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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