gapwblog

“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.

Tags: holocaust, lying, waiting