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Open House: Strategies for Blunting Xenophobia, Dr. Robert Zuber

Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public. Michael Eric Dyson

All this because one race did not have the decency to be ashamed of dealing in human flesh. Whitney Otto

Instead of being blind to race, color blindness makes people blind to racism. Heather McGhee

Genie had sidestepped the daily trauma of the historical record, the sometimes brutality and sometimes banality of anti-Blackness, the loop of history that was always a noose if you looked at it long enough. Danielle Evans

We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. Thurgood Marshall

Yeah, I love being famous. It’s almost like being white, y’know? Chris Rock

Later today, I will be speaking on a panel, organized by my friends at LINGAP – Canada intended to give a platform to the voices of people from diverse cultures – in Edmonton and beyond – who suffer violence, injustice and discrimination on a regular basis, much of which is directed at Asian and indigenous communities and which is only now finding a place on the mainstream radar.

I generally decline invitations like this. I have had my “say” on matters of exclusion and discrimination many times over the years and I retain platforms such as this for those of you who still honor me with your reading. But it’s not my turn now, if it ever was. From our policy centers to our urban streets and rural pathways, the line of people waiting for a few moments at the global podium now stretches to the ends of the earth. As people like me are fond of saying, the problem we face is not levels of talent, but of opportunity. It is this latter privilege we still resist sharing, resist declaring, despite what we can amply chronicle about the former.

In the twilight years of my erstwhile “career,” I want to do my full part to link talent to opportunity in all global regions, to ensure that our emerging “global commons” is more than rhetorical, is more than a branding opportunity for groups like Global Action or a business opportunity for large corporate interests. People have a right to voices that matter, voices which influence, voices with impact. They don’t need me speaking for them and they don’t need oversized influencers packaging sound bites from the policy margins to service unrelated interests.

Indeed, the more we try to engage and promote it, the clearer it becomes that the agenda of ensuring inclusiveness remains among the most challenging on our collective plate. Our news feeds are filled to the brim with images of violence against people of Asian and African descent, violence which in many instances is the jarring manifestation of many years of covert discrimination, the ways in which what for a time was left to simmer in privatized settings has been released forcefully into the public domain. We now routinely see evidence of people wearing their xenophobia like a badge of honor, a badge woven deeply into souls rather than merely being pinned to outer garments.

Our personal and cultural bubbles have lost whatever measure of clarity and transparency they once might have had, substituting instead an opaqueness that allows our grievances to multiply like in some oversized petri dish until we are ready to burst out and confront the human objects of our scorn, indeed, the humans whom we have largely objectified and now turned into threatening caricatures of themselves, caricatures about which we feel the need to actually understand little. Indeed that is part of the discriminatory deal, isn’t it, turning complex human beings and their cultures into categories worthy not of respect but of suspicion, knowing just enough about people to “know” that they are essentially unworthy of dignity or respect.

This tendency to objectify and dishonor, certainly prevalent in the US, is not confined to any one political or ideological persuasion. A series of maps published recently chronicles the degree to which people have increasingly segregated their domiciles by political affiliation, choosing to live (and isolate themselves) in areas where most folks are tolerant (if not always accepting) of their political, cultural and religious viewpoints. At one level this approach is understandable, especially for families caught in the current cultural crossfire. Clearly it is not the “job” of children of “First Nations” Asian or African descent to solve the embedded racism and xenophobia that rear their ugly heads in manifold ways and which have resisted the best efforts of some remarkable figures over time to finally end their reign of terror. Nor is it their job to “take one for the team,” to absorb the epithets and bullying, the rejections and outright violence that we adults have not done nearly enough to prevent. From the standpoint of protecting children from the worst of our collective behavior, our thickening demographic bubbles make some sense.

But of course, the bubbles themselves don’t resolve the violence and discrimination, the objectifying and the demeaning. If inclusion is to mean anything more than rhetoric, it cannot be attained if people are not also willing to leave their corners of the ring and engage with others in the center. How do we create safer spaces for people to engage, to invest more in each other, to understand more about the “other” besides the ways in which they allegedly “threaten” our own, entitled ways of being?

Part of the answer clearly embodies a policy dynamic. I was pleased this week that at the UN, alongside excellent events on preserving water resources and the impact of climate disasters on agriculture, alongside as well the gender-focused inclusivity promoted at the Commission on the Status of Women, there were several events that highlighted the growing divides of race, religion and culture that continue to impact international peace and security. During thoughtful discussions that highlighted the toxic effects of racism, xenophobia and discrimination against Jews, Muslims and persons of African and Asian descent, it is becoming more and more apparent that diplomats worldwide are worried – as well they might be – about the many ways we seem to be tearing each other apart, rupturing what remains of human unity in ways that policy can only partially heal.

Among the highlights for me of the week’s discussions were concerns expressed by New Zealand’s Ambassador and others of the extent to which COVID-19 has helped “open fractures” wider and deeper than we have seen in some time. Indonesia warned against our sometimes “empty words” with regard to justice and tolerance. Pakistan noted during the Islamophobia event the importance of rejecting “distortions of our common humanity and their selfish motives.” At that same event, UN Secretary-General Guterres warned about our spreading “epidemic of mistrust and discrimination” mirroring the admonition of Niger’s Ambassador to “build bridges not burn them.” A Rabbi at this week’s event on anti-Semitism was particularly graphic in his warning to the online audience that “those who burn books would also burn human beings.”

But perhaps the finest presentation of the week on this topic was offered by the new US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield. Her remarks were personal, poignant, and challenging. She described the racism she has lived through as an “ignored cancer,” encouraging those impacted by it to “stare it down,” to do everything in your power not to “internalize” its messaging. She also pointed to a role for policy in efforts to minimize such messaging, noting that “we can’t always change peoples’ hearts, but “we can change the rules.”

