such as the postal service represented an almost sacred commitment duly upheld by those tasked with delivery (including by me in two earlier years) and which was not ever to be misrepresented as the province of any singular political interest.

These days, it seems, everything in our lives has been claimed –and often defaced — by one political interest or another.  Thus it seemed a bit ironic that as the post office is being cut off at the knees, it has issued a stamp (see above) to commemorate 100 years of US women’s suffrage, a reminder of what has been a long and often painful journey to enfranchise women not only as voters but as leaders and policymakers, and not only in the US but in too many other UN member states.  As the postal infrastructure of this country continues to unravel and even as more women (and women of color) struggle to grasp their rightful places in public policy, it remains crystal clear that the struggle for enfranchisement has not ended, that we remain buffeted by threats to civic dignity and civil peace perhaps even more grotesque than the pandemic itself.

It is a small symbol in the grand scheme of things, to be sure, but after a good conversation yesterday with our colleague, Lisa Berkeley, I think we can use the suffrage stamp to help reinforce a peacebuilding-relevant linkage between electoral protection and women’s enfranchisement.  As such I would urge anyone who can do so to visit your Post Office, buy as many of these particular stamps as you are able, and then use them liberally on post office services, including letters and bills, that you still feel comfortable entrusting to our nefariously-disabled and reliability-impeded postal infrastructure.

In addition, having once engaged that culture first hand, I can thankfully attest that the US postal service remains a responsibility of government filled with people committed to crossing bridges of reliability, people who still believe in the sacredness of the documents that travel the world and bind its inhabitants; people who understand (even viscerally) that a pandemic (or other crisis) must never become an excuse for disenfranchised citizens, politicized public services and abuses of fundamental rights. Until our leaders get this message, clearly and unequivocally, we would do well to exercise all remedial measures — symbolic, legal and legislative –still remaining at our common disposal.

 

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Generation C: Minding the Catastrophes Encircling our Children’s Lives, Dr. Robert Zuber

9 Aug

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It was like we had known all along that the sky was going to fall and then it fell and we pretended to be surprised. Elin Hilderbrand

Sometimes catastrophes split you in half and even if all the pieces are there, they might not ever fit back together.  Julie Murphy

Sooner or later the world comes to its senses, but oh the damage that has been done.  John Kramer

Some days punch us in the gut so hard it seems we can feel the whole universe gasp with despair.  Curtis Tyrone Jones

It’s a catastrophe to be without a voice.  E.B. White

The mind couldn’t think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial.  Neal Stephenson

One of the pitfalls of this policy business is that we are now drowning in the “crises” that we are tasked to identify.  Everywhere you turn, there is one more manifestation of our lack of solidarity with each other, another blow to the views maintained by some (us included) that human beings are still capable of choosing life over death, growth over destruction, cooperation over nationalism and unchecked narcissism.  And yet there are those times when we simply do not treat our crises with sufficient urgency, seemingly more worried about our talking points or funding streams than actually solving the problems most directly relevant to our roles and mandates.

Regardless, it was difficult for any of us to miss the urgency embedded in this week of many catastrophes just ended.  For the past few days, we have been beset by some stark and painful images, some a clear consequence of human neglect but also a harbinger of a future that we are collectively not approaching well at present, one that cannot offer much comfort either to children or to those tasked with guiding and educating them.

In case you were taking a vacation this week from the news to concentrate on family or “romp through the trivial,” allow me to remind you of some of what we have done to ourselves in this most recent time.   We have now reached an ominous threshold of 20 million known COVID infections worldwide – 5 million in the US alone – with most medical experts fearing that the number of actual cases (and spreaders) is considerably larger than reported.  At the same time, a large oil tanker leak off the coast of Mauritius continues to directly threaten both the complex biodiversity of the country and the livelihoods of its people.  In addition, many of you have surely seen images of the Beirut port blast that brought devastation to an entire city, worsening an already tenuous economic situation and calling thousands into the streets to both mourn their losses and seek explanation and accountability from and for those whose negligence allowed this to happen. There was also some sad reporting about the collapse of the ice shelf on Canada’s Ellesmere Island, a collapse larger in area than the island of Manhattan and yet another blow to, among other things, the stability of the Arctic and its multiple inhabitants. And then there were the ubiquitous images of nuclear fireballs both from the testing we now seem determined to resume and from the highly-dubious uses of these weapons75 years ago on residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, weapons which our currently (and foolishly) modernizing arsenals dwarf by comparison.

