By the Late Tara Tidwell Bryan
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches. Rainer Maria Rilke
That bird sat on a burning tree and sang the songs that this creation had never heard before. Akshay Vasu
The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. Anaïs Nin
If we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. Wendell Berry
I don’t know how one can walk by a tree and not be happy at the sight of it? Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We were all forged in the crucible. Gayle Forman
Because God took one look at Adam and said, ‘Wow. This guy’s going to need all the help he can get.’ And here we are. Nancy Mehl
I had a lovely and important message this week from a former intern now working in Vienna. A Polish citizen great of skill and big of heart, she lamented her current assignment with a multilateral agency, not out of ingratitude so much as impatience to move beyond bureaucratic maintenance towards those issues in the world that now beckon so many in her generation. As she put it to me, “I wish one day I could do something that actually matters.”
The stakes are high for this generation and the need to matter is often acute. Indeed, I think we under-estimate the longing of many people of all generations and life-circumstances to have or recover lives that matter more, incorporating higher levels of significance and even adventure than their daily routines and “realisms” generally encourage.
Many of us scoff at people of middle age who harken back to secondary school as the highlight-reel of their lives. But there is a clue in this that we are in danger of missing and are, in turn, endangered by missing. I remember listening to family members talking about their military service with a fondness that exceeded most all of their story-telling. That fondness, I was quite convinced, was related not to the violence of war but to the significance of service. This was a time in their lives when what they were doing really mattered, when the merits of their sacrifice were both encouraged and honored in a way that, in many instances at least, had not happened to them since. Few listened to them anymore. Few sought out their advice or paused to hear their stories. Their service was “past tense” but so was its mattering. What was “forged in the crucible” of war had become voices largely of nostalgia, almost empty of any larger impact.
Staying on this theme, I have seen so many photos since the recent, dismal US presidential debate of “patriots” who have been dubbed (and denigrated) as right-wing warriors, folks apparently preparing for some sort of “war” with their fellow-citizens, testing the limits of official response (and implicit permission) by grabbing their guns, donning military-style gear and taking to the streets to “defend” some makeshift iteration of morality, order and legacy. Without endorsing one iota of the tendency to conspiracy and lawlessness, I also wonder how long what I see in their faces and hear in their words has been simmering? But it is apparent that, in part due to a self-serving shout-out by the US president, these folks matter now, more than they have perhaps mattered in many years. Their ideas and actions have consequence again, both for their own self-worth and – as they see it at least – for the future of their country.
There is no part of that truth-defying intimidation and incitement that I can support; but as someone whose ideas and opinions on global issues and the “psychology” of our collective responses carry more weight than they surely deserve, I don’t overlook the fact that the people who do matter in this world continue to represent an all-too-small subset of the people who should matter. And some of these folks, in ways that are sometimes both violent and reality-challenged, are now declaring their insistence to matter.
The irony for me in all of this is that there are now so many crises vying for higher levels of attention and response, many of which have been either enhanced or exposed by virtue of the current pandemic. At the UN this past week alone, three events of existential importance, mostly virtual, called attention to threats that we have not done nearly enough to mitigate and for which we lack both full disclosure from leadership and sufficient hands-on-deck to truly care for our present and do “full justice” to our future.
All three of these High Level events were dripping with opportunities to matter, and all attracted a bevy of senior leadership from the world’s governments. Friday’s discussion on nuclear disarmament highlighted the dangerous expansion and/or reintegration of “modernized” nuclear weapons capability into national strategic defense doctrines, complete with threats to resume nuclear testing and move offensive capacity into outer space. There was also some reflection (mostly by Palau and other small states) on the impact of excess military spending on funding access for development needs and related global concerns including those highlighted in the UN General Assembly earlier in the week.
One of those concerns took center-stage on Thursday as states convened to assess the impact, 25 years on, of the Beijing Platform for Action on women’s equality. With statements (mostly by men) lasting well into the evening, one leader after another delivered prepared and often unremarkable statements seeking to convince us that gender equality is both indispensable to peaceful societies (surely right) and lies at the very heart of their domestic policy — though equality progress in many of these societies remains limited at best. Perhaps the presidents of Luxembourg and Costa Rica put it most helpfully as they focused their remarks on enhancing the “practical dimensions of equality” at a time when “not one nation” can claim to have achieved the goals of Beijing. “Not one.”
Lastly, Wednesday’s High-Level event was, to my mind at least, the most urgent of the three. On this day, world leaders and others convened virtually to assess the rapidly declining health of global biodiversity on land and in the sea, a decline so precipitous that it directly threatens the health of our agriculture, indeed calls into question the viability of the entire food cycle, not only for ourselves but for the still-abundant life forms with which we are still privileged to share this planet. And while most of us are rightly appalled by the sight of slaughtered elephants and emaciated polar bears, biodiversity loss is felt most acutely at the lower levels of the biological chain: the bees which are disappearing from our farms and gardens, the insects whose presence is no longer in sync with the birds who need them to sustain their migrations, the coral reefs which have been bleached into oblivion by warming seas. The image offered up by the director of the UN Development Program, of trucks full of bees traveling to save California farms from unpollinated crops, was a stark reminder of how disruptive we collectively continue to be to the natural rhythms and needs of our now abundance-challenged planet.
The science on this potential mass extinction event we seem determined to create is clear. As UNSG Guterres noted on Wednesday, we must now find a way to “bend the curve” on biodiversity loss and we are running out of time to do so. Such bending requires more thoughtful attention to economies pitched more to destruction than protection. But it also requires more initiative and activity at local level, urgently appealing to those many people (including and especially indigenous people) with the energy and skill to matter: to help lay the groundwork for a future in which loaded guns, clenched fists, predatory economics, bloated military budgets and unresolved inequalities and exclusions no longer have pride of place.
Such a future must also be more attuned to the very human though often unrequited desire to matter. A young woman from India speaking at the biodiversity summit responded to what she interpreted (and not without reason) as a string of often “empty statements” by global leadership: “We are ready to do our part,” she intoned, “Are you?”
Like my former intern, this young woman is clearly determined to matter, and there are many millions more like the two of them. Our task now is to get back to work on what ails us as a species and as a planet, in part by getting to the heart of what it means to matter, what people of diverse backgrounds require such that they can call forth more of the “riches of life” for themselves and for all with whom they come in contact. It also means learning how to better accompany each other as we “sing the songs that creation has never heard before,” including songs revering the presence of the bees, the trees and other life forms on which our own survival depends and that we simply must do more to keep.
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