Archive | January, 2022

Lying in Wait: A Holocaust Commemorative Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

28 Jan
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Dali: Gala’s Dream of Paradise

“Tired” by Langston Hughes

I am so tired of waiting,

Aren’t you,

For the world to become good

And beautiful and kind?

Let us take a knife

And cut the world in two –

And see what worms are eating

At the rind.

This poem has always resonated with me and, I imagine, with others in the larger “business” of making a more peaceful, sustainable world.

Yes, we are mostly all tired of waiting.  Waiting for the human race to recover its collective sanity.  Waiting for promises on peace and development to be duly honored.  Waiting for justice and healing for victims of seemingly endless abuses.  Waiting for health care and vaccine equity.  Waiting for an end to practices that make cannon fodder out of children before they have even been able to dry their wings.  Waiting for gross inequalities of power and wealth to balance.  Waiting for people to grasp their fundamental dependency on a natural order which we seem so keen to destroy. 

While at times it might have been foolishly considered, our own waiting has not been passive.  Like many in our line of work, we possess a fair amount of well-earned authority, though almost a complete lack of power.  We can encourage officials to do things, but not make them do anything.  And so we like others attempt to correct flaws in logic and policy once we see them. We likewise expose attempts, deliberate and otherwise, to misrepresent and deceive.   We try our best to cut in two the world that is presented to us by the rich and powerful, a world that is being eaten by worms which are within our lines of sight and which we humans have largely released into the world ourselves.

And still we wait, wait for beauty and kindness to erupt on the global scene, albeit in conditions more pleasant and less urgent than those experienced by most of the people our recommendations reference, the people who often experience far less of the goodness of people in diverse regions and circumstances than of the worms eating into the rind of possibility, including the possibility of relief from their recurring daily burdens. 

Two recent UN events underscored the degree to which, despite a host of valiant efforts and partial successes courtesy of UN entities and partners, despite real glimmers of goodness and kindness, our wait appears to be far from over.

Last week, the UN Secretary General met with diplomats in the General Assembly Hall to outline his policy priorities for the year: continuing the fight against the pandemic, reform of the global financial system for a better recovery; bold action on the climate crisis; addressing the digital divide; and securing sustainable peace across the world.  And as he has done in the past, the SG couched these priorities within some harsh, “pull no punches” warnings, alleging that we are now facing a “five alarm fire” which threatens the entire planet as it now engulfs much of the life of Afghanistan, Yemen and other zones of conflict. 

Some of what the SG proposed in the name of fire prevention and response resonated with us.  He called for adequate conflict prevention structures such that disarmament can again “become the recognizable compensation for non-proliferation commitments.” He urged states to exercise restraint rather than continuing to “enlarge the military capacity” of parties to conflict.  And as already noted, he called for urgent action on climate mitigation, on vaccine equity, and on global financial reform. 

He has made these calls before to diplomatic audiences more receptive than responsive.  Clearly, no one around the UN needs to be reminded of the wolves of poverty and violence pacing just beyond the UN gates.  No one needs to be reminded of the damage we continue to allow on our watch, damage which undermines prospects for the children we profess to love.  No one even needs a reminder, as the SG himself noted, that when people lose trust in institutions, they also lose trust in the values which those institutions advocate. And when such shared values have been shelved, we are left to navigate a toxic brew of policy that does not produce, authority which is neither recognized nor heeded, and words which cannot be believed, indeed, in some instances, deserve not to be believed.

The SG more or less made this last point when he suggested that “lying must be made wrong again.” Yes it must, with the caveat that there are diverse forms of this art, some of which indict those of us eager to point the finger at others without at least a wag in our own direction.  For instance, there are the lies that stem from being a bit too comfortable telling some of the truth but not the whole truth.  There are the lies embedded in our efforts to share data and/or opinions willfully divorced from proper context.  There are lies that are used to convince or encourage behavior such as those told by advertisers suggesting self-serving product comparisons which never actually quite materialize.

And then there are the larger lies intended to deceive but also to inflame and incite, lies meant to encourage expression of the parts of ourselves prone to discrimination and even hatred, demons which are less under wraps than we imagine them to be and which we now allow to circulate in our world with almost complete impunity.   Such was the subtext of an excellent UN program this week to honor and reflect upon victims of the Holocaust, an event which not only highlighted abuses which, as one survivor put it, turned me into a “nothing,” but which deeply honored the legacies of those who helped Jewish children and families to escape capture. Also honored were those who managed to survive what the president of the General Assembly referred to as “losses impossible to recover,” and then find platforms and places where they could with courage and integrity help identify and address the dehumanizing hatred, intolerance and misinformation to which the current pandemic has seemingly opened fresh doors.