Indeed, we must change the rules and then insist that those rules be followed. But as this UN week made clear, as my own experience confirms, we must never abandon the task of changing hearts, the hearts of the racists and anti-Semites, the hearts of those pumping out grievance and affixing them to alleged, objectified threats, and yes, our own hearts as well. Indeed, if we want better policies, policies that incorporate diverse voices and retain the trust of global constituencies, we who have regular access to policy processes must become better people ourselves. The wider public will never fully trust our treaties and resolutions unless they can also trust those who craft them. Opening safe space for other perspectives, other views, is one sure avenue to that trust.

And there is another dimension to this, one which some in the Edmonton community I will later address have taught me well – that the path to a genuine understanding of others across divides of culture, race and faith while long, is also rich. To reach the finish line, we must be willing to get close enough to touch complexity, to replace assumptions with realities, to dwell in the nuances of other lives long enough to understand that our own personal challenges are not so different than theirs, and that we too have ideas, prejudices, assumptions and behaviors that would be better off relinquished than reinforced.

At the same time, we would do well to remember that there are things that you can never know about people unless you have spent time in their homes, to see first hand how people organize their lives and care for their families, to get a sense of their priorities and how they invest their precious hours, to better understand the multiple influences that inspire and guide what they care about more and less.

In my life, I have been multiply blessed by often-remarkable and honorable people from many global regions, people of diverse backgrounds and interests who have opened their homes to me, who have honored me with their hospitality and complexity, who have helped ensure that their joys and burdens become part of the backdrop of my own work in the world. It is a gift I can never repay; indeed it is a gift that enlarges souls, expands minds, and makes hearts beat a little differently, and can do so for many others as it has done for me. As the UN diplomats themselves have attested, we can and must change the rules. But we should also encourage others (and maybe even ourselves) to take a few more risks and engage more deeply those experiences, those stories, those voices that can inspire the changes we are obligated to make in the world and in ourselves.

Tags: Culture, Racism, religion, United Nations, xenophobia

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Death Dancing: Choreographing a Mutually-Assured Future, Dr. Robert Zuber

14 Mar

If we didn’t move on, who could move in? William Sloane Coffin

Monsters don’t exist. It’s men you should be afraid of. Niccolò Ammaniti

This is the stuff we’re made of, half indifference and half malice. José Saramago

And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing? Iris Murdoch

All that could be seen in him was the urge to hurt, and it was, as it always will be, the most dreadful sight in the world. Susan Cooper

One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient. Charles M. Blow

There is a reprint of the Eichenberg engraving posted above which has been pinned on a bulletin board in my messy home office for over a quarter of a century.

I have it there not because I entirely resonate with Eichenberg’s sometimes jarringly dark worldview but because I do embrace what I understand to be his core message. For much of our history, indeed for too much of our present, a perverse message of “child care” which the engraving seeks to parody has held sway. In this piece, we see a group of older men of grisly countenance joined by children whom they are purported to protect surrounded by the weapons we who work in the security space know all too well — the missiles and tanks, the war planes, the automatic rifles — that have long been used to threaten and intimidate, an expensive blanket of weaponized “protection” more likely to raise anxiety through the metaphorical roof than offer reassurance.

The children in the engraving are not being comforted so much as being egged on by grotesque caricatures of “caring” adults. One child is getting a ride in a tank; another is fondling a missile; a third is taking target practice on a hanging human figure cheered on by one of the adults. Others are merely seen pointing guns at others in the room, each with an older “mentor” ensuring proper technique, reinforcing the notion that the activities in this room are “normal,” that the children should become as comfortable, even reassured, around this arsenal of death as the determined and mostly uniformed adults have come to be.

Of course, this “comfort,” passed on from generation to generation has a price. Indeed, at times a very high price. I was intrigued and saddened this week by a story I was tipped off to about the F-35 fighter jet program in the US, a program that, according to The Hill, is likely to fully cost out at $1.7 Trillion. Yes, with a T. It is a dangerous world indeed and military planners are surely losing sleep trying to manage conflict threats that our skilled negotiators and mediators have not yet figured out how to mitigate, let alone resolve. But this weapon with its record-setting price tag and uncertain strategic value represents flawed decision-making that might even give the Eichenberg figures pause.

At a time when a pandemic has stripped local economies of trillions of dollars; at at time when a warming climate threatens both our biodiversity and our agriculture; at a time when trust among peoples in each other and in their institutions of governance is waning; at a time when a bevy of new security threats and conflict triggers cannot be solved through conventional military applications no matter the cost or technological sophistication; there is an urgency — especially in these moments — to rethink our security investments, to do more than merely pass on our weapons-related addictions to another generation as we might pass on an old vehicle or pocket watch.

The UN is figuring out the multiple ways in which armed conflict and its weapons are both a cause and consequence of so much misery in our world. Thanks in part to the persistence of a string of smart, vocal, elected Security Council members, the implications for security from still-insufficiently addressed climate change have become more and more apparent. And in the week just passed, a US-organized debate on famine and food security in the Security Council as will as a Swiss-chaired report launch from the Open Ended Working Group on “developments in the field of information and telecommunications in the context of international security” reminded us once again of the multiplying dangers we now face — dangers for which our omnipresent weapons are still in some quarters, by some flawed logic, seen as a solution.

There was much good discussion in the food security debate, including from both India’s Ambassador and the World Food Programme’s ED David Beasley, who reminded delegations that humanitarian assistance, while essential, is not a solution to grave food insecurity; rather it is the resolution of armed conflict. This point was taken up as well by Council members such as Niger and Mexico which are particularly vulnerable to the effects of the trafficking in and the still-under-regulated trading in weapons. Moreover, all members seemed in sync with the simple point made by SG Guterres that “if you don’t feed people, you feed conflict.”

