Archive | November, 2020

Lonely Exile: An Advent Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

29 Nov
Feeling lonely? You've got company. | The World from PRX

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.  F. Scott Fitzgerald

Every grievance you hold hides a little more of the light of the world from your eyes until the darkness becomes overwhelming. Donna Goddard

So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them. Sylvia Plath

Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting. Khaled Hossein

They’d elevate small grievances; they’d cherish hurt feelings and ill treatment like they were signs of virtue. Amy Bloom

As we have said about many things in this strange and uncomfortable year, this Advent season feels like few we have experienced in our collective lifetime.

One of the reasons, I suspect, why Advent is not more resonant within communities and even across faith traditions is that we don’t routinely engage in the reflections and reactions that the season demands. The word “Advent” is perhaps best translated as “expectation.” The signature image is, as we have noted over many years, the lone person peering into the night sky, knowing that something is out there that can reverse the trend of lonely exile, that can provide a lift to relationships in disarray and the loosening of the iron grip of occupation both of our nations and our souls.

This peering into the Milky Way was never merely wishful thinking, for Isiah and other prophets had long-anticipated “a light to those who sit in darkness” indeed even to those who find themselves sitting “in the shadow of death.” And yet this expectation was accompanied neither by a timeline nor a script. Something out there would surely come, a visitation would commence that could “guide our feet into the way of peace,” peace in our families, our communities, our world, but the timing and the program elements were as yet unclear, as yet uncertain. And the wait for clarity was genuinely painful as “the simple act of waiting” so often is.

But longing and waiting for a visitation are insufficient. This “way of peace” demands more of us as well. The visitation that can “guide our feet” requires us to use those feet to walk that path, to trust the direction but do so willfully and mindfully, to push ourselves forward and not wait for some unseen hand to keep pushing from behind. And as we walk, to engage in the two demands that, for me at least, signify the essence of the Advent season, the essence of our longing and response.

For me, the core of Advent takes the forms of Anticipation and Preparation: anticipation of the world made possible in part through the promise of a visitation; preparation to seize that opportunity, to be as ready as we can be as that world of promise takes its welcome shape.

On the surface, these two attributes seem like obvious conduits for the best of our modern age; indeed in healthy families, institutions or even governments, both play a key role. Such health requires an attentive and active investment in the world and its peoples, a willingness to see past our often-petty, soul-clogging grievances and our sometimes discouraging logistics to a time when, as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer puts it, we have “cast away the works of darkness” and now bathe in a light which is accessible to all and not just to some, a light which never dims in part because we ourselves have accepted the responsibility for illumination.

But all this sounds now like a bit fantasy, doesn’t it? Those in our time who dare to anticipate at all often see a future filled with obstacles for which we are no more prepared than we were for prior sets of challenges. We “expect” the next major storms to devastate coastlines, the next geo-political tensions to spill over into brutal conflict, the next species to be made extinct through our own greed and negligence, the next pandemics lying in wait to inflict their damage once the current virus has had its fill of us.

On and on, anticipating an epoch of impediments for which we do not know how to adequately prepare, indeed that our elected representatives and policymakers don’t seem properly equipped to address either. Rather than anticipating that time when our feet finally reach that place of light and peace, that time when anticipated visitation becomes trusted presence, we expect to see only the faintest glimmers of a world that seems perpetually beyond our reach. Indeed, especially in this pandemic year, it seems to many as though our sun is always setting, regardless of the hour.

But Advent calls out circumstances not in perpetual dusk — calls us to anticipate and prepare for the world that can and must exist beyond the loneliness that has disabled so many of our current connections, beyond the (non-virtuous) grievances that rob the world of light and disfigure our very souls, beyond the masks and social distancing which are necessary for physical health but challenging to emotional stability. We fear the dusk and the darkness which soon envelops it, but we fail to properly discern what such fear reveals about the status of our own resilience, our own courage to stay the course of peace, our own capacity to illuminate a path different from the one we are on now, a path inconsistent with Advent’s calling.

In writing this, my thoughts turned to a deceased Aunt who helped raise me but whose later years were a veritable cauldron of suspicion and grievance, immersed in conspiracy theories and half-truths she never bothered to interrogate. She was one of those people who when the phone or doorbell rang, would erupt in expletive-saturated discourse as though the voice on the other end had no goal other than to take her money or make her life more confusing and threatening than it already seemed.

