Archive | February, 2021

Mess Hall: Fixing the World We Share with Birds, Dr. Robert Zuber

28 Feb
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The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.  John Steinbeck

If you consider yourself a credible person, when a lie reaches you, that’s where the fallacy should end. Carlos Wallace

He munches a sandwich so messily that you can’t help wondering if he’s actually misunderstood the whole concept of eating.  Fredrik Backman

He never dreamed. Dreams were too messy. Peggy Webb

One of the few relics of our civilization guaranteed to be recognizable twenty thousand years from now is the potato chip bag.  Edward Humes

Are not half our lives spent in reproaches for foregone actions, of the true nature and consequences of which we were wholly ignorant at the time?  Herman Melville

Being alive is a monumental undertaking.  Richard Smyth

I’m sitting in my apartment on a gloomy Sunday late-February morning waiting (likely in vain) for the heat to come on, waiting also (hopefully not in vain) for someone to come repair my broken internet.

This temperature and connection-challenged weekend has given me the chance to finish a slender but soul-opening book, “An Indifference of Birds,” by Richard Smyth.  The book is branded as “human history from a bird’s eye view,” but it is really about how our self-referential and predatory species creates space – often inadvertently and outside our purview of consequence – for birds to nest and feed, to exploit the openings we create while keeping their distance as best they can from our guns, our cars, our pets, our poisons.  They watch us from a distance, indifferent to our presumptions of species superiority, immune to the near-religious fervor which justifies our “slash and burn” mentality, our predisposition to subdue nature rather than partner with it. 

The birds have inspired our wonder but also felt our wrath.  While we consult our birding check-lists and set up our outdoor feeders, elsewhere birds are being shot out of the air just for the fun of it.  Those birds fortunate enough not to be living in factory farms have nevertheless had their habits drained, their flight patterns diverted, their biological rhythms upset as the insects they depend on during long and arduous migrations now operate on climate-altered timetables.  In order to survive, in order to avoid the extinction we humans at times seem hell-bent to impose on the natural order up and down the food chain, the birds have been forced to “learn” things about us that we have largely forgotten about ourselves.

Two of these learnings seem pertinent to our policy community, a community which seems stuck in its nomenclature and methods of work, one which could use infusions of fresh perspectives, fresh dreams, fresh lenses on problems that we have domesticated, but not resolved, and that our preferred policy formulas seem more appropriate to “sanitizing” than confessing and fixing the deeply human roots of our gravest current challenges.

One of the insights from our indifferent aviary partners is that we are primarily a species “that’s always figuring out how to be bigger, to extend our arm-span, to lengthen our reach.”  The same species that places space craft on other planets “because we can” is also the species that kills and conquers for no apparent reason, a species which insists on colonizing most everything, going where we don’t actually need to go, disturbing what could be left undisturbed, satisfying our need to explore but in a way that often leaves behind a deep human footprint, a souvenir of sorts that ostensibly proves our mettle, our willingness to climb the highest peaks but in a manner that leaves behind gobs of trash, of human waste, even of human corpses to tarnish the experience of the next explorer.  We don’t clean up our messes so much as march forward into what remains of our wilderness, in part to note its beauty but also to leave our next mark, to replicate in a new setting the messes for which our reputation well proceeds us in the bird world.   

From a bird’s eye perspective, there is one iteration of human mess which has actually proven to be somewhat bird-friendly, at least in the short term. As Smyth puts it, “Waste is fundamental to what we are: Messy Eaters.”  And so we are.  While our indigenous brethren try and try again to wean us off our “developed” world wastefulness, we insist on staying our desecrating and self-deceiving course. Despite the cries of those many millions facing food insecurity and even famine in our pandemic-stricken world, we remain addicted to wasteful patterns.  Our agriculture is needlessly inefficient.  We routinely leave crops in the field that could save lives elsewhere.  We continue to pursue monoculture farming that requires more and more toxic fertilizer and, even then, is more accommodating of locusts than bees.  Our factory farms are hotbeds of human indifference to both animals and workers which results in antibiotics-filled livestock waiting to be made into Happy Meals and virus-threatened (often immigrant) employees who don’t make nearly enough in salary to take care of themselves, let alone their families and communities.  