In another UN chamber, the cyber-report (and accompanying discussion) made several important points, including that “increasing connectivity and reliance on ICTs without accompanying measures to ensure ICT security can bring unintended risks, making societies more vulnerable to malicious ICT activities. While not named as such in the report, activities that should be mentioned under this rubric include the increasing ability of hackers to disrupt the functioning of all manner of civilian and military infrastructure including, as we saw earlier this year in the US, the safety and security of our most dangerous weapons.

Lamentably, some of the member states that ostensibly carry the flag for a more human security-centered approach, that are the most rhetorically engaged regarding our ever-evolving security responsibilities, continue to fuel conflict back-door through their abundant arms sales, their disproportionate emissions, their self-serving trade agreements, their reluctance to commit fully to multilateral agreements until it has been clearly determined that national interests are also served. Or at least those “national interests” as determined exclusively by national leadership. In this regard, we were sad to note, with OXFAM executive director Bucher, the number of states which mourn food insecurity but also make it more likely through their incessant acquisition of weapons. In this same vein, it was a bit jarring to hear the UK minister reject those states that, in his view, tend to see other human beings as “insignificant” while his government continues to sell weapons to most all who seek them, including to conflict-compromised Saudi Arabia.

While monitoring these discussion on the impacts of famine and malicious cyber actors on peace and security, we were reminded that one of the challenges that has eluded successful resolution for many years and which continues into the present is related to establishing the full costs of armed conflict. How do we “price out” misery in places like Yemen and South Sudan? How do we factor in costs related to trafficked and traded weapons let alone the damage they inflict on local education and agriculture? How do we calculate the costs of the fear that keeps people prisoners in their own homes or on the move in search of safer domiciles? How do we assess the costs from generations whose learning has been jeopardized or whose food and health deprivations are almost certain to require long-term care assuming their survival in the first place? And how do we factor the costs associated with depleted fish stocks and bee populations, of conflict-inducing discriminations of the basis of race, gender or culture, or of the increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity malfeasance that puts all of our civilian and military infrastructure at direct risk?

These are not hypothetical accounting issues. We are now modernizing nuclear weapons and planning to put some of our most deadly armaments in space under “dual use” cover, all at great expense in resources no longer available to to support vaccinations or habitat restoration, small farmers or safer, healthier schools. We are willing to spend trillions on a fighter plane with no obvious strategic advantage but balk at providing livable wages for workers or taking better care of the immigrant communities without which most “developed” economies would collapse. We want children in school but then tolerate the disincentives that lead many to leave school behind for dangerous jobs, for forced marriage, even for recruitment into armed groups.

And still our oceans fill with plastic, our children face depression from a loss of childhood, our communities live in fear of those who brandish trafficked weapons, our civilian and military infrastructure remains vulnerable to malicious attack, our children living in conflict zones face starvation, the consequences of which will linger even if food provisions ultimately arrive in time to keep their frail bodies alive.

This and more constitutes our own “dance of death,” movements (and choices) more complex than those engaged around Eichenberg’s militarized table, but which are more clearly recognizable in our own time. We know that weapons are not the solution to our endless political disagreements, our climate crisis, our biodiversity loss, our mass displacements, our pandemics now and to come, our increasingly vulnerable infrastructure. And yet we continue to make weapons of increasing sophistication, make them for recipients that don’t need them and probably shouldn’t have them, weapons that promise much more ruin than security, weapons which drain our national accounts for no clear human purpose. Our dance card continues to call for weapons. And so we build, and then build some more.

In this season of Lent for those of Christian persuasion, the stark rhythms of betrayal and loyalty, death and rebirth, are just some of the themes in play. Especially for those of us for whom the end is much closer than the beginning, death in this life is simply part of the deal, a deal which requires all of us to eventually “move on” such that others can “move in,,” such that others can take the lead and share their most creative impulses, can try their hand at solving the problems which generations before them left sitting on the table, can change the program such that we spend more time dancing for health and life and less time dancing for malice and indifference.

But their own dance card might well be too difficult to pull off unless we who are still here can choreograph the world as it is now to become less weaponized and intimidating, to abate our “urge to hurt” and demonstrate more empathy and understanding beyond our now pandemic-challenged rhetoric. The question for the international community is not whether we die, but whether or not we kill ourselves off through malfeasance or indifference, through grossly misplaced spending priorities and the failure to relinquish significant portions of national interest to solve life-or-death problems which, as the UN rightly notes on a regular basis, cannot be solved by any state alone.

Death may be inevitable. This current, complex iteration of our “deadly dance” need not be.

Tags: children, death, United Nations, Weapons

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Ambulance Chasers: Clearing a Path for Policy Change, Dr. Robert Zuber

7 Mar

They were partners. They were two halves of the same brain. Margaret Peterson Haddix

It was an honor, to be listened to closely, to be heard. Meg Waite Clayton

She was hearing the words. They just weren’t registering on her Richter scale of sanity. Dakota Cassidy

Life is a long preparation for something that never happens. W.B. Yeats

In a sense we are all prisoners of some memory, or fear, or disappointment – we are all defined by something we can’t change. Simon Van Booy

Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation. Charlotte Brontë

It wasn’t a particularly momentous week at the UN, though there was plenty of momentousness in the world to discuss, including the growing threat from hate speech and atrocity-crime level violence committed in the Tigray region of Ethiopia and against protesters on the streets of Myanmar. In addition, while a session on the use of chemical weapons in Syria fell flat – largely due to the lack of new information from the existing investigative mechanisms – there was nonetheless a palpable sense of frustration in diverse sessions that 10 years into the Syrian conflict, the violence still continues, the disappearances and arbitrary detentions still continue, the foreign occupation still continues, the displacement and material deprivation still continue.