With all due regard for the prevalence of elder abuse, I used to think that my Aunt was a relatively extreme, isolated case. But in this era of pandemic, climate and economic threats, when even a jaunt to the market has potentially grave health and budgetary implications, the numbers of socially isolated persons are vast approaching epidemic proportions. Indeed, one explanation for the failure of political polling to make accurate forecasts in the US election just concluded is the large number of people who now simply refuse to answer the phone or whose grievance-laden and conspiratorial responses made pollsters wish they hadn’t bothered.

Most of us are not as angry and self-protective as this, of course, but many of us seem unable to see past the current circumstances to that time when it is no longer necessary or appropriate to see others primarily as viral conduits or threats to our increasingly privatized spaces, but rather as fellow beings who need our touch, our encouragement, our tangible expressions of interest. It is thus cause for concern, especially apparent during this season of anticipation, that our heart-habits are still tracking in dubious directions, that the visitation of Advent finds so many of us in hardened, isolated, impatient, even desolate places.

As circumstances better enable, it will be instructive to see if and how we are able to pivot to a world where solidarity makes more sense than competition; where vulnerability makes more sense than isolation; where sharing makes more sense than hoarding; where showing interest in others makes more sense than demanding attention; where gratitude makes more sense than grievance; where our aching feet carry on the path towards that revelatory state wherein the world remains illuminated and lasting peace remains within our grasp.

This Advent more than others, such instruction still indicates a risk of of slipping deeper into “lonely exile,” a place of disconnect from ourselves but also from those who can bring richness to our lives, including those who can inspire visions of a better world and help enable the multiple preparations we must now be about in order to to get there. Thankfully this Advent can also serve as a reminder of what months of isolation, social distancing and face coverings have tended to obscure, that the keys to our recovery from this pandemic are also keys to our recovery as a species.

The blank stares which define so much our battered present must not be allowed any longer to blur anticipation of a healthier, fairer, saner planet. Something is coming to help push us down a path towards a world that is no longer falling apart, that is no longer shedding species and hope, that is no longer enveloped in a fog of virus, mistrust and indifference. Advent is our time time to prepare for that visit, for that push, and for that world.

Tags: , , ,

Attitude Adjustment: A Thanksgiving Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

22 Nov
Manage Risk to Stay Safe for COVID Thanksgiving

Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.  Thich Nhat Hanh

Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer. Maya Angelou

Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.  Voltaire

It is a pity that doing one’s best does not always answer.  Charlotte Brontë

This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.  Michael Ondaatje

Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold.  Nadine Gordimer

The Major was silent. He was at once appalled and also reluctant to hear any more. This was why people usually talked about the weather. Helen Simonson

During this past week of political turmoil within and beyond the US, together with a pandemic that is spreading in some regions faster than butter on a hot biscuit, a singular image shook me to my core.

The image was of a boy in Cameroon, a country I have visited several times and which has been in the throes of civil conflict for too-many years now as the Anglophone region bordering Nigeria struggles to maintain autonomy from an increasingly tone-deaf and even brutal government in Yaounde.  

And while I’m skeptical of many posted images on twitter and other social media, this is one which could not have been photo-shopped, could not have its takeaways easily manipulated through the framing of the image.  Here, a Cameroonian boy, perhaps 10 years old, is lying in the street, having had his feet and lower legs shot off apparently by Cameroon security forces, or perhaps one of the vigilante groups “serving” alongside national military contingents.

The boy was bleeding profusely as he grabbed at pieces of his shattered limbs, tossing them aside in agony as he no doubt realized they were no longer of use to him.  If he survived the trauma and the bleeding, if there was anyone there to bind the wounds and ease the pain, he would never do again what had come most naturally to him a short while earlier – to walk and run, to explore and participate in the street life of a community that now seems so diminished, so impotent in the face of the overwhelming reality of a young life on the brink, a life that now at its best is as shattered as the shards of his own limbs scattered across a familiar path.

This boy can never “kiss the ground” with the feet he no longer has.