Event speakers noted in one form or other that these annual events serve both as a reminder of where hate can lead us and a stark warning of where hate is in danger of leading us now.  But there is also a concern, again noted by the SG, that such events can too-easily “ring hollow” if we do not commit harder to eliminate extremism, discrimination and bigotry in our midst, as well as the “lies” which justify abusive behavior, minimize its impacts or, indeed, even deny its very existence.

Those of us who engage in this work and the institutions we promote (albeit skeptically at times) need to set a better example here.  The exposing and healing of hatred is a task which surely commends itself to most all of us.   At the same time, our own commitment to truth, individually and institutionally, must perpetually be examined and fine-tuned. As keynote speaker John Roth noted on Thursday, a just world “unconnected to hatred or fear” can still be built. But who Roth identified as “lies and liars,” those authoring lies and those complicit in them, continue to make horrific violence plausible and indeed stand as impediments to the world we are running out of time to make, a world where power in all its forms is held to account and where individuals, institutions and entire societies are more fully engaged in becoming their “best selves.” This task is for us as well.

For now, we watch and wait; hopefully also strive towards that good, beautiful and kind place more proximate to our deepest longings, dreams and anticipations, a world where hate has largely been extinguished and not merely chronicled, a world finally freed of the worms that corrupt and degrade and of the many lies, larger and smaller, which have for so long in our collective history guaranteed their ravenous and corrosive presence.

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King Maker:  A Reflection on Heroes and Heroism, Dr. Robert Zuber

17 Jan

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. Martin Luther King Jr.

Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world. Desmond Tutu

Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that such knowledge will help set you free. Assata Shakur

I am of certain convinced that the greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel.  Florence Nightingale

Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces “nice” people, not heroes.  Peter Kreeft

Heroes aren’t heroes because they worship the light, but because they know the darkness all too well to stand down and live with it.  Ninya Tippett

I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not. Philip K. Dick

Perseverance is the act of true role models and heroes.  Liza Wiemer

I don’t often remember where I was as key events in our world unfolded, but I do remember what I was feeling on the day that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. 

I grew up with guns in the home, but also in a home which valued gun safety, which would go to great lengths to ensure that guns were always managed responsibly, were never used in anger or to settle scores.  The thought that someone would use weapons to “hunt” other humans, let alone a human of King’s stature and hopeful values was almost unfathomable.

Moreover, the killing underscored what for me was a common emotional dimension – a feeling that the world was spinning out of control and that I was impotent in the face of its challenges.  It was clear that some people were finding their “refusals,” both quiet and loud – the march across the Selma bridge, the encampments outside courts of law if not justice, the determination to sit in any open seat on public transit and not only those which local legislation had assigned.  But such refusals were then beyond my remit.  I was a spectator to the upheaval but not in any way a participant in its resolution.  I was despondent, angry, unsure of most things, and with so much more to learn than I ever recognized.

On this annual King Day, alongside the recent sad death of Desmond Tutu and the ageing out of some of my most important life guides inside and outside the UN, it seems to be a propitious moment to revisit the entire concept of heroism and heroic acts.  Who are our heroes?  Why do we have them or need them?   What role do they serve in our lives and how are their words and images manipulated and often “domesticated” by others to serve interests inconsistent with their values and efforts to persevere in their commitment to justice through challenge and even threat?

At their best, our heroes provide a modicum of inspiration to those who would deign to follow in their more “famous” and widely-honored footsteps.  To insist on a life full of meaning as well as data.   To develop and use our voices to keep alive the many and diverse things that matter to ourselves and others.   To pay attention and contribute to the local contexts and dimensions of social change. To make a better effort to ensure that those who have been culturally marginalized are brought closer to the center.  To counter the darkness which stubbornly resides both in the hearts of ourselves and amidst our communities as one of many contributions to the unfolding of the light.

But there are dangers lurking here as well, the vicarious dimensions of the ways in which we “honor” heroes that serve to impede as much as inspire. Our heroes, in this scenario, are akin to celebrities who do something real (as a schoolchild allegedly confessed to a teacher).   But the “real” that they do often falls into the category of things we would not risk doing ourselves – jeopardizing personal and family security to call out injustice, driving into danger to rescue civilians under attack or to feed those at the very edge of starvation, acquiring positions of power and then actually using them to advance the full human condition rather than satisfying personal or even national ambitions, abandoning socially prescribed expectations to serve those who might then serve others, paying forward what has been given to those who need it still.