On the “consumer” side of things, the story is equally grim including staggering proportions of edible food shoved down kitchen disposals or sent away to rot in landfills.  While persons displaced or stuck in conflict zones scavenge for a meal, we in our centers of affluence almost seem to relish in our wanton wastefulness, not only carelessly disposing of uneaten food itself, but insisting on packaging that prolongs the wasteful life-span, the potato chip bag that will far outlive our food scraps and crops rotting in our fields; indeed at the rate we are going that may survive human civilization itself.

The birds see all this; they sense the opportunities that our wastefulness creates.  They feast on the scraps of our own messy indifference while preserving (in most instances) the distance that keeps them safe from the worse of our dispositions, including to control and subjugate.  As we continue to turn green fields into brownfields, the birds find nesting niches in the abandoned buildings and insects in the toxic landscapes.  They have learned to create temporary havens amidst the environmental carnage that, unless urgently corrected, threatens to leave us all with barely a habitable planet.

The policy community of which we are a part recognizes some of what the birds see and much of what they don’t.  We understand the ravages of armed conflict even if we often seem ineffective in preventing or resolving it.  We know that a future is rushing towards us that is likely to be warmer, species-deprived and less green, a future that will test our commitment to cooperation, justice and care even more than our uncertain present.  And we have some idea about the “hail Mary” technologies that we might be able to develop and that will, if we are clever enough, save us from ourselves, if only for a season.

I also suspect that many recognize, even if we can’t say so openly, that our current system of global governance with all of its state-centered prerogatives, is insufficient in and of itself to fix what needs fixing in our world and within ourselves, the parts of us that insist on going where we don’t need to go, that attempt to subdue what would better be left alone, that resist both creating fewer messes and embracing more opportunities for sharing and solidarity.  When we at UN, which we did in a General Assembly event this week, discuss how to better brand our often-hopeful work with global constituencies, we tend to forget that such branding also exposes the parts we have fumbled, the parts buried under protocol and bureaucracy, the parts that the birds seem to see more clearly than we do, the parts of us stubbornly determined to remain on dangerous paths that our lofty resolution language is unable, in and of itself, to amend.

Even during what was likely the signature event of the UN’s week – a minister-level, Security Council discussion on the climate-conflict nexus, speakers struggled to look beyond what the UN and its member states can see routinely, to get past “our way of doing things” to the deeper issue of how we as humans can learn the traits and tactics that might ultimately ensure the survival of all of us, including the birds. In fairness, we did note with appreciation the insistence by Secretary-General Guterres of a right to a clean and healthy environment as well as the call by the Prime Minster of Antigua and Barbuda for prompt and determined action to address “the barrage of unrelenting threats which undermine development and even governance.” We were also pleased by the appropriately humble and urgent stance taken by US Climate Envoy John Kerry who pleaded with delegations to heed the science which is now “screaming at us,” in order to avoid what he called a “mutual suicide pact,” one which, as he knows, the US has contributed to writing more than most. 

But the highlight of the event for me was clearly the statement made by Sir David Attenborough who has done as much as anyone to prick our collective consciousness on matters of species extinction and the climate crisis.  As he somberly intoned, we have only “a few short years” to fix our broken economics and recover our better selves, our higher human values and best human practices, while reminding us all that “money is not the measure of things.”  Sharing is.   Balance is.

As he knows, we have largely talked a better game than we have played, still too content to wait for some miracle transformation of our natures or that “hail Mary” technology that will give us another chance we barely deserve, another chance to reset our habits, to acknowledge the responsibility attached to the “monumental undertaking” which constitutes our lives, and to finally, once and for all, “make peace” with the natural world. 

During this same Security Council meeting, the Minister from India kindly offered a prayer, the first of its kind in that chamber in my years of monitoring, for an environment “which belongs to all living beings.”  Of these, there is none which creates the messes that we humans create; there is none which generates the vastness of waste that soils our own bed and complicates survival for so many other life forms.   The birds know what we’re about.  It’s high time to be about something better.

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Perseverance: Reaching the Bars We Set for Ourselves, Dr. Robert Zuber

21 Feb
Members of NASA's Perseverance rover team react in mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, after receiving confirmation the spacecraft successfully touched down on Mars on Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021.
 (Bill Ingalls/NASA)

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.  Maya Angelou

Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Samuel Beckett

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.  Thomas A. Edison

A bend in the road is not the end of the road.   Helen Keller

Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.  James A. Michener

I like the scientific spirit—the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them.  Walt Whitman

The seeker after truth should be humbler than the dust. Mahatma Gandhi

This was one of those weeks which stretched our recognition of human capacity and human ineptitude both in the wider world and within our bubbles of global policy.

