When you can tell your story, and it doesn’t make you cry, you know you have healed. Helen Keller
Your doubt may become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing. It must become critical. Rainer Maria Rilke
In an interactive, decentralized world, the voiceless do not need someone to be their voice. They need a megaphone. Heather Marsh
We are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land. Wendell Berry
There should be only one political ideology and that is good governance. Amit Abraham
I think that little by little I’ll be able to solve my problems and survive. Frida Kahlo
Not everyone is able to show courage, but human decency must be demanded of every person. Andrzej Duda
We have turned the calendar on a year that for many around the world was filled with uncertainty and sorrow, people not knowing where their next income was coming from – and in too many instances their next meal – and having to bid farewell to loved ones through glass barricades or over Facetime, if they were even fortunate enough to have windows or internet access. Moreover, our politics also remained a source of sorrow as elections were contested, weapons were drawn, repression was authorized and groups which barely managed a truce amongst themselves found even those thin bonds severed.
Celebrations at the end of this discouraging year were themselves muted this time around, keeping many more of us at home and just perhaps evoking a bit of thoughtfulness about how this new year might possibly look different from the last one. The early returns are not entirely promising. While many wish for the flipping of the calendar to represent the flipping of our collective karma, we know that most of what ailed us in 2020 is being dragged across the starting line for 2021. Pandemic infections and new variants continue to spread more quickly than people can be vaccinated. In the US, conspiratorial narratives regarding our presidential election outcome are being manipulated by ambitious politicians and could well lead to armed violence in the weeks to come. And what surely stands as our greatest common threat – a warming planet – continues to melt icecaps, pressure biodiversity and accelerate human displacement.
These desecrations of our planet, our politics, even at times our very humanity are enough to make anyone cry. Over this last year, they’ve been known to prompt that reaction in me as well.
Clearly we have much to heal this year, in the world and in ourselves. Thankfully some of the raw material needed to facilitate that healing is already in place – the courage of front-line health and humanitarian workers, the skill of scientists and doctors, the determination of people to stay engaged with each other despite the obvious impediments, the insistence of citizens in many countries that “decency” still has an important place in our politics and our communities, the many projects at local level which are seeking to reset our relationship with the land and its life forms, people of all backgrounds dedicated to halting the senseless desecration of the eco-systems which now struggle to uphold our own lives and must become healthy enough again to uphold the lives of our progeny.
But beyond initiatives from households and communities, we need more resolve from our institutions of governance as well, greater reassurances that those exercising political power are more invested in the public good than their own riches, that those holding office are capable and willing to look beyond short-term gain and the petty grievances of the moment to the momentous challenges that we adults might well survive but that those who follow us may not. We need institutions that can be reliable sentinels of threats and opportunities, institutions with sufficient public trust and the ability to command attention when it is time – as it surely is now – to take many steps, small and large; steps that can accumulate into a more robust and urgent planet-saving movement, a movement of many hands and multiple “megaphones,” a movement that is kind and thoughtful, connected and respectful, a movement wherein our pious words are connected to gritty and dependable actions, and where our circles of concern are resolutely allowed to expand and become more concrete in their expression.
We are not those people yet. Neither yet are our institutions. And the clock on this erstwhile-hopeful year of movement and healing has already started to tick.
The United Nations, our primary focus of institutional concern, has been relatively quiet this past week though metaphorically holding its collective breath that political violence erupting in places like Yemen and now threatened for Washington, DC doesn’t create new pathways for crisis. Secretary-General Guterres did release his New Year’s message in which he said two potentially important things: He committed the UN “to build a global coalition for carbon neutrality – net zero emissions – by 2050” and also to “make 2021 a year of healing.” These are both easier said than done, of course, and both UN skeptics and even “trained doubters” (the latter of which we hope applies to us) have questions, not so much about the priorities themselves but how we actually move forward with healing the many wounds of our not-so-distant past.
For starters, do we actually have 30 years remaining to invest in the pursuit of carbon neutrality before all of our climate “tipping points” have been reached and the damage we are responsible for is no longer reversible? Is this deadline sufficiently ambitious or are we in danger of “kicking the can down the road” rather than remediating the many eco-desecrations which are part and parcel of our contemporary legacy?
And how is that trust among nations and stakeholders needed to scrutinize our patterns of consumption and ensure equitable access to public services and resources to be cultivated and expanded? How can we more effectively persuade nations and peoples that all need to take up the mantle of community and climate healing while ensuring that those of us who have contributed the most to global problems, including the climate crisis, do the most to reverse their current course?
And who gets to weigh in on those healing strategies? Who gets the “megaphone” to keep us alert to threats and guide prospects for effective response? Is it UN officials? Ministers of State? Experts on climate or other global risks? Managers of prevention and mitigation programs? Do we need to hear more from poets, designers and pastors in tandem with financiers and multilateral bureaucrats? If we are to solve the problems of the past that pressure our present, we need the right messages but also the right messengers. We must focus better not only on what needs to be said, but on those best suited in a variety of social and cultural contexts to make the case for climate health and all other aspects of healing to which we must now attend.
Whether in reference to the climate crisis or pandemic-impacted deprivation, healing requires attributes that we know are sometimes in short supply in our communities and institutions of governance. Healing in this time requires higher levels of honesty about both the wrongs done to us and those we have done to others. It requires a careful examination of social and economic inequities, and of the power dynamics that highlight some voices to excess and keep others shouting from ever-distant margins. And it requires trustworthy and accountable authorities with regard to the needs and aspirations they are expected to promote and protect.
As we begin a new year, we have a way to travel towards healing that is both believable and sustainable. Our circles of concern are still too small. Too many “experts” presume that what they know is in and of itself sufficient to what we now require, a dubious judgment often rendered without adequate consultation. Too many personal and institutional habits have been allowed to ossify, becoming more akin to addictions than conscious choices. And as we witnessed on Friday in the UN General Assembly, too many governments continue to reject mechanisms of accountability for abuses committed against their own people, including abuses related to willfully delinquent climate change and/or pandemic prevention and mitigation measures.
And yet, as this new year struggles off the starting blocks, there is plenty for us to work with, plenty of decency and courage alike, plenty of people with the time and inclination to reset their personal and family priorities, plenty of diplomats who understand that the governance game we’ve been playing, including on peace and security, is simply not relevant enough, indeed is no longer sufficient to shift our policy course, let alone to help heal the wounds of this age. We know that we need better and we know we can do better.
What a wonderful thing it would be if 12 months from now –given all the desecration, uncertainty and anger that we seem determined to drag along with us into 2021 –we could share genuine narratives of personal and institutional growth punctuated by both fewer regrets and fewer tears. With such stories in hand, we would know that we are truly making progress on healing ourselves and the world we inhabit.
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