I have seen thousands of similar images in the course of this work, some in person and more through the media platforms on which we are now, sad to say, increasingly dependent.  Like that tune you can’t stomach but also can’t forget, I have not been able to put this gruesome image out of my mind. This is a problem for many of in this work who imagine ourselves stronger and more emotionally resilient than we actually are. These images remind us of why we must stay engaged. But they also accumulate like toxins in our cells, akin to a poison we don’t realize we have ingested.

As many around the UN recognize, as attuned to US calendar rhythms as UN folks tend to be, this is our Thanksgiving week, a time both historically dubious and emotionally potent, a time when people now must make hard decisions about who to visit, how to travel, whether or not to accommodate the pandemic and lay low for just this once, just this year, in the hope that loved ones — especially our elderly — can survive our physical absence until the viral coast is truly clear.

It is also a week to contemplate the dual invitations implicit in this season; the invitation first to appreciation for the many blessings which we have received, the blessings which should constitute the core substance of our prayers however (and if ever) we understand them. Added to that is the invitation to giving, one which in normal times many would happily accept. But this year, those calls are often drowned out by a cacophony of grievances, uncertainty and loneliness; thus the invitation to give more of ourselves, more of the treasure we are now tempted to forget we have, more of the sensitive and intimate underbelly that is now mostly encased in thick layers of ideology and self-protection, all of this seems up for COVID-inspired grabs like rarely in our recent history.  

This is a time when the whole world seems to be messaging what we usually leave to our advertisers – that our lives are somehow less than they should be because we lack those core ties to “normal” patterns of consumption and connection that had defined our lives in what is becoming for many, a romanticized, pre-pandemic past.   In the void left by the sudden departure of that normal, we are collectively spending more and more time indulging our evidence-challenged assumptions about each other, acting out our anxieties by “tearing into each other,” and this for reasons we can no longer clearly explain, if indeed we ever could.  

Even for those of us who imagine ourselves in the “peace business” there is a fair bit of explaining to do.  We have tried our level-best in many instances, but our best “does not always answer” the questions and concerns which the world anxiously poses. To some degree, we seem to have achieved little more than putting disasters “on hold, “ a modest sign of success to be sure, but one which seems at times akin to ensuring a ready supply of umbrellas as a tornado approaches. 

In the institution of the UN where we routinely make our case for effective policy and the human values needed to sustain it, there often seems to be a fair amount of measuring success by putting looming disasters on hold, in part as a legitimate effort to buy time to see if a more sustainable solution to disaster threats can be negotiated and implemented, in part as what seems to be a not-always-subtle maneuver to kick problems down the road in the hope that another generation can rise above the consequences of their elder’s follies.

That said, there were some good and hopeful signs emanating from the UN this week, including a supportive, “fingers-crossed” Security Council Arria session on the peace process in Afghanistan; an adopted General Assembly resolution on a death-penalty moratorium that continues to gain traction and another GA session on reforming the Security Council; an event on how the medium of radio can both inflame atrocity crimes and promote social reconstruction; and a joint meeting of the Economic and Social Council and the Peacebuilding Commission that promises more coordinated responses to the diverse, “root causes” of armed conflict. In addition, although the UN does not insist on specific forms of governance from its member states, there was much timely and welcome scrutiny and active promotion of democracy this week with International IDEA at the controls.

Friday was also World Children’s Day, a time to reflect on the many promises made to our children which still remain elusive. Despite often herculean efforts by child advocates, children are leaving behind educational opportunity and re-entering a dangerous workforce across parts of Africa and Latin American due to the spread of the pandemic. Some children in Syria and Libya spend more time dodging bombs and landmines than balls on the playground. Children in places like Yemen are being deliberately starved to such a degree that their full functionality as adults will be severely impaired even if they mange to survive the current onslaught. Children are being displaced, then trafficked, then abused in the major cities of the so-called “civilized world.”

And then there is that image of the Cameroon boy that I simply cannot put out of my waking mind. His unimaginable misery does not in any way make me ‘’feel better” about my own life; if anything it encourages a toxic temptation to avert my gaze, to “talk about the weather” or other matters both banal and distracting. But I and others can surely recognize that as anxious as many of us are, as frayed around the edges as we now admit to being, the need to stay the course on policy attentiveness and practical concern remains acute. Thus my own Thanksgiving prayer this year is to appreciate others in larger measure, to offer more of what is left in me to give, and to hold on tight to my portion of our collective focus.