In the US alone, emotions were yet again stirred as the Perseverance Rover managed a damage-free landing on the surface of Mars and Special Envoy John Kerry announced (with what might be considered excessive fanfare) a “humble” but determined return by the US to the Paris Climate agreement.  The Rover’s mission, no doubt watched with interest by other orbiting probes from China and the United Arab Emirates, demonstrated the technology and tenacity over a decade + that we would do well to see more of in these precarious times, a combination that will eventually result in a joint US-European Union effort to bring samples of the Martian surface back to earth by 2031.  And while perhaps not as dramatic or romantic as previous successes placing humans on the lunar surface, some viewing the remarkable images now emanating from Mars gleaned similar lessons to place our earthbound follies in context. Indeed, as one commentator on a relevant Washington Post report stated, “It makes all these earthly fights and wars over politics, power and property seem pretty primitive and clueless.”

Beyond the justifiable cheers from the Perseverance control room, there was plenty else happening this week for which “primitive and clueless” might also be appropriate.  Despite the fact that the US is one of the ten countries worldwide at this moment with access to 75% of the world’s COVID-19 vaccine supplies, production and supply chain issues continue to impede vaccine delivery with direct implications for the health and safety of the elderly, store clerks and a bevy of other front-line workers – often people of color and those of limited financial means.  Such supply issues and parallel wasting of precious vaccine stocks has been exacerbated by a massive winter storm which both affected vaccine delivery and left millions (especially in Texas) without heat or potable water for days. The storm provided a different sort of optic – not of sophisticated technology on the Martian surface but of long lines of people standing in the cold hoping to return home with a bit of food or water to keep their families afloat until their own damaged infrastructure can be successfully repaired.

This is where we are now, or so it seems:  Mind-boggling technology that with the right levels of tenacity and perseverance can accomplish miracles, from soft landings on other planets to effective vaccines developed in record time.  But alongside this are horrific images of children in Yemen dying of famine; children in Texas dying of hypothermia, children being denied educational opportunity due to a combination of pandemic and armed violence, children whose vaccinations for the diseases which predate COVID-19 are being interrupted by security deficits and the often-related damage to health infrastructure.

It is, indeed, a measure of our sometimes “primitive and clueless” selves that we are unable or unwilling to deploy that combination of ingenuity and tenacity which clearly lies at our disposal to address some of the other, looming global threats, to do more than talk about the urgency of things, the unfairness of things but rather to sustain levels of commitment and skill commensurate with current challenges here on the only planet we have.  We are still, as noted this week by the World Health Organization’s Dr. Mike Ryan, “writing checks that we will be unable to cash,” unable because we continue to talk a better game than we play.  Our power (and often petty) politics at national and global levels are too-often “in the way” of goals that would otherwise be well within our grasp – including to rebuild our frayed infrastructure, eliminate digital divides, and ensure greater equity in the distribution of health-related and other resources.

As our partners on sustainable development are fond of reminding us, we know what needs to be done and largely have the tools with which to do so.  What is lacking is the will to persevere, the will to employ the best of our minds and character, the will to push through failure until we can grasp the success that might actually be closer than we allow ourselves to believe.

If only we had fewer deficits to overcome.  At the UN this week, we witnessed a dazzling, bewildering array of events and report launches, including on peacekeeping reform, on “making peace with nature” (report here), on “digital inclusion for all,” on efforts to stabilize states such as Iraq and Libya, and on the annual Munich Security Conference which brought together UN officials and others (including heads of state of the US, Germany and France) to discuss how to revitalize our fraying trans-Atlantic alliances as well as how we can better collaborate on climate threats, what SG Guterres rightly characterized as “the race of our lifetime.”

And for us these weren’t even the most important discussions of the week.  That designation went to a Security Council meeting this past Wednesday on COVID-19 and conflict and a Thursday discussion hosted by the president of the Economic and Social Council on “Reimagining Equality.”  These two discussions had more points of convergence than might otherwise meet the eye.  For as important as it would be to successful vaccination efforts to adopt and sustain a global cease fire, our current patterns of what Niger described as “vaccine hegemony,” patterns which persist amidst the rhetoric of “global public goods,” have clear discriminatory overtones.  Indeed, we heard during this Council session that as many as 130 countries have yet to see a single vaccine shipment; we heard the warnings from Mexico that some countries might not even see vaccines before 2023; we heard frustration about vaccine hoarding and a reminder from UNICEF Director Fore that violence in many forms continues to destroy health infrastructure, continues to complicate efforts to vaccinate in the global south even where the resolve to do so exists.