Those of you who still find some value in these weekly missives know of our preoccupation with a relationship between structure and outcomes, especially in multilateral forums. We affirm that solutions to global problems, much like personal ones, are undermined by gaps between rhetoric and response; between promises made and promises kept; between the growing expectations of the parties and honest appraisals of what it is possible to achieve (or not achieve), including by the UN or any other institutional frameworks. Such appraisals would do well to point out other sources of potential relief beyond the most obvious, underscoring that the attainment of relief supersedes any other concerns, including the authority of the relief-giver.

If a child requires urgent medical assistance, the over-riding goal is to get the child to hospital. It matters less who transports the child than that the child arrives in time to stave off disaster.

In many ways, it seems, the international community has lost touch with that fundamental principle. While public approval for the UN remains high within most of its member states, and while the UN maintains its singular function as a convener of dialogue regarding the world’s greatest challenges, there are also flaws in a system that is so heavily dependent on the permissions and funding of large states; that invests massive amounts of skill and resources providing assistance to people damaged by the conflicts we are too institutionally “conflicted” to stop; a system that is constantly “selling” its work to its state benefactors without clear assessments of where that work has gone off the rails, where we might actually be “unfit for purpose,” and where self-inflicted institutional and political impediments have become the erstwhile traffic jams that threaten to prevent constituents from receiving what we have given them every reason to expect from us.

We still insist on driving the sick child to the hospital ourselves even when there are other vehicles in better operating order and more at the ready. We often insist on being at the center of things, at the core of solutions and resolutions. Our institutional branding has become at times almost insufferable, people of considerable skill and integrity forced as a matter of professional protocol to tell us much about “what they’re doing” and little about how its working and, heaven forbid, what else needs to happen in the world beyond our bubbles and their aspirations to ensure that the metaphorical child reaches the hospital in time.

Thankfully, from various parts of the world in our zoom-saturated existence, officials and civil society still come into UN spaces to share and report, to attempt to put a human face on “global problems,” to remind diplomats and NGOs alike that what we’re doing isn’t quite working as we intended, that the vehicle holding the “sick child” is too often stuck in horrible traffic as the child’s vital signs plummet and with few willing to sacrifice their place in line to free up the ambulance ‘s path.

But if this week was any indication, those summoned to “brief” this UN community on global crises might be losing confidence in our ability to do more than “tick” our own boxes of concern, to hear and then file-away testimony as though we are somehow doing these leaders a favor by allowing them to present. Twice in the span of a couple of days, two female NGO leaders – one from Syria and the other from South Sudan, shared frustration at the ways in which their testimony seemed as likely to enable inertia as galvanize a tangible, sustainable response. Each in their own way they made clear the pressures they feel from colleagues who wonder what the point is of engaging the UN on issues it has failed to resolve over many long years. What can the General Assembly and Security Council possibly need briefers to tell them about these longstanding crises that they don’t already know? After all, as Wafa Moustafa noted about Syria after questioning the value of speaking to a General Assembly session, “you’ve all seen the photos.”

Indeed they have. We all have. From Syria, from Yemen, from DR Congo, from Myanmar, discouraging images seen over and over to the extent that they are now insufficiently evocative except perhaps insofar that they remind us of the consequences of our collective inability to translate diplomatic dialogue into sustainable peace. As Jackline Nasiwa of South Sudan noted in the Security Council, “we are tired of sharing the same stories,” lamenting that what she highlighted as the considerable resilience of the South Sudanese people “is clearly fading” in the face of ongoing, persistent, unresolved trauma.

And once finished with their own statements, both of these women were expected to listen to a series of largely predictable responses from delegations, expressions of concern largely genuine but also untethered to much in the way of fresh thinking or fresher commitments, anything that might possibly register on the “Richter scale of sanity” of these women. In many ways the responses from delegations merely confirmed the lament – that we are not only unable to fix what is so clearly wrong, but that we have few good suggestions for where relief might be found beyond our own walls and values. We can’t fix the problem, or so it seems, and we really don’t know who can.

The concerns of these women and of the people they serve and represent deserve a better outcome than words falling to earth like seeds on concrete.

With all due regard for the mindset of civil society – hoping for more, insisting on more than we are ever likely to see ourselves – we are right to insist that there is something collectively the matter with us here, something which lies at the heart of the frustration punctuated by the women briefers this week. We talk about the world as though we are in a race to survive a series of deadly pandemics but we act too often as though the world suffers merely from a simple head cold. We take our sweet time, preferring to delay appropriate action until we reach consensus, forgetting that consensus is an aspiration not a demand, forgetting also that while national priorities differ, the fundamental obligation of this system to prevent violence in the first instance and alleviate the suffering such violence causes should never be up for grabs. Not here. Not in this place.

One suggestion for the UN going forward is that it thoroughly examines its use of the term “partnership,” a phrase so utterly overused and misunderstood that it has lost much of its “flavor,” has in fact degenerated into something akin to proximity and assistance. Our “partners” are the ones who are “around” and help us do our job. They are not, apparently, the ones who help shape what that job is, how it is conducted, how its successes are measured, what course corrections might be required. They are not, apparently, the ones whose briefings demand responses akin to “what we are going to do differently now,” what are we as a community prepared to rethink and renegotiate in order for women such as these briefers to take something of value away from the session, perhaps a sense that they were really listened to and, in these instances at the very least, an assurance that human misery trumps institutional protocol as the motivation and inspiration for our common work. Like most of the rest of us, these women are not “partners” in any real sense, not yet “halves of the same brain,” but voices that we solicit when we need them, voices that we tap when we need to show concern genuine at one level, intangible at another. This is not real partnership. This is not enough.