I have had the life privilege of engaging with several notable figures, including the Reverend William Sloane Coffin Jr., who struggled routinely with an often-thoughtless vicariousness, finding themselves often out on a proverbial limb to cheers from an audience that wouldn’t think of joining them there.   I am anything but a hero, but I have also been told by others how reassuring it is to know that there is “someone out there doing these things.”  As though it is possible to “do these things,” indeed to do much of anything of value at all, without the active engagement, energy, wisdom, even love of so many others.  As though the heroic acts of heroic individuals can ever compensate for a dearth of hopeful activity at personal and community level, activity that can transform “the daily grind of domestic affairs” into viable and actionable linkages with so others in familiar and unfamiliar circumstances, including our heroes-turned-celebrities living lives (past or present) which too many of us have sadly become accustomed to assuming have little or nothing to do with our own.

One of the terms which has found growing resonance around the UN community, and which I believe was introduced to me and my office colleagues by Marta Benavides of El Salvador, is that of “accompaniment.” The skills which are conveyed through this term are not in opposition to heroism but are sustainably complementary. Walking alongside rather than in front of. Ensuring a reliable presence beyond one-off events or interventions.  Making promises to which we are personally accountable.  Remaining attentive to the creeping darkness in our midst and then enacting those “quiet refusals” which standing-down such darkness requires. Setting better examples ourselves rather than pointing to examples of heroes whose often-exemplary lives we might well honor but remain largely out of reach.

At the end of the day, heroism for most of us is not an office to hold or specific actions to honor so much as an opportunity to express our full humanity, a chance to grow beyond our limited contexts, a chance to help incarnate values in the world that we care about but don’t experience sufficiently, a chance to push ourselves further out of the realm of the safe and comfortable into the ever-whirling, ever-maddening, ever-threatened world.  Indeed, it is often an important dimension of heroism to focus less on the length of our lives and more on their quality – who they touch, what they stand for, what we can help others to accomplish or, in the case of children, prepare to accomplish.

On this M.L. King Day as on every day, let us pledge to do all the good that we are able, to identify and cast aside the darkness around and within us, to affirm more of life tomorrow than yesterday, and to insist on linking our own accompaniments and other manifestations of justice and service to those of others. These are aspects of heroism, of a life mindfully lived, that do not require celebrity but only a reaffirmation of the fully human, the willingness of all to contribute the good as they are able, goodness which, in tandem, retains the welcome and transformational capacity to “overwhelm the world.”

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Reconciliation Nation: A January 6th Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

5 Jan
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Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Voltaire

How all my brain was in tumult, and all my heart in insurrection! Yet in what darkness, what dense ignorance, was the mental battle fought!  Charlotte Brontë

Liberty or death!’ A rebel, armed with a blood-stained pitchfork, shouted over-and-over. David Cook

Hard towards himself, he must be hard to others, and in his heart there must be no place for love, friendship, gratitude or even honor.  Mikhail Bakunin

The only thing we knew for certain was the American Civil War was not a prelude to a kiss. Aberjhani

Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.  Elie Wiesel

The world needs people who have survived mistakes, tragedies, and trials to help the rest of us through. Kimberly Giles

I feel somewhat sheepish bothering you with yet another post so soon after the previous two, but this is an anniversary that I could not bear to let pass by.

One year after many of us within the US were transfixed with a brazen act of insurgency that we in the US should probably have seen coming, and as many outside the US were left to wonder if we had firmly entered “failed state” territory, there is little confidence in many quarters that the violence which was allowed to take root at the US Capitol has been sufficiently weeded from our national life.

If anything, the lines of ideology, even of reality, are increasingly sharp.  As I wrote last week, we have become quite comfortable taking shots at each other across a bow of willful misunderstanding and even enmity.  There are few voices now willing to stand apart from the chasms which define our culture, our values, our politics, stand apart not to remain aloof in its own right but to try and make space for choices beyond following an increasingly angry and stiff-necked herd.

This stiffness has taken many forms and is not confined to any one of the herds which now occupy and relentlessly defend their own pastures.

On the political right, we have seen and heard many insurgent voices, including ostensibly “religious ones” parroting conspiracies which could easily be debunked if folks were only willing to trust their senses more than the angry, victimized language communicated to them and from which some never seem to be satiated.  We have seen the spike in gun sales, we have heard the voices from radios and pulpits calling for “patriotic” violence, we have recoiled from the “lone ranger” fanatics willing to shoot up schools and shopping malls in some instances as their last gasp attempts to gain some measure of “patriotic” infamy before departing this life for whatever might come next.

What is most chilling about some of these incidents is the levels of financial and even political support which perpetrators of this violence receive from those in their herd.  Some of this support takes the form of vitriolic rhetoric, but also of silence, an approach which, even more than malicious or conspiratorial words, suggests that what happened last year on this date was “no big deal,” even as we now recognize that this hand of insurgency was being dealt from the highest levels of the US government.