We know that “vaccine nationalism” persists.  We know that we have often “dropped the ball” regarding funding for health infrastructure, even by some of the wealthiest countries on the planet.  We know that we remain woefully unprepared for the next iteration of pandemic. And we know that our current failures on vaccine distribution endanger many lives, not only within the countries of greatest need but globally as new variants evolve and spread, complicating the resolve to rebuild economies in a more climate-friendly manner and overcome what one diplomat this week deftly referred to as our “baggage of biases,” the ones which trick our minds into thinking we’re being equitable and inclusive when the data suggests otherwise.

As the Perseverance Rover captures informative and inspiring images from the Martian surface, it transmits them home to a planet still reeling from, as one speaker noted during the “Reimagining Equality” event, our “tsunami’s of hate,” our inattentiveness to the pervasiveness of racism and other forms of discrimination as well as to the specific communities which bear that brunt year after year, the communities still on the outside of access to education, to economic opportunity, to adequate climate adaptation, to the vaccines which represent an investment in the lives of all of us.

Amidst this current swirl of global need, of articulated commitments often masking their practical neglect, we must find and sustain that tenacity to navigate the many bends in the roads we have chosen to travel, to learn how to “fail better,” to keep consulting all relevant evidence and not give up until we succeed in the tasks that we have collectively set out for ourselves – a world free of famine, free of discriminatory practices, free of neglected and traumatized children, free of governance more corrupt than responsive, free of biological extinctions, free of armed violence and mass atrocities.

The human community that can set a rover safely on Martian soil can figure out how to distribute the vaccines that our science raced to provide, can find the means to ensure access to education and technology for all, can silence the guns that kill and traumatize millions, can make a more convincing case for human solidarity over human discrimination. We have established diverse and daunting policy bars for ourselves. But as several speakers noted during this busy week, we are running out of time to demonstrate the tenacity and perseverance needed to reach them.

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Procrastination: Overcoming A Fatal Habit, Dr. Robert Zuber

14 Feb
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Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone. Pablo Picasso

It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.  Leonardo da Vinci

Someday is not a day of the week.  Janet Dailey

From this instant on, vow to stop disappointing yourself.   Epictetus

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.  Ray Bradbury

Look for the opportunity to leap, and leap faster than your fear can grab you. Vironika Tugaleva

Procrastination is my sin. It brings me naught but sorrow. I know that I should stop it. In fact, I will — tomorrow. Gloria Pitzer

I’m not a nostalgic person by nature, but I do believe in the importance of being mindful of the opportunities which have been presented to me over the course of my life –too many of which I have squandered — to make stronger and more durable connections with others, to right at least some of the wrongs of history, to divert divisive energies before they can create chasms which cannot easily be narrowed, to counter threats before they can evolve beyond the possibility of straightforward remediation.

The (unfortunate in my view) ending of the impeachment trial of Donald Trump in the US coincides with Valentine’s Day and the mid-point of Black History Month, a troika of events which raised for me, once again, a bevy of questions interesting at one level and quite challenging at another. 

For instance:  How much love and care directed towards us and demanded of us have we mishandled over the course of our lives?  How often have we inadvertently or otherwise reinforced privileges and inflamed injustices that in some instances have been begging for relief for centuries?  How frequently have we looked away or allowed ourselves to become fully immersed in our daily circumstances hoping that our political and cultural divides would somehow, without any positive participation on our part, escape the deep acrimony and even violence that we now witness in the US and in other global regions?

As the quotations above also attest, and our own questions and experiences largely confirm, we have largely upheld our reputation as a species of procrastinators, happy to put off until tomorrow, or even the day after that, what could have more successfully been resisted or otherwise achieved in the present.   We seem all-too willing to drag behind us a legacy of matters – both emotional and political — that we have treated as less than urgent, ignoring the long-term effects of our damaged relationships and unfulfilled social agendas, kicking problems as far as we can into the future in the hope that they land in someone else’s jurisdiction, hoping that “someone will do something” without owning ourselves as that someone, reinforcing a legacy of oft-ignored contributions by cultural and racial minorities by failing to offer such contributions their proper respect in the present.

