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Bubble Wrap: Unpacking our Digitalized Enclosures, Dr. Robert Zuber

24 May

Bubbles

For a bubble, even the gentlest touch is fatal.  Mehmet Murat ildan

The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.  Nadine Gordimer

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.  Oscar Wilde

What fools we mortals are to think that the plans we make are anything more than a soap bubble blown against a hurricane, a frail and fleeting wish destined to burst. Barbara Nickless

The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.  Joe Klaas

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.  Flannery O’Connor

On a weekend when we celebrate the end of Ramadan and mourn the loss of the fallen on our various battlefields, I have spent much of the time cleaning out file cabinets filled with old letters.  Some of these letters were angry, some grateful, some filled with insight about the writer, the intended audience, the world at large.  But what was most revealing is the amount of care that went into them, page after page in longhand, people often younger than me committed to disclose and share, to make sense of a world which was often making none, to decipher and embrace the core of their being amidst a cacophony of conflicting and competing messaging, to transcend fleeting joys and hurts and find the north star within themselves to guide what would hopefully be a long life of care for self and service to others.

We rarely communicate like this anymore.   Our introspective longhand has become digital shorthand.   We have trouble sustaining attention of any sort let alone sustaining a train of thought that promises genuine insight, even possible breakthrough.   Our messaging is ubiquitous but thin; we “stay in touch” by dropping in and out of lives from which we extract highly-branded versions of key “incidents” but with less and less of the backstory that explains why such incidents actually matter and what longings might yet exist between what are often lengthening cracks revealing our obsessive efforts to convince others we’re OK when we may only be partially so.

As is often the case with these posts, I am preaching to the choir; but also to myself.

This week, for me, was immersed in communications-related issues.  It began with a “new” campaign-related initiative by the US Republican party and ended with what will hopefully be an important opening gambit in the UN Security Council examining how the cyberspace we are now reliant on to almost desperate degrees is digressing into “bubbles” of self-referential propaganda and even hate speech that directly threaten international peace and security.

The aforementioned campaign initiative was given a most interesting name:  The Truth over Facts Investigative Website which is designed primarily to highlight the gaffes of the US president’s political opponent, but which neither interrogates the president’s own slippery relationship to facts of any stripe nor breaks any new ground regarding our general confusion regarding how “facts” are and are not constitutive of a fuller “knowing” of the world and our own relationship to it, how “facts” divorced from context can just as easily reinforce our various cognitive bubbles as puncture them.

As someone whose long-ago graduate school experience was literally drowning in epistemological considerations related our diverse “ways of knowing” the world, I have long been a believer that data and truth are kissing cousins but not quite marriage partners.   I won’t waste your weekend on a protracted diatribe about the ways in which we misuse data by failing to properly contextualize it, or about the ways in which we use “facts” to place people in boxes that we don’t want them to escape or even use “facts” to justify an end to exploration rather than as the engine of its continued evolution.

But I will communicate this.  In my erstwhile-jaundiced view, the behavior of several leaders of major power governments during this pandemic has been nothing short of criminal, principally in its lack of humility, its unwillingness to consult and abide by those of greater knowledge, and its utter lack of urgency regarding the preservation of life.   It is certainly the case that scientists are learning more and more each day about the pandemic, its modes of transmission, effective treatment options, even the consequences of infection – from kidney failure in the sick to psychic depression in those merely fearful of sickness, but also with sustained periods of loneliness and of protracted economic uncertainty.

But the certainties that many seem to be looking for in this time of pandemic remain elusive. Yes, we have vaccine trials with results that are sometimes encouraging and we can generally ascertain when the viral “curve is flattening” and where relapses are most likely.  But do GDP or official unemployment statistics really communicate the “truth” about our collapsing and vastly unequal economies? Is “official” data on COVID-related deaths and infections the “truth” about our viral circumstances, or might matters actually be more dire due to people dying in places other than hospitals and tests yielding untrustworthy results?