It is hard for the rest of us at times to remember that this form of insurgent outrage is not new to this country; indeed our history would suggest that the current cultural configuration – love your country and distrust its inhabitants — has more or less been stitched into our national fabric.   We have long taken each other for granted if not altogether exploited one another; we have long  stoked culture wars, not only between believers and unbelievers, but among believers themselves; we have long proclaimed our cherished values and peaceful dispositions while arming ourselves to the teeth and using our power to unfair advantage over diverse races and cultures; we have long packed ourselves into cities and then denigrated those who still work the fields and mines essential to our urban lifestyles; we have long extolled those who “win” at money and power as though that game is not also rigged in favor of those who already control institutions and define pathways of access.

In the tribes which I more regularly frequent, we who mostly never fought in wars or saw fit to engage in other forms of national service seem to feel quite satisfied with our university educations, our jobs with health insurance and other social benefits, and our access to power and to those who hold it.  We, too, look after our own interests as though there was something vaguely sacred about them, as though these interests were somehow also baked into the rules of a game that has long been tilted in our favor.

One of the frustrating aspects of this year for me and many has been the slow pace of justice, including justice for those who fanned flames that erupted last January 6 after what had been a long and steady burn.  We in my tribe generally stand fast in our defense of the “rule of law.”  But where has this “rule” been hiding?  Indeed, as I have maintained in other contexts, one now presumably faces more severe legal jeopardy for stealing a Red Bull out of a convenience store than for launching an assault on the US Capitol. 

Clearly, we in our liberal bubbles also have things to answer for: Have we done much of anything over this past year to remedy this legal travesty?  And while we are at it, have we done enough over this past year to heal our broken politics, to eliminate gross inequalities of access to income and education, power and influence, to put the corks of discipline and service back in the bottles of military and police command, to promote notions of “freedom” which apply to all and not just to some and which are more textured and communally-binding than merely “doing what I want?”

I don’t think it can be considered in any way conspiratorial to conclude that I and others are collectively failing to meet the moment.  We have allowed deficits of justice and kindness to fester while increasing hostile divides and giving unearned comfort to those content enough to face additional “wrist slaps” in order to continue their assault on democracy.  And those wrist slaps, by the way, pertain to those well beyond the January insurgents themselves, those with plenty of money and the will to buy whatever and whomever can be bought — which appears to be most anyone now in government or contemplating a run for elected office. January 6 did not announce threats to democracy but did pull back the veil on how that threat has evolved and been duly monetized over time.

We are going to hear much over these days of political officials scared to death – as well they might have been — of the mob (and their enablers) who invaded the Capitol last January 6 and who have largely yet to face proper justice. But the storm that is coming and for which we remain ill prepared is one which promises more destruction, more enmity, more chaos.  We need voting rights, yes.  We need a revitalized response to the world’s “huddled masses” including those huddling due to our own economic and security policies.  At the same time, we need to fix what is wrong with ourselves, not just wrong with “them” but wrong with us, those of us locked away in blue state bubbles, those of us who make fortunes in our urban canyons and then place them beyond the reach of any public good, those of us who flaunt our degrees and other credentials as though they were primarily a sign of virtue rather than of privilege.

One year on, we must insist on accountability for the insurrectionists and their political enablers still prepared to do violence to uphold their own victimizations and conspiracies.  But we must also promote avenues of reconciliation with such people, people every bit as much citizens of this country and, if you will, children of god as we are, people who have reason to fear our largely-unaccountable political and economic hegemonies as much as we fear their weapons and reality-challenged leanings.  Simply put, our vaunted and oft-exported democracy does not work for everyone, if it ever did. We need to narrow those gaps before further eruptions of violence force us to shut down our democratic experiment altogether.  

One thing that seems to be clear as we approach this troubling anniversary – we and those we oppose on ideological grounds have something important in common – the deep trauma we feel courtesy of a global pandemic, climate and economic uncertainty, cultural upheaval and all else that has prompted many to retreat to our isolation chambers and hide under the metaphorical covers until it is time to lash out – with prejudice, with stereotypes, with conspiracies, with dismissiveness, with anger, even with guns.

The attack on the Capitol requires justice with urgency and determination, but it was also a symptom of national angst more than a cause, the flaring of a virus we have been carrying around long before COVID-19.  If we are to avoid the fascist-style outcomes some now predict for us, it is incumbent on we and our institutions – churches, schools, media and more – to help us find the language and actions which can soften hearts and stiffen resolve, the resolve not to give up on ourselves, on each other, nor on the democracy that so many of our ancestors gave their lives to preserve. We know more, it seems, about how to inflame emotions and harden opinions than to search for common ground and reconcile one to another.  And while we may well lament becoming a country allegedly “free” to choose its facts as well as its opinions, the “fact” also remains that we have much work to do – on our country and on ourselves – to fulfill the promise of our national creed.

As much as nationwide vaccination, the need for nationwide reconciliation remains acute. Time is running out for the people of this country to revisit and apply those skills. 

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