While there are certainly exceptions, including our remarkable vaccine scientists, we have collectively yet to take that vow to stop “disappointing” ourselves, to stop settling for half a loaf when only a full loaf will feed our souls and reverse our unsustainable paths, to stop holding ourselves back from the boldness of thought and action which the times require. Perhaps our resistance to this vow is due to the fact that we fear we are just not good enough, not loving enough, not wise enough to get out front and resist the looming threatens to ourselves and our progeny, to amply interrogate our legacies and embrace current responsibilities, to fill our cup to the brim with knowledge, wonder, wisdom and care and then “tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out” for all to see, for all to benefit.

We are certainly capable of doing more of this tipping.  We can find ways to keep our prior relationship misfortunes from damaging the love and friendship we are privileged to enjoy in the present.  We can pledge to stop passing laws and resolutions that look too much like the previous ones, the ones that didn’t work out, that didn’t solve any problems, that didn’t communicate genuine hope to people, especially to younger people, to whom we have a special obligation.  We can stop repeating the patterns that prevent our engagement with urgent challenges until they become embedded in our now taken-for-granted, become just one more task to accomplish and not necessarily to accomplish as resolutely as the task itself demands.

With full acknowledgement of my own disappointments, I must also report on a week at the UN that was replete with instances of “domesticated resolve,” threats that we failed to resist at early stages and which now constitute part of our institutional agendas-without-end, problems which our consensus-driven bureaucratic cultures are sufficient to highlight and explore, but not to lay to rest in anything like a timely manner. Year after year, cycle after cycle, we do our level-best to bandage the innumerable wounds created by the conflicts we have so far failed to sort out – from Syria to Ukraine — the climate change we have failed to mitigate, the atrocity crimes we have failed to prevent, the displaced persons we have failed to repatriate. 

It is perhaps with respect to climate change that the disconnects between the insistent attention it demands and those forces and agencies which tend to absorb and blunt its urgent force come into sharpest relief.  This week, as young people worldwide return to the streets to plead for swift climate action and articles appear in multiple formats about our diminishing climate options, the UN held a preparatory session for the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 26) to be held next November in Scotland.  As he has done in the past, SG Guterres issued stern and earnest warnings about the need for states to stop putting off their “collective determination” on climate action, to stop delaying and postponing, to cease procrastinating regarding  the political decisions we have long needed to make and are running out of time to make.  During this meeting, New Zealand issued its own blunt reminder to colleagues that the UN’s habituated, consensus-oriented working methods are of little interest to constituents who only want to hear that “states and stakeholders are determined to do what is needed, and all that is needed, on energy, finance and more, to get climate change under control.”

But many also recognize that successful resistance to climate impacts is becoming more difficult by the day; indeed there are some who believe that only the most radical responses to our climate emergency should now be considered.  An article this week in the New York Times featured a discussion between Ezra Klein and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Kolbert (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-elizabeth-kolbert.html) in which she laments the degree to which “We are in this very deep — there are only wrong answers, only hard choices at this point. Nothing is easy from here on in.” Without specifying the UN or any other stakeholder, Kolbert cites “the awful knowledge that our interventions have gone awry again and again” an acknowledgement which must then be paired with the “awful reality that we have no choice save to try to manage the mess we have made.” 

As Kolbert intimates, we are clearly not managing our messes, nor have we taken those measures in our collective past which may no longer be viable options for us – to clean up the messes altogether, to learn from our “awry” interventions and repent of our erstwhile “strategic” procrastinations, to truly set things right, if not for ourselves than for subsequent generations.   

If our procrastinating ways have indeed left us only with “wrong answers and hard choices” on climate, it is essential that the inheritors of this mess have a key role in its management.  One of the highlights of this week for me was a discussion I had with students at the Institute of Leadership & Social Impact at Georgia Tech University who were interested in the sustainable development goals and what their lives (and those of their own progeny) might look like if these goals were truly to be realized.   This group of talented students, like others of their kind, have been metaphorically stuck in the starting blocks as the pandemic mutates, the global economy fizzles and climate change continues to threaten a sustainable human future. They have skills and energy, they mostly want to make a difference beyond their salary negotiations and LinkedIn accounts, and they are looking for alternatives that might allow them to work on issues that matter to their future.  They seem generally determined to avoid disappointing themselves, to avoid setting off on some path more likely to guarantee sanctuary than sustainability, more likely to exacerbate threats than confront them, more likely to enable further procrastination than release hopeful determination.,