Tags: , , ,

Mess Halls: Curbing the Spread of our Current Chaos, Dr. Robert Zuber

15 Nov
Your Messy Room is Keeping You Unhealthy - Dr. Peggy Malone

Messes are made by people who want but don’t know what they want, let alone how to get it.  Joyce Carol Oates

There are more dishes to come, more flavors to try, and this time I will not spill or spit or drop or splash. Jay Rayner

We don’t have to wait for someone to make messes of our lives. We do a good enough job, ourselves.  Jodi Picoult

I’m shaken and I’m stirred.  Anthony Hamilton

You don’t know how much it is tiring to stay here, since Chaos is all I know. Mess is all I see; And noise is all I hear. Samiha Totanji

Like a button on a shirt buttoned wrong, every attempt to correct things led to yet another fine –not to say elegant– mess.  Haruki Murakami

Clean up your room!  Many Mothers

I spent some of my childhood sharing a bedroom with three younger brothers, a situation that was challenging both in terms of privacy and especially in terms of maintaining some semblance of fairness and order.

My mother, who had more children to care for than she needed and likely wanted, was constantly demanding that those of us responsible for turning that small room into a preview of Armageddon (mostly me) invested some of our life force in cleaning up the mess that was, as are so many messes in this world, so much easier to make than to repair.

The only blessing in this scenario was that there was a door to close, a way to keep the chaos of that room from spreading like a virus into unsuspecting corners of that small house.  But even inside the room itself, there were good reasons to restore some baseline of order, a baseline more likely to foster respect for the rights and feelings of other inhabitants, a baseline that allowed us to keep our toys and other belongings as “shared property” only when we chose to share them; not giving in to the chaos which enabled bullies like me to grab whatever they wanted over the squeals of disapproval from the other children. 

Needless to say, my mother had a different standard of cleanliness and “order” than her children did, and she struggled to get us to buy in to her standard without having to impose it through her own labor.   And people do, indeed, have sometimes wildly divergent levels of comfort around issues of order and cleanliness, as many in long-term relationships discover.  That said, there are lessons around “mess” that we would do well to consider, specifically the lesson that messes are more easily made than undone, and that the easiest way to clean up after ourselves is to resist the temptation to make a mess in the first instance.

I know that it is frustrating for some readers to endure these weekly attempts to analogize lessons from family life to civic life, from modest bedrooms to large conference rooms filled with important people ostensibly doing important things.   But let’s go there anyway.    For the world we now inhabit is surely characterized by one “mess” after another, many of which we could have seen coming if we were not so intent on averting our gaze; many of which have also given those of us in places of privilege an excuse to disregard the rights and needs of others, to grab more than our share of the metaphorical toys and stuffed animals, to get around to cleaning up after ourselves when it is convenient for us to do so and not when it is most urgent.

Unlike the chaos of my childhood resting space, for us in this larger world there is no door to close, no way to confine the consequences of the mess to the authors of the mess.  The chaos that we willingly tolerate for ourselves is also most often chaos exported, becoming yet another imposition on people who, in some instances at least, have their own issues with disorder and turmoil to resolve; people and communities whose messes are already challenging enough without additional external consequences from the discord which they neither caused nor can reasonably assimilate.

Those of you who read this weekly post and/or other (likely better) alternatives don’t need me to remind you about our currently over-heated mess threshold.   From a hyperactive pandemic to a conflict in Yemen that promises environmental ruin in the long term and starving children in the short term; from climate risks that have likely passed their tipping point to the growing numbers of displaced persons exchanging hopelessness at home for road-weary misery; from ocean creatures ingesting more plastic than prey to landscapes more prone to wildfires than wild flowers; the chaos that we have sown has deep roots and broad consequences, most of which inspire responses that are not as carefully crafted and boldly implemented as they should be, responses that seem to enable messes of longer-duration as often as they offer tangible improvement.