Public opinion polls regarding the value of the UN notwithstanding, there is a fair amount of cynicism afoot regarding the ability of the international community to ensure that our metaphorical ambulances are able to get to hospital in time to save their patients. When women such as Ms. Nasiwa and Moustafa question the value of their UN testimony — not its content but its audience — we need to take serious note. It may be that we all are defined by things we cannot change. But the violence, heartache and trauma embedded in their testimony, this must change. Most all of us have endured the experience of not being heard, of urgency more often patronized than acted upon. I worry that women such as these will stop speaking to us at all, will rather take up the search for settings where there is closer synergy between rhetoric and response, where there is a higher probability that the ambulance will reach its intended destination. This is an outcome the UN can and must do more to avoid.

Tags: NGOs, partnership, United Nations, urgency

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

28 Feb

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.

Tags: birds, climate change, Human Nature, waste

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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.

Tags: COVID-19, health care, Racism, technology

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Procrastination: Overcoming A Fatal Habit, Dr. Robert Zuber

14 Feb

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.

Tags: climate change, procrastination

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

7 Feb

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.

Tags: capacity building, COVID-19, discontent, peacebuilding

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Unity State: Replenishing our Thirst for Reconciliation, Dr. Robert Zuber

31 Jan

While you see it your way there’s a chance that we may fall apart before too long. The Beatles

Propensities and principles must be reconciled by some means. Charlotte Brontë

I’ve learned that reconciliation has to occur between the parts of ourselves that are fragmented and wounded. Parker Hurley

The nation as it is currently constituted has never dealt with a yesterday or tomorrow where we were radically honest, generous, and tender with each other. Kiese Laymon

The simple, mutual recognition that mistakes were made is in itself a closing of the divide. Steven Erikson

Statements often bring controversy. Questions often bring unity. Emilyann Allen

No us. No them. Just we. Steve Goodier

Earlier this week, a good colleague of ours called to discuss a new project designed to help promote reconciliation in our highly polarized country, reconciliation which might help unify factions across the US which have stopped listening to each other, stopped trusting each other’s motives, stopped looking for entry points thorough which we might promote each other’s goodness rather than assuming that every pronouncement, every statement, every mis-step, is some manifestation of evil intent.

I share her concern for reconciliation but wondered then as now to what extend there is truly a thirst for it or at least enough of a thirst to make reconciliation efforts viable. For like the many other mountains of psychology and policy which we are now seeking to climb, reconciliation is also a hard slog, requiring substantial levels of honesty, attentiveness and staying-power, not only to address the excesses and insanity of our adversaries, but our own as well; not only to demand apologies but to offer them as well; not only to answer the questions posed by others but to pose questions that allow for our own spaces of ignorance to be filled with something other than malice and prejudice.

This “will-to-reconcile” is impeded by so many factors, and at so many levels. The “bubbles” in which so many of us are content (or resigned) to reside – our own bubbles and not simply the ones we identify in our adversaries – can lead us to the mistaken notion that reconciliation is easier to achieve than could possibly be the case in our current circumstances. If only others could accept the erstwhile “truths” that “we” represent, the “wisdom” of policies and structures that are assumed to be in the best interests of others, the “good intentions” of narratives about the world that seek to silence the guns of others while burying our own hostilities deep within the forms and structures of polite, “liberal” culture. If only people could cross back over the line into “my” zones of affective and epistemic comfort, if only they could see the fundamental worthiness of my “propensities and principles,” maybe then we could find a common way forward.

It seems more complex than that doesn’t it? Current divisions seem larger and more intractable to me. My priorities of policy and practice seem generally “right” to my mind, seem to be on a track that promises some pathway beyond climate ruin and the divides of technology, economics, social development, and even COVID vaccine distribution that threaten to expose existing wounds even further. But I also recognize that others see it differently; others see the edifices and rules of mortar and ideas that people like me have constructed as the means for some to further their own interests at the expense of others. Indeed, as we have noted often this space, we who are properly horrified at the growing threat from conspirators and their weapons have also to acknowledge that “they” didn’t by their own force of policy and practice create our plastic-filled oceans and staggering economic divides; they are not primarily responsible for our current climate emergency nor the “vaccine nationalism” that might well become the latest stake through the heart of our globalist pretentions. “They” did not invent our longstanding embrace of racism nor the corruption at the highest levels of governance which takes multiple forms and damages us all. Mistakes were made, even grave ones, but they have been made by many of us, mistakes compounded by the failure to “see” them clearly let alone to acknowledge or (God forbid) apologize for consequences unintended and otherwise.

While global leaders, including the current US president, are right to call for “unity,” the many steps needed to accomplish this seem only partially grasped. Some of these steps were on display during an extraordinarily busy January week in and around the United Nations, a week punctuated by an alternately sobering and hopeful “state of the union” address by the UN Secretary-General, a strong endorsement of science-based policymaking by the Deputy Secretary-General, and a useful joint session convened by the presidents of the General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council to sort out impediments both to development finance and sustainable development support for the Least Developed States; all of this in the shadow of the World Economic Forum annual event at Davos, a star-studded gathering to assess global trends that seems once again this year to be as much of a confirmation of existing inequities than a sincere effort to eliminate them.

That said there were two UN events which offered some good guidance how we might attend to our current, multi-layered fragmentation. On Monday, the Security Council held a discussion that highlighted the ways in which conflict prevention and COVID response are mutually reinforcing, with most speakers affirming what Ireland referred to as our current “dark times” brought about by a combination of inadequate COVID preparations and cease fire arrangements which, if they exist at all, are held together by fragile threads. It was up to UN USG Lowcock to highlight, in keeping with statements made by SG Guterres, that the pandemic is the crisis that we must find a way to solve together, noting that compromised health capacity, inadequate testing and other preparations and (now) predatory vaccine access have merely allowed fragilities of communities and states to grow, inflaming prospects for armed violence between and (especially) within states, and damaging economies and livelihoods in ways that could easily cost trillions of US dollars to repair. The “common goals” which are so often a prerequisite for achieving greater unity, the goals of ending the pandemic and silencing the guns, are still there, still beckoning, still awaiting a determined and humble response from states and stakeholders now one year on since the World Health Organization issued its initial warnings about the pandemic gloom we have still not unified sufficiently to dispel.