I have too little to offer them, I’m afraid, aside from some pious platitudes about “finding your treasure,” and sincere offers to continue these discussions with them about global issues and options for involvement, including how best to let our “beautiful stuff out,” in whatever formats are available to us.  But I also recognize that as they explore options to “leap faster than fear can grasp” we in the policy world must be prepared to leap with them, to overcome the various incarnations of inertia that suppress policy memory and domesticate policy options, inertia that continues to delay action germane to the severe threats we now face, threats that (as these students mostly understand) are only becoming more difficult to manage, let alone to reverse.

As the president-designate of COP 26 warned this week, our climate is clearly “closing in on us.”  As our young people increasingly recognize, the time has grown short to prevent our collective suffocation.  Delaying the practical decisions that we know we need to make is simply no longer an option. If the policy community tasked with guidance on climate cannot deliver on the urgency that is now required, cannot get beyond the inertia that stifles initiative at the scale now required, we need to find other means to put skills in the service of sustainability, to cultivate the hopeful actions that we in our centers of policy only imagine we are inspiring.

Young people can’t wait any longer for us to cease our habitual procrastination. We should welcome their decision not to do so.

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Capacity Control: Managing Personal and Collective Discontent, Dr. Robert Zuber

7 Feb
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You see what is, where most people see what they expect.  John Steinbeck

The world had scarcely become known as round and complete in itself when it was asked to waive the tremendous privilege of being the center of the universe. David Eagleman

That was the thing about the world: it wasn’t that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn’t expect. Lev Grossman

As gloom and doom have been creeping into their lives, many can’t feel anymore the freshness of their emotions that withered alongside the wearisome path of their expectations. Erik Pevernagie

I am either lacerated or ill at ease and occasionally subject to gusts of life.  Roland Barthes

People never expect silence. They expect words, motion, defense, offense, back and forth. They expect to leap into the fray. They are ready, fists up, words hanging leaping from their mouths. Silence? No.  Alison McGhee

Expectations were like fine pottery. The harder you held them, the more likely they were to crack.  Brandon Sanderson

I and others in our small team spent much time this week zooming in to virtual UN meetings on topics from security deficits in Yemen and humanitarian crises in Ukraine and Afghanistan to global peacebuilding initiatives, narrowing the digital divide, and solidifying a political breakthrough in the long Libya conflict.

In the background of all these discussions, almost like some nefarious wallpaper, was the COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis which has unfolded as some experts and officials had long feared, with more infectious variants, a wave of fresh economic and food security challenges, and a mad scramble for vaccines which is leaving behind people of color in the “developed” world not to mention the vast swaths of the global south which are only now seeing their first of what are likely to be sporadic shipments.

This was the context swirling in my head on Tuesday as I approached a large parking lot in a working class neighborhood for my first COVID shot complements of Pfizer, a clever family member who found an appointment that I could not seem to find for myself, and a bevy of medical workers who were young, cheerful and diverse. 

They also weren’t very busy.  In fact, I was one of the only candidates for vaccination in a lot which could easily have accommodated hundreds of vaccine seekers, a lot surrounded by neighborhoods which surely contained thousands of people at least as deserving as I to be given this pandemic protection, people with family members who likely have to leave the home to go to work, who may have no health insurance attached to such employment, and on whom others depend more than anyone currently depends on me.  I wondered how many of the relatives of those dutifully checking me in had managed to find the protection that my bare arm now beckoned?

Seriously, how could this lot be so empty?  How is it that people like me get to jump what was in this instance a non-existent queue without any clear protocols for determining who are most deserving of protection in this health emergency, a crisis characterized in part by lost and wasted vaccine doses, mixed (and often defensive) messaging on protection, and other grave mis-steps, including with regard to the vaccines we pledged to share but decided instead to horde?  How does this happen and how do we allow it to happen still?