Even our democracies now seem in peril as more and more people worldwide seem to have abandoned the responsibility to push through the “messiness” of democratic consultation and consensus-building in favor of iron-like authoritarian voices telling them what they should want, what they should value and how they should go about getting what they have convinced themselves they are entitled to have.   Sadly, these are often the voices that justify their own mess-making at the expense of others, an entitlement to sow substantial short-term chaos secure in the belief that its consequences can be successfully exported as needed — that we can keep our own rooms reasonably in order in part by shipping messes off to the dwellings and communities of of others, largely against their will.

The UN which we engage relentlessly is a place at its best where nations and peoples can come together to assess and resolve common threats, to own the messes we have made and reverse the consequences we have largely ignored; and then together authorize and enact multilateral strategies to better ensure that there is less clutter and chaos on our planet, dampening down verbal excuses and political impediments preventing us from doing more to resolve the messes that perpetually beckon.

But at its worst, the UN is a place of inertia and obstruction, halls of policy where mostly privileged national lenses fuss over resolution and/or treaty language that guarantees (at best) tepid responses to our major messes, responses that are often not nearly as timely and robust as they need to be from an institution and its Assembly that are not yet as prescient, reliable and determined as we need them to be.

I am not naïve regarding the considerable value of a UN institution in which I (and my colleagues) have spent many long years. But the lessons that seemed clear to me when I first entered still apply. The longer we fail to acknowledge and respond to the messes that impact so much of our planet, the harder they are to resolve. And the less we are willing to control the consequential spread of our own chaos and disorder, the more mistrust and enmity we are likely to provoke in others.

My sense is that no amount of institutional self-referencing, no amount of speeches lofty or obstructionist in the General Assembly Hall or other multilateral settings should ever blind us to the degree to which the chaos, the mess, the “noise” of our world (including the cries of those whose lives are characterized by flying bombs, grave food insecurity and polluted waterways) have raised expectations for our policy. The world is crying out for new “dishes and flavors” to try, innovative solutions to threats and messes that have festered for much too long, fresh commitments from the most privileged that they will clean up their own spaces without off-loading the worst of their clutter on to spaces where it simply doesn’t belong.

Do we as a policy community have what it takes to make such a commitment? Are we willing to swallow some of the mistrust and downright orneriness that lead to sometimes bitter deliberations, such as was the case this week regarding a proposed e-voting procedure to allow the core work of the General Assembly to continue during a pandemic or other crisis? Are we willing to follow the trail of our own messes to ensure that our “solutions” don’t inadvertently create more discord, thereby impeding even more than is already the case the rights, development and stability of those we purport to help?

In my view (and hardly mine alone) a fair bit of what we in places of privilege and influence have wrought upon the world should shake us to our very core. But it should also stir a fresh passion in us, a passion to reverse our messy trajectories while we still can, to create more fairness and accountability within our institutional halls, to shut the door on the spread of our chaos of excess and indifference better than we are doing so far, chaos now firmly embedded in pandemics and armed conflicts, in climate shocks and social inequalities.

My mother knew little of such things. But she recognized a mess when she saw one, and she would likely recognize that we, too, have many messes still to acknowledge and confine within the spaces where we work and live.

Tags: , , ,

Race Track: Driving Discrimination from our Ranks, Dr. Robert Zuber

8 Nov
Social diversity is initially threatening but people do adapt over time – new research

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men. Alice Walker

We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust.  Thurgood Marshall

My color is my joy and not my burden. Bebe Moore Campbell

Wherein is the cause for anger, envy or discrimination?  Mahatma Gandhi

But she knows where her ticket takes her. She will find her place in the sun. Tracy Chapman

The Black woman in the South who raises sons, grandsons and nephews had her heartstrings tied to a hanging noose.   Maya Angelou

Excessive praise arises from the same bigotry matrix as excessive criticism. Stefan Molyneux

It is a glorious November Sunday in New York, a day more like late September than the Sunday after a US presidential election.  I had vowed not to say much about the election results, though there is plenty to reflect on, plenty that elicits fair portions of both celebration and caution; with especially deep gratitude to the remarkable poll workers and vote tabulators who ignored and even at times defied a bevy of threats, including from the leadership of the US Postal Service, armed protestors and a spreading pandemic, to deliver what appears by all independent accounts to be free and fair voting for some 150 million US citizens.  