In addition to this, on Wednesday the UN convened a panel on “Holocaust Denial and Distortion,” which highlighted efforts to posit alternate realities which both deny the genocide and pry open rationales for the repetition of mass atrocity violence. Much attention was rightly paid to Holocaust victims, including some extraordinary prayers and musical tributes and a mournful German Chancellor Merkel who expressed “shame” for the horrors unleashed by Germany but also shared a warning about how quickly our “cherished values can be cast aside.” But for me at least, one core virtue of this event was not only its “calling to mind” the grave horrors of our not-so-distant past, but the extent to which “denial and distortion” characterize our present circumstances as well, the dual arrogances of unhinged conspiracy and unexamined convention that turn up the heat for all of us and make unity a more elusive goal than might otherwise be the case.

While rightly underscoring some of the specific and horrific consequences of Holocaust denial — including the attempted “rehabilitation” of those in more recent times who have yet to be held to account for the hatred they have espoused and the violence which such espousals have engendered –much of this event focused on the need for a common base of knowledge and understanding from which we can iron out our disagreements and move forward to heal the fragmentation within and outside ourselves, creating what one panelist called a “healthy relationship” with our often “inconvenient” past that allows us to “own our behavior, past and present, and not simply cast it aside or as another panelist put it, bury it under “lies and silence.”

Such ownership in our time would be warmly welcomed. Indeed, as our ideological and lifestyle bubbles continue to thicken, as the “ways and means to share forbidden fruit” only grow in volume and access, and as frustrations over pandemic and equity mis-steps rationalize new expressions of conspiratorial violence, our reconciliation challenges only continue to grow. We seem to lack viable strategies to restore a reality-based platform on which we can all debate, declare and then build, a reality that now seems to require higher levels of competence and rigor, justice and accountability, but also levels of “honesty and generosity” that are virtually endangered species in our policy and public spaces.

Though many are now in despair about our growing, seemingly intractable divides, there simply must be a viable third rail beyond “my way” and “your way,” beyond my version of reality and yours. Before we come fully unglued as a species, before our guns settle what our humanity has failed to reconcile, we need to do more than talk about unity, more than encourage unity. We must find the means to replenish our thirst for unity based on genuinely common purposes, common visions, common goals and common benefits; we must also locate and apply that third rail which can power and sustain reconciliation efforts; and we must do so without delay for our very future depends on it.

Tags: COVID-19, reconciliation, United Nations, unity

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Planting Season: Young Advocates as Seeds of Peace, Dr. Robert Zuber

24 Jan

They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds. Dinos Christianopoulos

It’s senseless to disarm the hands, if the heart remains armed. Bangambiki Habyarimana

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. E.B. White

To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Buckminster Fuller

If things don’t work out the way you want, hold your head up high and be proud. And try again. And again. And again! Sarah Dessen

Art cannot change events. But it can change people. Leonard Bernstein

In some ways, the United Nations represents the epitome of an “if at first you don’t succeed” institution. Important discussions on emerging global issues occur long before resolutions are tabled and adopted. And many adopted UN resolutions appear in similar form, year after year, in the hope that additional states will “get the message,” on matters from capital punishment abolition to ensuring greater protection for journalists, “getting” indicated not only by support for the resolutions themselves but for the policy change at national level that the resolution seeks to promote.

And its not only with respect to UN resolutions, these carefully negotiated documents by diplomats trying to navigate between instructions from capital and the compromises needed to move policy priorities from possible to actual. In the realm of peace and security where we invest much of our attentions, change can be painfully – even deliberately slow, in part because of a lack of consensus regarding the direction that change should take, whose interests are served, how the consequences of change should be managed. This leads to some severe policy bottlenecks, such as with respect to Syria and Yemen as well as some stunning ironies such as this week when officials in the city of Bangui, Central African Republic were forced to declare a state of emergency just one day after the Security Council met to consider how best to confront armed groups determined to undermine and even reverse recent presidential election results.

Within the domain of weapons and weapons systems, there is also ample room for frustration with occasional if welcome, bursts of sanity in the form of resolutions and treaties which promise, albeit with significant caveats, to regulate or even prohibit altogether the weapons that continue to threaten human communities, even human civilization. These include weapons locked in silos or placed on submarines, weapons trafficked across borders or carelessly allowed to leak from government control into a vast illicit market, weapons placed in outer space under “dual use” cover, weapons designed to explode primarily in heavily populated areas; weapons with new “bells and whistles” manufactured at still-staggering rates and shipped off to states with dubious human rights records or without much of a clue regarding what to do with the weapons – still deadly – that are set to be replaced by newer models.

These are not, for the most part, new issues for the UN nor for the many NGOs gathered around headquarters with a keen interest in promoting a disarmed world. Their determination to find ways to end the threat from nuclear weapons has persevered, a threat which has only grown as the weapons themselves display greater precision and payload and as unresolved global tensions have provided ready (if not convincing) excuses for states seeking to hold on to their weapons stockpiles or even develop their own nuclear capabilities. Some of my closest UN colleagues, have invested a professional lifetime of thought and organizing energy in a valiant effort to solidify the relationship between disarmament and non-proliferation obligations, including obligations under international law, as well as to examine political obstacles to “general and complete disarmament,” and to remind governments and citizens of the overwhelming humanitarian imperative to keep these weapons out of harm’s way until they can be eliminated altogether.