It is alternately intellectually interesting and emotionally unsettling for me to watch public officials struggle with their COVID messaging in an environment where trust in officials is low across the board, where the “facts” of infection change regularly as we learn more about what works and what doesn’t, and when national political leadership seems more inclined to stoke anger and anxiety than coach it away.   As a result, too many people of all ideological persuasions feel abandoned to cope with the current uncertainty largely on their own, to pull the metaphorical blinds and double-down on the “bubbles” with which are most reassuring, even if those bubbles are riddled with half-truths, even if those bubbles only offer equally false choices between hard certainty on the one hand and conspiratorial make-believe on the other.

Our remaining confidence in authorities and experts seems now less about the credentials behind what we are being told and more about who is telling us, who we choose to believe, who is able and willing to confirm what it is that we have more or less already concluded about the world and what in it truly threatens us.

This week, the UN launched what it calls Verify, a useful initiative to combat the growing scourge of COVID-19 misinformation “by increasing the volume and reach of trusted, accurate information.”  Of course the test for Verify will be less about the accuracy and trustworthiness of the data it scrutinizes and more about the trust that the UN and its World Health Organization can garner as a responsible arbiter of the “truths” of COVID – what we know, what we don’t know, and why some of the rumors and conspiracies floating around the planet (and especially in the digital universe) do not pass the test either of facts or context.

Does the UN retain the capacity to do more than offer its version of competing narratives about the pandemic or, for that matter, the many other, science-relevant, global challenges also on its policy agenda?  Sadly for me, this is unclear.  As much of a proponent of science (and of the UN) as I have been all my life, I lament that we have misplaced so much of our capacity to educate people about what it is that scientific and medical experts can and cannot (yet) accomplish, to have an honest conversation with people about the nature and limits of scientific inquiry, the findings of science that might well eventually set us free but, in the short term, are almost as likely to “piss us off.”

We need to have those conversations in our schools, our communities and especially in bastions of social and political authority such as the UN.  No, our data is not static.  No, all of our facts are not situated in proper contexts.  No, our “authorities” are not always authoritative. Sometimes authorities do what we now mostly all do and much too often – re-purpose “truths” espoused as a manipulative pathway to get what we want rather than as a means of enriching our connections and the quality of our common life.

In reading this over, I recognize how naïve and old school it must seem to some readers, especially those who have given in to the modernist assumption that we can be expected to do no better than to encase ourselves in our bubbles of choice and then pray to whatever powers we might still acknowledge to preserve our bubble from puncture.  But puncture is inevitable.   Our bubbles might be lovely to behold but as even the reference dictionaries acknowledge, they are also fragile, temporary, fleeting, insubstantial, unable to withstand much in the way of the winds of change and the challenges of new lenses on truth that now buffer them routinely.

When those bubbles do finally burst, when disenchantment towards our governments and official expertise has been set loose, when the convenient untruths communicated by our digital media preferences start to unravel, when our resentments (and the entitlements to which they are often tethered) are allowed to overwhelm our collective solidarity even more than they already do now, then we have set the stage for fresh ugliness that even the excellent Security Council discussion on Friday on “digital threats” to peace and security could barely discern.  We have shaken and awakened our hunger, not so much for truth and the data to which it must remain attached, but for grievance-based vengeance, for our petty cancel culture and its righteous minions, for a “rules based order” created by powerful states and individuals who don’t play by the rules they advocate. And this is encouraged by a media and “information system” that often seems relentless in its attempts to manipulate emotions not help them reach maturity.

This is a larger problem even than the virus, even than the digital culture on which we increasingly rely and which now seems to offer many more opportunities to reinforce prejudice and distance than wisdom and connection.   We are being pushed into bubbles from many angles, but we often now offer little resistance and even less inclination to abandon their false security.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple as Oscar Wilde noted.  The question now is whether we have the “stomach” to pursue — with humility and even in longhand — the truths of our time along their winding, rocky path; and then create a post-COVID world of security, health, equity and beauty once we are fortunate enough to catch them.