Despite this gift, we know that threats to this democracy, as to others worldwide, have not been laid to rest.  We know that there are tricks left to be played by those still in power (and those heaping “excessive praise” on them), people who understand full well the metaphorical knives that have been drawn by prosecutors and regulators once they leave the sanctuary of the White House.  Those of us who have been holding our breath (at times even our tongue) that this period of political – even criminal – hardball will soon pass recognize that democratic oxygen is still in short supply and that the grievances – legitimate and otherwise – that have driven us to an authoritarian brink are likely only to intensify over the next 10 weeks.

Assuming that a genuine political transition occurs in my country, and that is no foregone conclusion, we anticipate that (what we interpret as) benefits from a new US administration will accrue in the form of climate action and other multilateral efforts to curb the pandemic, reduce social and economic inequalities, disarm weapons and promote sustainable development.  The UN, which has largely refrained from criticism of the US (as it does routinely with all major state powers and funders), can expect a bit of a post-inaugural holiday as dues are paid in full and abandoned political commitments that can readily be reinstated will be.

This US election season also cast light on a UN agenda that is often-discussed but less-often implemented, and that is the concern for inclusion, the basic belief that all should have a say on matters which affect them; the belief that our increasingly inter-dependent world requires diverse voices on a wide range of matters both complex and mundane, including on matters of governance.  In  the US, our own myth of inclusivity has taken a pounding in recent years by those in positions of authority espousing equivalences between “whiteness” and “greatness.” This has resulted in some hard-to-remove stains on our national character including children separated from families and parents afraid to send their children to the grocery store for fear of confrontation with store managers or police; but also ordinary citizens having to fight through what appears to be willful disenfranchisement as polling places were closed, ballots arbitrarily rejected,  and voting lines in some “minority” neighborhoods permitted to stretch for miles.   

While grievances in my country now spring forth like weeds in an abandoned garden, there are some that have deeper roots, louder echoes of oppression, producing more pervasive anxieties.  There is much listening we need to do far beyond our comfort zones, ideological bubbles, evidence-less presumptions and political preferences.  And a special listening post must be dedicated to those whose “ticket” has yet to guarantee them a seat on most every ride, the mothers and grandmothers whose heartstrings are “tied to a hanging noose,” those who live under threat every day that their next venture outdoors will trigger some hate-filled response or even a one-way trip across the nearest border.  

The UN in its own way has tried to keep alive the flickering flame of inclusiveness, insisting with varying levels of success that we find the courage and the means to ensure that those habitually left behind are invited to the head table; that their “ticket” to viability and safety is deemed as valid as any other’s; that their full franchise is both encouraged and protected; that the fruits of development (or a COVID vaccine) are distributed without politics or prejudice; and that the justifications we employ regarding the “causes” of our discriminatory ways are recognized to be largely without merit.

This past week there were several key events (mostly virtual) at the UN that underscored the ever-deepening relationship between inclusiveness and the promotion of peaceful societies. In the Security Council, in the General Assembly, and during events celebrating the increasingly gendered commitments of UN policing and highlighting efforts to abolish capital punishment, the mantra of inclusiveness and an end to discriminatory practices — as well as the incitement which stokes racism, xenophobia and other human behavior we could better live without — were duly reinforced.

Among the primary takeaways from this long and exhausting week included Malaysia’s lament in the General Assembly’s 3rd Committee that the COVID pandemic “has brought out the worst in us,” specifically with regard to racial and religious discrimination. And in a Security Council discussion on “drivers of conflict, Sir Hilary Beckles underscored the tangible steps needed to reinforce this current “age of apology,” while the Prime Minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines reminded delegations that we cannot hope to overcome chasms of distrust and apathy unless we can speed up our current “baby steps”

There was even more of value to digest including UN Special Rapporteur Day’s plea to address and eliminate the “habituation” in many societies that allows people to tolerate discrimination, Mexico’s call for higher levels of government consultation and trust-building with the most vulnerable and marginalized within national borders, and the Netherlands urging of UN member states to be better “truth-tellers” on racial justice.