The lessons that we can take from this week’s gallery of disturbing images are ones we have mostly learned already and then blithely discarded.   That our sky in some sense is falling is not news to most.  That we continue to accept these “punches in the gut,” that we continue to allow crises to break us apart with little or no strategy for putting the pieces back together again, this is symptomatic of something insidious inside ourselves. This goes beyond a failure of technique to a failure of stewardship; the courage to ensure that, at a most fundamental level, we are determined to bequeath to our children a planet that can sustain life, ensure equitable access to water and other essential resources, and provide opportunity for creative livelihoods that are less about destroying competitors and more about contributing as we are able to the well-being of the global commons.

Even before COVID, we have collectively been losing ground on sustainable development goals from food security to climate health.  But COVID has pushed even our development successes to the margins, including our goals for education.  Indeed, one of the more disquieting statements of the week was issued by UN Secretary-General Guterres, who noted that 90% of the world’s school-aged children have had their education disrupted by COVID, a catastrophe for a generation that will need all their wits about them if they are to manage, let alone thrive, in the (needlessly) melting, food insecure, hostile environment we are in danger of leaving to them.

In his statement (click here) the SG makes an urgent plea for governments to do what they can and all that they can to get children back in school and to properly fund their educational infrastructure.   But he also recognizes, as do many in the US (such as my longtime friend and colleague Dr. John Thompson) now weighing in on how to reopen schools in the midst of a pandemic, that to some considerable degree the still-potent virus — and what Thompson describes as our struggle to put “public health over ideology” — are now dictating educational outcomes for many millions of children. A frightening percentage of such children now run the risk of permanent exclusion from formal schooling and other educational opportunity.  Such exclusion will only increase inequalities and ensure that the skills and voices of millions needed to bring this stubbornly self-destructive world to heel will remain missing in action.

If this is not a catastrophe in early formation, I don’t know what is.

There are so many dimensions to this educational threat that require attention now:  parents desperate to find work and who cannot adequately attend to their jobs and the safety of children marooned from classrooms; curricula which increasingly exposes both infrastructure disparities and the still-large swaths of our digital divide;  children who we are learning now can both spread COVID and become victim to some of its most serious health consequences; teachers who (much like our front-line health care workers) are somehow expected to “take one for the team” as ideological divides harden and classrooms (like most every other public space) become petri dishes for evolving manifestations of pandemic threat; students who desperately need in-person peer interaction as they begin the long, complex psychological separation from their parents; children whose shelter-in-place attentions are now directed largely towards the screens that already play an outsized role in value and worldview formation.

Guterres sees within the confines of this pandemic an opportunity to “reimagine education” and we welcome that call so long as the fruits of reimagining don’t themselves widen gaps between children with access options and children without.  If indeed education is to remain viable as a “great equalizer,” we do need to reach more children with formal and informal opportunity, including access to digital resources.  We do need to prioritize educational funding as we consider how best to mitigate an otherwise crisis-riddled future.  And we do need to take better care of our educators, primarily but not exclusively in the formal sector, remembering that it is not the task of teachers to solve in any isolation the vast social problems which they confront daily but did not themselves create.   It is their task, at least in our view, to do what they can to instill hope in the future and to impart and nurture the skills that have the best chance of making that hope sustainable.

And while we are at this reimagining business, we should take a hard look at what we teach not only how we teach.  In this aggrieved and distracted time, when kids are increasingly more comfortable in cyber realities than out in the crisis-driven mess we have made for ourselves, it is important that teachers take a stand against both stifling cynicism and blinding ideology.  The world is still worth knowing; is still receptive to possibility and positive change; still harbors hope of greater fairness and solidarity between cultures and among diverse life forms, still has beauty to convey around nearly every bend. We need the eyes of children to remain open to wonder and possibility especially at times like these when both seem to be at a premium.

