The goal is not to get something said but to get something heard. Fred Craddock
We cannot feel good about an imaginary future when we are busy feeling bad about an actual present. Daniel Gilbert
It is our daily lament that we cannot love enough. Charles H. Spurgeon
We want our leaders to inspire us because we’ve been inspiring them for so long.
This last quotation from Vanessa Nakate, one of the leading youth representatives at COP 27 in Egypt, hit me in ways that most of the oft-compromised, policy speechmaking emanating from this climate COP (and previous COPs for that matter) has not.
While preparing yet another Advent Letter and while assessing the value of our work and how it needs to change going forward given the possible end of twitter and some predictable disappointments from the latest (and now extended) UN climate change event in Egypt, the words of a compelling young advocate seeking from “leaders” what they should be providing to our youth as a matter of course is, to my mind at least, both jarring and dispiriting.
For over 20 years, we at Global Action have chosen to tether ourselves to institutions which tend towards being long on activity and short on progress and the inspiration which progress engenders, institutions (and their talented people) which largely mean well but which fail to communicate the limits of their own efficacy; institutions which urge people to have confidence in state capacities which have proven largely insufficient given the magnitude of threats and challenges which now dominate our social and political landscape. In process and rhetoric, the emphasis seems to be on maintaining control of issues and their response narratives much more than most officials of these institutions would ever acknowledge.
Many of us know what it feels like to “mean well,” to grant ourselves some form of emotional participation trophy for efforts – good faith and not – to honor our promises and commitments to others. In our own modest line of activity at the UN and beyond, such honoring has taken the form of both careful scrutiny and feedback which has attempted to be harsh when needed, complimentary when deserved, and mindful that the insight and skills of our policy competitors and even our adversaries are likely to be as indispensable to a healthy, secure, peaceful future as our own.
After years of engagement, we continue to believe that our own small-scale energies are mostly on the hopeful side of issues from climate change and capital punishment to weapons spending and the well-being of persons with disabilities. And while we may have over-rated a bit the capacities of we humans to rise to difficult occasions, especially in cases where our status and income might be called into question, we have seen enough change over the years – much of it welcome — to know that the fact of change – if not its general direction – is inevitable. Painful to navigate at times, raw material for a barrage of grievances often, but also potential never to be dismissed.
Still, we who spend time in the endless gabfests of international policy have forgotten things which are perhaps not in our remit but are indispensable to the success of our efforts to address problems beyond operative paragraphs in resolutions that all governments (and even some civil society organizations) can accept in theory if subsequently ignore in practice. We especially forget that beyond the range of our policy bubbles, resolutions represent promises. People anticipate, and have the right to anticipate, that our erstwhile “leaders” are fully committed to global well-being, and that the skilled diplomats who carry their messages and incarnate them in agreements are as committed to honoring public expectations in a timely manner as they are to honoring “political realities” or diplomatic consensus.
We also seem to forget that the messes we have made in the world are unlikely to resolve themselves, that the sickening mold on our walls will only expand unless we take firm measures to remove it and then impede it from returning. Such firmness in the policy realm requires commitments to both boldness and fairness, ensuring that crises are met with actions that can bring us back from the brink and can do so to the best of their ability without inflaming further the tensions currently tearing our grossly unequal world apart.
Such a scenario is not outside the realm of possibility, even in this time of shrinking response options. But we need more – much more – from the people who hog the podium, negotiate tepid agreements beyond public view, accept outcomes which they know will not solve the problems to which they point, and dare to get inspiration from talented, energized youth advocates rather than providing more of it themselves.
No, the ones who gobble up the speaking slots and then stand and accept the applause for their “leadership” should also be providing a larger share of the inspiration, encouraging the rest of us to do more, care more, and take more risks while promising to watch our collective back. It should not be left to a group of diverse and determined teens to inspire leaders to do more to mitigate climate and other global threats, to take more tangible responsibility for the health and well-being of this next generation as they would take for those of that generation in their own households.
Nor is it unreasonable for me to wonder if after all these years of monitoring and organizing, of creating spaces of hospitality and access for people who could otherwise not afford to have their voices heard in UN policy spaces, if we haven’t also, at times inadvertently, enabled the perpetuation of some of what we say needs to be fixed. Enabled by showing up every day and tacitly (and at times explicitly) equating what the UN does with what the world now needs; emabled by sharing critiques that are little more than feathery blows against a system which has amply fortified itself against much stronger winds; enabled by failing at times to communicate the best of what we see at the UN in anticipation of its potential recurrence, or to hold up the worst of what we see in the hope that repairs can commence at the earliest possible moment.
I don’t want to be that sort of enabler any longer. To the extent that I and my colleagues have been so, we should have had the sense to divert from that path long ago. Of course, enabling itself can be (and often is) an act of love, one which commits to attentiveness beyond our comforts, which seeks to magnify the voices, capacities and skills of others, to help more and more people find places in the world where they can not only speak but be heard, and where possible, even be heeded. This is the sort of enabling we wish to do, what we have long sought (and sometimes failed) to do, the sort of enabling which helps create and inspire more in the world of what we seek beyond the limits of our own mandates, energies and capacities for care.
The possible demise of twitter has sent many users, including within our own community of some 6800 followers, into a state of alarm. Some have already found an alternative platform in an effort to preserve a modicum of community engagement which an otherwise-flawed resource has for some time allowed them. If twitter dissolves, a large portion of our own monitoring work will likely dissolve with it. But we will continue to write, continue to engage our lists, continue to create spaces for hospitality and presence in and around multilateral settings, continue to enable others to take up their hopeful tasks in the world as our frustratingly constrained capacity for loving this planet and its diverse inhabitants permits.
Reports this morning suggest that COP 27 might actually have endorsed creation of a fund for “loss and damage” directed towards the states and peoples suffering disproportionate impacts from climate threats. We greatly honor those who have advocated for this breakthrough while we wait to see if this fund can be sufficiently capitalized to address the fossil fuel-influenced loss and damage which continues to slowly, inexorably engulf our world and which too many of our policy compromises — including at COP 27 –seem as likely to inflame as to abate. Given this and going forward, twitter or no twitter, we all must do more and better to enable life-preserving outcomes.
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