While one could surely chide the UN for its own “baby steps” regarding its long-delayed success in gender-balancing peace operations and other core security-sector functions, the UN also enables valuable guidance on how hold together a global community which has too often threatened to disengage from one another. Keys to the reconciliation we need include broader-based consultations, higher levels of truth telling and truth-hearing, firmer commitments to address the scourge of incitement in public and online settings, and better protection of spaces where “public goods” (such as a potential COVID vaccine) take precedence over private interests.

But will we listen? The US president-elect’s oft-repeated claim to represent all US citizens — “those who voted for me and those who didn’t” — is a welcome if somewhat conventional claim, albeit with challenges destined to frustrate all but the most sincere and robust of -commitments. We have, regrettably, conspired over many years to create a culture that is long on acrimony and short on listening; long on grievances and conspiracies and short on evidence and compassion; long on self-delusion and short on self-reflection. We are less mindful than it is in our best interest to be, both about the demonizing we do routinely within our own borders, and the violence we inflict — directly or by proxy — beyond them. We simply cannot survive much more of this no matter who occupies the White House.

I want to end on a more hopeful note by referencing last night’s speech by vice-president-elect Kamala Harris. She delivered a strong and humane point of contact with women and men across my country (and likely beyond) for whom “color” has been a burden; a burden for those who have suffered much, often over many generations, but also a burden for those who can see no way out of their own predicaments other than through more threats, more intolerance, more dubious claims of “superiority.”

For Ms. Harris, her own burden seemed, for a glorious moment at least, to have become something more akin to a joy. As she proclaimed with great enthusiasm, “I am the first, but I will not be the last.” She has found her well-deserved place in the sun, but she also recognizes that if that same sun is somehow prevented from shining on all, the ones we like and the ones we don’t, the ones we trust and the ones we don’t, then the democratic values and processes we presume to cherish will eventually and finally slip through our grasp.

Clearly we need more “firsts” in our country and our world, “firsts” emanating from every corner of human community, especially where people are feeling neglected or abandoned, disrespected or humiliated. And as Ms. Harris rightly suggested, we need more “seconds” and “thirds” as well.

Tags: , , , ,

Thought-Provoked: The Mindset We Need Now, Dr. Robert Zuber

1 Nov
Image preview

Learn why the world wags and what wags it. T.H. White

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.  Plutarch

Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.  Samuel Johnson

I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity. Eleanor Roosevelt

Her grandmother had once told her that one of life’s best lessons was not being afraid to look foolish. Melissa Senate

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead.  Susan Sontag

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.  Carl Sagan

Although it may seem premature to some, one of the tasks as the gut-wrenching US elections approach is to think about their aftermath and what we as a people need to do – need to become – in order for elections to do anything more than widen social divisions and confirm biases that it would be better to challenge.

 As is the case in most instances, and as I mentioned last week, elections in and of themselves rarely resolve national problems. Tuesday in the US may result in a bevy of new faces at the head of the table, but there is no guarantee that those faces will be able to “sell” disenfranchised or ignored segments of the population that government truly has their back.  And our elections, in and of themselves, certainly don’t guarantee that the US as an entity can restore its role as partner to those seeking a higher level of accountability from their own governments; or that we can once again pledge to become a reliable bearer of our own creeds and commitments.

The US is by no stretch the source of all problems in the world, but we must acknowledge our bad habits of thought and action, some of which have punctuated our 200 + year history while others have recently been added to the national menu.  There is no reason to dwell here on our cruel legacies of race or the delusions associated with our alleged “exceptionalism,” except to say that we must continue to interrogate and even “wrestle” with these demons if we are ever to bring them to heel. 

But beyond these, there is still something that seems deeply wrong with us – all of us, not just the ones who see fellow-citizens as enemies; not just the ones who pull cookies from a jar that isn’t theirs; not just the ones who vacuum up public wealth and horde it within privately-controlled accounts; not just the ones who are more concerned about the operation of their guns than the health and well-being of their neighbors.  Collectively speaking, we don’t listen well to others, we wilfully contain our concerns within our families and other “safe havens,” we are much too comfortable with what we imagine we “know” and much too sensitive and protective regarding any threats we perceive to what are so-often lazy, distracted and self-referential opinions.