Those of you who know me personally (and are willing to acknowledge as much) know that this “looking a gift horse in the mouth” scenario has long been an unfortunate part of my DNA.  So too is what Sigmund Freud (and his less gender-biased successors) described as the guilt that I have tried to explain by reference to my privilege, but which is more aptly characterized by a deeper and incompletely examined unease, a discontent with too many “things as they are” which has led on my part to a fair amount of brooding but also occasionally manifests itself in positive efforts to ensure full parking lots with people from all walks of life getting protection for themselves, a desire to share instead of horde, a desire to harness my own contributing energies rather than being ensnared by the perceived limitations and inequities around me. 

Indeed, to invoke one of Freud’s more compelling descriptors, I have been and remain one of those “discontents,” someone who has likely spent too much of my cumulative life energy cursing the darkness more than organizing and contributing to a world of greater equity and justice, a world featuring institutions that are both competent and trustworthy, a world where solidary is in evidence more than selfish interest and where cynicism is in abeyance as more of us demonstrate that we are able not only do the right thing, but to do it for the right reasons.

Thankfully my own “discontent” has undergone an evolution over the years, from a focus on the failure of the world to meet my self-derived (and often petty and self-serving) expectations to the weightier matters of capacity and its deficits; our wasting of resources and opportunities; our sometimes relentless clutching to power and institutional mandates rather than to ensuring inclusive delivery; our inability to plan for generations to come and not only to fulfill the desires of the present; indeed the refusal of human civilization to become genuinely civilized across all borders and amongst all peoples and the other life forms with whom we share this fragile planet.    

After a lifetime of trial and error, it is now possible for me to distinguish more clearly and fairly between the good and the not-yet-good enough, to focus more attentively on the “tricks” that we often inadvertently play on ourselves and others, tricks which prompt others to anticipate the arrival of the metaphorical cavalry to help set things right when its horses are still back in the barn, waiting for water and saddles.

With respect to COVID, entire dissertations will be written on our many mistakes on policy, capacity and humanity which have undermined confidence in government and medical authorities and which continue to lead to staggering death and infection totals in most corners of the world.  Sadly, we have conspired to make an already hard thing that much harder, in part due to our inability to get on the same page regarding our messaging about the evolving pandemic science and in part due to our failure to provide adequate access and capacity support for testing and tracing, and now for vaccinations, those tools that remain the scientifically acknowledged pathway to less crowded Intensive Care units, schools with live children in them, and businesses that can reopen without the risk of becoming an accessory to mass infection.

There are, indeed, lessons to be learned here, ones which are applicable well beyond the current pandemic, lessons about fidelity to the tasks deemed most urgent, about the need to “put our money where our mouth is,” about promising less and delivering more, about not allowing our mandates to impede our performance, about escaping that trap characteristic of some institutions that who gets to respond is somehow more important than ensuring capable, timely, competent response in the first instance.  Lessons such as these are surely relevant within the peace and security realm as well, where the UN Security Council remains both bogged down in its own institutional limitations and uncertain about levels of collaboration it is willing to tolerate with respect to other diplomatic chambers and initiatives. This is especially apparent with respect to the Peacebuilding Commission which has done much in its relatively short lifespan to fill policy voids and establish viable policy connections, attract the best diplomatic talent from across the UN system, offer guidance to states at earlier stages of conflict threat, and free up resources to address peacebuilding deficits in real time and in diverse communities of need. As last year’s PBC Chair (Canada) noted this week, the world is “one or two shocks” from falling into deep crisis, and the PBC is well positioned to “anticipate such shocks and promote inclusive responses,” including, as Japan noted, building institutional capacity and genuinely “listening to the people,” talking with them and not at them.

This blend of institutional strengthening and dialogical engagement remans fully relevant to a host of pandemic and non-pandemic threats. There are many urgent needs in this world that we must address with greater care and competence if we are to have a world that can continue to provide a base for our own survival.   Such response must do better at enlisting and enabling the most diversely effective actors and capacities that we have at our disposal, both legacy and innovative, if we are to pull ourselves and others back from the brink of so many contemporary shocks.

And at more a personal level, we must ensure that our “discontent,” my discontent, continues to evolve beyond its often petty and self-referential grievances; that in so doing we become better able to seek out and identify the good in our world that is not yet good enough. And so we can better highlight and expand access to those “gusts of life” that enable and empower individual and institutional capacity for change; gusts that help some to see beyond the gloom and others to experience stability beyond the threat; gusts that fortify our determination to see what is really going on in the world beyond our expectations of it; and gusts to help us identify which personal and collective capacities — which tools and traits of character — are best suited now to take us to more peaceful, healthier and sustainable places.

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