I also have a long history with disarmament obligations and issues, which I won’t unpack here, except to say that nuclear weapons issues proved to be a “gateway” concern for me, one which I have never renounced or discarded but one which has made space for other “human security” concerns to which we are now linked by a bevy of excellent institutional partners who focus on torture and climate change, racial discrimination and biodiversity loss, atrocity crimes and incarcerated children, terrorism and corrupt governance, unsustainable cities and food insecurity. While making it clear that we endorse the specific concern of our nuclear weapons partners – that human security priorities must not be reconstituted as security “conditionalities” which excuse neglect for nuclear disarmament obligations – it remains our view that security linkages can lead in the best of circumstances to mutual security investments that can, among its other benefits, strengthen support for the disarmament we all want and need.

While more and more of my older disarmament friends and colleagues have moved towards a more nuanced security framework, especially with regard to gender, race and climate, our younger colleagues have embraced such linkages as a matter of course. This week’s entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) (for the treaty in multiple languages, click here: Ch_XXVI_9.pdf (un.org)) bears the broad policy and preambular concerns of several progressive states (such as Mexico, Austria and Costa Rica) along with youthful leadership from around the world who together brought the treaty into existence While holding on to the hope that the core promise of the TPNW – that nuclear weapons rendered “illegal” by this treaty will lead to concrete disarmament measures – we nevertheless applaud the degree to which the treaty’s prohibitions and positive obligations for ratifying states are certain to “shrink the space” for the influence of nuclear weapons, impeding security cooperation with nuclear-armed states in part through the rejection of longstanding “nuclear umbrellas” and related security arrangements.

The TPNW should perhaps be understood more as a stage than a solution, but it is a hopeful and welcome stage, one which seems to have unleashed some positive and inter-linked initiatives by young advocates who are well-suited to organize online and across barriers of identify and culture in this age of COVID. One initiative close to home is “Reversing the Trend,” which was also launched this week by a diverse group of young advocates with support from the diplomatic missions of Costa Rica, Kazakhstan and Kiribati. In a virtually seamless manner, the leaders of this initiative, including our office-mates Christian Ciobanu and Danielle Samler, have fashioned a format for discussion and advocacy that brings together youth from diverse cultural backgrounds but also links the nuclear weapons issue to other powerful impediments to their future (climate change and racial discrimination among them). They have also opened a space for creative contributions (fashion design and visual art so far) that not only help to contextualize nuclear weapons threats but allow young people to blend policy leadership and artistic expression as they navigate the personal, structural and ideological minefields that older folks like me have not done enough to clear.

These youthful advocates are skillful, articulate and determined. They know that their very future is on the line as pandemic variants continue to spread, as ice caps continue to melt, and as weapons continue to modernize and find new hiding places. They also know that tinkering with the existing frameworks is not likely to be good enough; they recognize that they must locate a healthier balance between “changing the world and enjoying the world;” and they are determined that efforts to “bury” their ideas and influences are destined to fail as these young people represent, indeed, the seeds of future well-being for themselves and so many others.

And the diplomats are paying attention. For instance, Ambassador Maritza Chan of Costa Rica, a longtime champion of the TPNW and advocate for “human security” lenses on contemporary threats, was one of those welcoming the Reverse the Trend launch. She reminded the largely youthful audience that security is ultimately “not based on military competition but on human cooperation,” that multilateralism is key to progress on peace, and that diverse voices worldwide, including a new generation of experts on human security and the rule of law, remain dedicated to ending what she described as a “perverse” arms race. For his part, the Kiribati Ambassador was more cautious, noting the longstanding and stubborn resistance to disarmament by the nuclear possessing states but also reassuring the audience that, in part due to the TPNW, nuclear weapons threats can still be overcome under UN auspices.

My own hope for initiatives like Reverse the Trend is that they can help examine and assess, together with the rest of us, which models of governance can be fixed and which need to be replaced; which skills and voices must get closer to the center of discussions about the “world we want” and not just the world that seems most likely ; which threats most impact their future and how can such threats be robustly identified and then addressed in tandem; which “seeds” these young people are keen to plant, may already have planted, and how we can all do more to help nurture a successful crop; which global problems are most likely to resist resolution and how can we best inspire perseverance across generations until they are finally sorted.

And perhaps we could add to that a bit of youthful guidance regarding a task that, certainly for my generation, has proven even more daunting, even more elusive than forging resolutions or negotiating limits on weapons and weapons systems: the task of disarming our own hearts as we seek to disarm the world.

Tags: disarmament, United Nations, youth

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Night Mood: Ending Terror in our World and in our Dreams, Dr. Robert Zuber

17 Jan

You are enough to drive a saint to madness or a king to his knees. Grace Willows

I’m well used to burying such things in a dark cellar and moving on. Mark Lawrence

Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other’s heads and fingers trembling on the trigger? Arundhati Roy

I don’t know which is worse. The terror you feel the first time you witness such things, or the numbness that comes after it starts to become ordinary. Tasha Alexander

I felt now that my life was practically lost, and that persuasion made me capable of daring anything. H.G. Wells

We passed from laughter to terror which, like love and hate, are close relatives. Lise Deharme

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. Martin Luther King, Jr

When I was younger, which in this past year has seemed like an eternity ago, I spent much time working on issues related to nuclear disarmament. At the time, the UN was immersed in a high-visibility disarmament push and it seemed to me, aside from addressing the compelling and seemingly looming disaster of nuclear war, that this could also serve a “gateway” issue for me, a path to a wider “human security” engagement on environmental care and racial justice to mention just two other enduring concerns.

It was also a time when my subconscious life seemed to be running on overdrive, when my nightly sleep was punctuated by dreams of pure terror – of being out of control while falling from bridges, of pending disaster and the panic of not being able to successfully outrun the coming storm, including and especially the nuclear storm. The infamous “doomsday” clock was always ticking away in my earlier dream life, always positing some existential disaster that I had ill prepared for and couldn’t manage to escape.