In sum, we have become willfully incurious about others, about our planet, about the wonders, many still largely unexamined, that exist below our surfaces and beyond our orbits.  We are too keen to project our biases hither and yon, but not to ask the questions that allow others to share, and also to grow, and to invite such questions in return.  We “know” so much, apparently, about all sorts of things, including what our political adversaries are thinking and feeling, what they fear and hope for, what impediments, real and imagined, block the path of their fulfillment. 

Except we don’t.

In our post-election period, regardless of outcomes, we must find ways to recover our collective curiosity about our world and each other, a thirst for what there is to be known beyond what we claim to know, the larger realities and wonders that exist beyond the opinions and biases we barely comprehend and rarely interrogate, but relentlessly project and defend.

In this time of opinions both aggressive and shallow, a time when science is little understood but widely attacked, the ongoing efforts of scientists to examine, recommend and re-examine on urgent matters such as climate change, pandemics and environmental degradation are held up to ridicule and accused of being unreliable and even corrupted, often by people determined to project their own corruption on to others.

In this regard, there were some interesting rays of hope at the UN this week, including a small “Open Science” event on Thursday that shed some good light on our limited understanding of how science works, the curiosity that lies at its roots, and the “public” benefits that can accrue from its investigations.  At this event, the directors of UNESCO, the World Health Organization and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights joined forces to remind diplomats – and the rest of us – why science at its best matters so much to the lives we lead and the world we need. 

All speakers urged a less “secretive,” more open, transparent and community-engaged scientific community, one prepared to insist on a more democratic distribution of scientific benefits, including on a possible COVID vaccine.  Such “honest engagements” as High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet urged, must involve discussions of how science aspires to its best insights; the consulting and accommodating of evidence at all stages of investigation, doubling back on conclusions and findings, continuing to modify and enrich what might otherwise devolve into an artificially-inflexible consensus.  It must also be about communicating its “best sense of things” beyond the laboratories and research centers, helping us to see as clearly as possible what needs to be fixed, including in ourselves, and how such might effectively be accomplished.  It must be about asking the next question rather than settling for the last answer. And it must be about, as UNESCO DG Audrey Azoulay noted, learning to share research and its benefits better across borders as well to to cultivate the “collective intelligence” that we will need to tap into more regularly –beyond the confines of our laboratories and government offices, beyond the bearers of advanced degrees and owners of large bank holdings — if the problems that will continue to confront us post-election have any good chance of being solved.

Indeed, it is that precisely that “intelligence” from multiple sources and corners of our societies — intelligence that is generous, attentive, evidence-based, inclusive and courageous — which we must learn to tap in larger measure if we are to patch up this leaking ship.  As we plot our course forward with the leadership that we in the US will give ourselves on Tuesday, we will need heavy doses of all of these attributes, and then some, if the social ruptures, stereotyping and current levels of distrust are to be effectively combated; indeed if we are to emerge as a nation in more than name only. To this end, we would do well to cease our collective suppression of the “fire” of curiosity, curb our obsessive need for certainty, and invest more of ourselves in what “wags” this world still filled with incredible things to be known and which we are slowly, foolishly, dangerously bringing to its metaphorical knees.

As grateful as I was for the “Open Science” discussion, some of the most inspirational moments at the UN this week actually came from other, if complementary spaces.  At a UN-Habitat “World Cities Day” event, for instance, a youth climate activist called for higher levels of “responsible action” on climate change and reminded delegates that hers’ may well be the “last generation that can bring us back from the abyss.”  And in the Security Council, the ever-thoughtful Ambassador Singer from the Dominican Republic noted that, even after a decade of horrific, unprecedented conflict in Syria, the refugees and doctors, the prisoners and economically distressed have not given up; and “neither must we.”

And neither will we.

For the sake of the young activists now begging the rest of us to to “consult the science” on climate change, the civilians in war-ravaged regions desperate for provisions and the silencing of guns, the front-line health workers seeking guidance on how best to restore the health of COVID patients and reinforce often-ignored health guidelines, we must persevere. Tuesday’s elections may give those of us in the US (and perhaps others as well) the chance to reboot our cognitive skills and priorities and reset our ethics and relationships. If so, it’s a chance we simply must seize.