And we need to help students cultivate what the psychologist Erich Fromm called a “scientific attitude,” not so much a reverence for the “techniques” of science but a mindset that refuses to accept on faith conclusions for which there is clear conflicting evidence; a mindset that prioritizes a larger role for objectivity and realism; one that requires us to see the world as it is as the precondition for any life-enhancing modifications; one that cultivates what Fromm saw as the healthiest formula going forward – humility towards the facts of the world and a renunciation of “all hopes of omnipotence and omniscience.”

As hard as it sometimes is to imagine, our damage-ravaged societies will eventually come to their senses. The question is how much catastrophic damage we are willing to inflict on the aspirations of and prospects for “Generation C” until that blessed day finally arrives?

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Traffic Alert: Countering our Dystopian Gridlock, Dr. Robert Zuber

2 Aug

Gradually our ideals have sunk to square with our practice.   Alfred North Whitehead

We dismantle the predator by countering its diatribes with our own nurturant truths. Clarissa Estés

The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without color, pain or past.  Lois Lowry

There is no feasible excuse for what we are, for what we have made of ourselves.  Iain Banks

In the year 2025, the best don’t run for president, they run for their lives. Stephen King

Only the sweetest of the sweet would bring brownies to the apocalypse.  Shelly Crane

Quietly and complacently, humanity was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.  E. M. Forster

Yesterday on the radio, a New York Yankees baseball commentator was sharing a warning issued by the weather service for the arrival of a tropical storm – perhaps something even stronger – set to make its way up the East Coast of the US this week and thus create havoc for more than just baseball.  After the warning, another commentator reflected, “Of course a huge storm is coming.  It’s 2020.”

Yes its 2020, a year that once upon a time held a great symbolic hope of clean cities and transparent politics, a time when we might have overcome at least some of the burdens of poverty and predation that we as human beings have inflicted on ourselves and the rest of the natural order, a time when our education and our technology would allow more of us the opportunity to pursue lives of meaning that hold the public interest in as high a regard as the personal.

Whatever that vision might have looked like, what we have “made of ourselves” in the run-up to this stormy year lies in stark contrast.  Despite some remarkable, heroic stories coming from our hospital wards and the determination for justice seen on the streets of our protests, we have collectively (to use a baseball analogy) lost a few miles-per-hour off our fastball.   We have allowed ourselves to be defined more by our grievances than our generosity.  We have indulged what one political commentator this week referred to as a “cult of selfishness” that permits too many of us to obsess on what we have lost during this pandemic with little regard for those who never had it in the first place; indeed those for whom every day is a struggle to hold on to something –- or someone – to help navigate life circumstances more akin to apocalypse than quarantine.

We have in many instances misplaced faith in institutions, in governments, in science.  We have also lost a good deal of faith in each other, defending more and more a dystopian worldview dominated by predators, rapists and thieves, people seemingly bent on taking from us what we love and inflicting violence that our security sector seems powerless to stop.   And this worldview is being reinforced through a good chunk of media brimming with images of cruelty and violence, scenes where the next betrayal is right around the corner, media products where everyone seems to have a gun, where no one can be trusted, and where the screen carnage often exceeds the grisly toll from COVID emanating from our overstretched and under-resourced hospitals.

This current incarnation of our dystopia is hardly the first and it draws on and perpetuates a deep legacy of (often unaddressed) anger, fear and frustration.   Like many others I speak with, especially those in the business of attending to global crises, I know how much “darker” my own dream life has become in recent times, full of danger and rejection, images of free-fall and betrayal.  There is this sense – in many of us – that circumstances have simply gotten out of control, that our “nurturant truths” have been buried under the current avalanche of pandemic-generated, personal and economic anxiety, that the best we can do is to protect what is ours, if we can, from threats that seem to be lurking around every corner and for which much of our leadership seems to have no solution that doesn’t revolve around incitement, arrests and tear gas.