After years of what passed in my life for a higher level of sanity, complements of an apartment full of “dream weavers,” a remarkable church community, and some of the best friends and partners one could ask for, some of those terrors of the night have returned. A year of running from COVID impacts and weighing in on a bevy of complex and daunting issues, global and domestic; another year of trying to contribute to what remains of our seemingly dwindling options on climate change and reconciliation among nations and peoples; another year of reminding people of what they don’t generally want to be reminded – that the ills that afflict us, including our now-pervasive political turmoil, are personal as much as structural – those fears that I once conspired to “bury in a dark cellar” are now leaking from their receptacles and finding their way back to prominence in my nocturnal affairs.

These contemporary terrors of the night are different in tone from earlier iterations. Not so much about being out of control as being frozen in response to looming threats, of not having the ability to counter whatever is “coming for me” or even being capable of moving to places of safety or like possums, playing dead. In these dreams, “my reactions” are more like what rabbits do, freeze in place until an avenue for escape presents itself. But in my dreamlife, there is no such avenue — only the sounds of danger getting louder and closer.

I know that I am by no means alone in facing mental health challenges that seem mostly to play out after hours. Especially people who are raising children and/or have jobs to which they need to travel and which often barely cover basic necessities have no choice but to retain as much functional sanity as they are able, to perform their daily duties and let their unconscious self sift through fears and anxieties once sleep has been able to descend. I know how much better I have it – have always had it – than so many in this world. I never forget (though don’t always appreciate sufficiently) how many blessings have found their way to my door without being asked, like packages from the postal service I don’t recall having ordered. I also know from many years at the UN and in the field the terror that is routinely inflicted on so many people in this world; those who need not wait to close their eyes after dark to experience threats that never seem to abate, fears of long-term pandemic ruin, of societies splintering at the point of a gun, of climate change that turns productive lands into dust bowls, of education for so many children put on hold, of fires of all varieties that rage on and for which we seem to have crafted insufficient preventive alternatives.

For too many, the sounds of terror become louder and closer mostly in broad daylight, the guns that have yet to be silenced, the screams from too-many domestic abuses, the sirens of ambulances rushing COVID victims to what might well be their final earthly stop, the government helicopters whirling overhead designed to intimidate protesters at least as much as to uphold the law or protect citizens.

As we in the US sift through the details (and its many enablers) of the recent assault on the US Capitol, an attack which more and more bears the marks of coordinated domestic terrorism, the UN has been assessing its own mechanisms and measures for identifying and addressing terrorist threat, as diplomats are fond of saying, “in all its forms and manifestations.” This week, under leadership from Tunisia’s Foreign Minister, the Security Council examined progress on countering terrorism since its landmark Resolution 1373 was adopted in the aftermath of the attacks on the US on 9/11. Key to resolution progress has been the work of the UN’s Office on Counter-Terrorism and its Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate, bodies which have done much to ensure that the counter-terror measures adopted by states are coordinated (especially across borders), adequately resourced, sufficiently attentive to the causes and instruments of extremist recruitment as well as the means for successful reintegration of “foreign terror fighters,” and that any and all measures adopted are consistent with the UN Charter values and human rights obligations already assumed by member states.

While levels of urgency regarding the need for more robust counter-terror operations varied from Council member to member, it was gratifying that so many of them, including Estonia, Mexico, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Niger (which recently endured its own terrorist-related massacre), understood that the task at hand is not primarily about military confrontation with terrorist elements but of depriving terrorists of “oxygen” in part by restricting access to funding but also through policies and practices that promote sustainable development and what CTED referred to as “healing and justice.” Such counter-terror priorities also stipulate governance that is more effective in service delivery as well as more transparent and otherwise deserving of citizen trust, governance with the will and skill to eliminate what UN Special Representative Chambas referred to in another Council meeting this week as “the toxic influence of exclusion.”

Putting this bevy of good ideas and lofty rhetoric into collaborative practice requires high and sane vigilance of thought and action, the commitment to overcome all vestiges of the “sincere ignorance” which magnifies threats to the very lives it purports to help. The manifold dangers that constitute the waking lives of too many global citizens –including threats from heavily armed terrorists luring away children and robbing communities of dignity, livelihoods and even of life itself — warrant the full implementation of every preventive measure at our disposal. For whatever reason, I remain convinced that at least some of the turmoil which punctuates a number of my own nights would be alleviated if the seemingly endless threats which punctuate the days of too many of the rest of us could finally attain some sustainable relief.

With whatever energy and mental health we can muster now, after a long year of lockdowns, physical distancing, political fragmentation and emotional challenges, I feel some assurance that our own lives will be a bit less stressful, our nights a bit more restful as we do what we can to help ensure that the days of many millions around the world are themselves less threatened, more prosperous. If it is the case that we, together, have sufficient skill and capacity to “drive a saint to madness or a King to his knees,” we surely have enough to bring about an end to fingers trembling on the triggers of deadly weapons, an end to governance that serves the interests of only some and not of all, an end to terrorist violations and social deprivations that stop the development of children in its tracks and lead many adults to the desperate conclusion that they simply have nothing left to lose.

In my dream life, perhaps in yours as well, there is now an over-representation of numbness to terror, of frozen limbs amidst a growing sense of panic. But once the alarm sounds the end to another night of fitful rest, the demands of the day intervene, including the demand to do what we are able to lower the terror threshold that millions struggle mightily to escape regardless of the time of day, as well as the demand to ensure that we never permit ourselves to become numb to worldly deprivations we are well-placed to address. For me as for others, these demands are — and will remain — worth sacrificing sleep over.

Tags: dreams, Security Council, Terrorism

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Night Mood: Ending Terror in our World and in our Dreams, Dr. Robert Zuber

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