Indeed, “our ideals have sunk to square with our practice,” and our practice at this moment is not one in which we should be taking particular pride.  Our multi-lateral institutions are delivering less than promised on sustainable development (see climate change and food security), on peace and security (see Syria and Yemen), and on the protection of children from violence and abuse.  Our religious institutions have largely misplaced their responsibility to reconciliation and thus have too often become one more partisan influence in a bitterly divided social landscape. Our schools continue to be put in the untenable position of solving social problems which should be resolved elsewhere while attempting to counter the current mood which elevates opinion over science and conspiracy over evidence.   And our security institutions have to face the brunt of our collective anger while generally refusing accountability for acts which inflame that anger still.

In such a climate, truth-telling is punished and competency is suspect.   While we may not have lowered our guard, we have certainly lowered our standards such that the “best” are more likely to be found “running for their lives” than seeking roles in social and institutional leadership.

In my experience, it is the issue of trafficking in persons where our current emotional and policy fault lines are often most clearly exposed.  This past Thursday was World Day Against Trafficking in Persons and, at the UN, a bevy of speakers – first responders, victims, diplomats and others – shared testimony on why this particular type of trafficking, this particular manifestation of human predation, simply must receive greater policy attention.  Perhaps the most animated of the speakers was the actress (and UN Goodwill Ambassador) Mira Sorvino who noted that the 2020 pandemic has merely slowed down the already much-too-modest efforts to break up trafficking networks and prosecute offenders.   She urged, among other things, better training for judges and law enforcement such that they can become “more than paper tigers” in efforts to counter human trafficking and related predatory acts in all their manifestations, traffickers who have routinely demonstrated more flexibility during this pandemic than those seeking to put them out of business.

That same day, one of our partners, WIIS-New York, moderated in an online event focused on the growing threat of (domestic) trafficking as well as kidnapping and other threats lodged against our youth, especially girls.   The focus here was less on policy responses and more on “awareness raising” about the prevalence of predators in and around their homes, schools and shops, as well as the grave difficulties parents face in trying to keep their children, especially their girl children, safe.

One can only sympathize with parents who must assume this protective burden within a social fabric that seems to be fraying more and more, a fabric of public institutions less trustworthy and responsive than they might be, with images streaming through their devices in their current “shelter at home” reality of a world that is badly divided and amply frustrated, where leadership often seems more interested in stoking fires than extinguishing them, and where capacities to apprehend predators and rehabilitate their victims are generally inadequate, sometimes shockingly so.

And yet, part of our current dystopian mind-set involves perceiving threats in all sorts of dark corners where they might not actually exist and simultaneously under-stating our ability to contribute to remediation beyond the boundaries of our personal space. Parents must protect, full stop. And yet so much seems out of their control, not only with respect to trafficking, but regarding the larger economic, health and ecological threats that might well impact children far beyond this stressful year.  How do parents protect without paranoia or without imposing a life for children devoid of “color or pain?”  How do parents nurture children to be savvy about threats and not overwhelmed by them, to rely on their wits but also to seek help when those wits are unsure?  How do they protect children from danger without protecting them from life?

There are no firm answers but many helpful stories.  Indeed, one of the most hopeful presentations of the UN’s week was made by a former trafficking victim from Colombia, a woman who suffered, as a girl, grave abuses from which her family was unable to offer adequate protection. But she and her family persevered and, quite remarkably, she is now director of a trafficking-focused NGO in her country, making protective and healing services available to victims that were not available in her own time of need. “We have come a long way,” she proclaimed.  Indeed, the same could surely be said about her, a stunning modeling of human resilience and healing that we need more of in these times.

But sadly, we have collectively not come such a long way as we might otherwise have hoped. Especially in this pandemic year we have seemingly given up too much ground to negativity and cynicism; we have allowed a dystopian worldview to take up residence in our souls, thus undermining so many of our common causes. If this year is to be known for anything other than acrimony and suspicion, of lives needlessly facing material ruin, languishing in makeshift morgues, or frozen in fear of any and all unknowns, we would do well to assess the impact of this violent, chaotic darkness on our most personal choices and then vow to contribute more to healing and reconciliation, more than merely “bringing brownies to the apocalypse.”

Even now, even in 2020 we have our “nurturant truths” to share, truths that can help restore institutions, dismantle predators, inspire children and fortify communities. There will never be a better time to share them.

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