 

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Star Wars: Guidelines for Reaching our New Normal, Dr. Robert Zuber

17 May

Evola 2

The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise.  Maya Angelou

It is hard work to control the workings of inclination and turn the bent of nature; but that it may be done, I know from experience. Charlotte Brontë

Something – the eternal ‘what’s the use?’ – sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis.  Gustave Flaubert

Where there is not community, trust, respect, ethical behaviors are difficult for the young to learn and for the old to maintain.  Robert Greenleaf

Even eighty-odd is sometimes vulnerable to vanity.  L.M. Montgomery

The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes. Frank Lloyd Wright

We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Samuel Ullman

One of the challenges for me of writing these weekly messages is resisting the temptation to focus on issues of national interest rather than on human interest or, as my organizational mandate would suggest, the multilateral interest.

My own country is completely at odds with itself now.  We attack the very people trying to save lives and manage a generation-shifting pandemic.   We have allowed the stresses of the moment, egged on by some tone-deaf leadership, to justify the release of demons we would have done better to keep in quarantine – not only those flashing guns and symbols of intolerance in front of cameras and legislatures, but also those making fortunes off the misery of others, going so far as to consciously divert resources meant for struggling families to line their own pockets yet again.

In this time of viral threat, we have created no common symbols of mourning for the many persons we have lost, no places of public esteem for those who have honored their oaths and thrown themselves into the most harrowing medical emergencies. Our leadership misrepresents the times and its challenges, leaving us all to double down on the mistrust of institutions – and each other – that defines our era in many respects.

And neither has this been a moment of ringing endorsement for multilateral alternatives.   The World Health Organization is being scapegoated, UN peacekeepers struggle under external threats and mandate confusion in several global regions, the UN’s general budget is under strain –reeling from decisions by key member states to withhold assessed contributions — and the UN’s humanitarian relief functions are experiencing both resource limitations and access barriers that make it difficult to bring aid to the millions suffering under violence that we seem almost powerless to prevent.

And the eminent Security Council remains a place of some paralysis, consumed by big-power stalemates over COVID origins, Israeli annexation plans, remnants of the Iranian nuclear agreement, unabated weapons flows to Libya, and much more.   Council members, at the direction of their national capitals, have some successes to which they can point – notably in Sudan and Colombia.   But the presence of so many unresolved conflicts – and this at a time when the global public is becoming more restless, not less – raises the specter of new agenda items for the Council on top of those it has already demonstrated an inability to resolve in a timely and effective manner.

As with our own projects and ambitions, some of the Council’s under-baked mandates are related to the ways in which it does its business.  An as was the case on Friday, the Council has been willing to take up issues related to working methods, understanding at least in part that how we do our business is as integral to our success as what the goals of that business are.   In other words, the manner in which we go about reaching for the stars has much to do with whether or not those stars become attainable.

As is typical for these “methods” sessions, the Council brought in briefers who are well-known and reliable to their interests, briefers armed with suggestions such as improvements in the system of “penholders” and sanctions committees, of better preparatory processes for incoming elected members, of restraints on the length of statements made in the open chamber, of avoiding what one called “adopt and forget” peacekeeping mandates, of working more closely with other UN entities to keep the Council from becoming, as China noted, the policy equivalent of a “grocery store.”

But at best, and despite calls from the UK and others for the Council to “lead with innovation and urgency,” the day’s truth lay more in Vietnam’s statement (on behalf of other elected members) — that the COVID crisis has “laid bare” the current limitations of this Council.  It simply is not the case, as one briefer suggested on Friday, that the global public judges the Council on the number and content of its resolutions.  No.  We judge the Council on the practical impact of those resolutions, on the Council’s willingness and ability to insist that policy text results in tangible, improved conditions for the many millions who yearn for relief from war, famine and disease.   These resolutions should be understood as opening gambits towards genuine change, not as ends in themselves and certainly not as excuses to downgrade “seized” into some version of unresponsive.

Policy differences aside, there is a bit of “heart sinking” for me in much of the multilateral scrutiny that we try to perform.  Simply put, I can’t resist expecting more of the people making these decisions in these precarious times, people who, too often, are indulgent of the changes they are willing to make but not of the changes that they need to make.  In such a scenario, we can likely maintain some measure of our collective ambition but have lost in large measure our capacity to “reach the hearts” of people who need to believe in us – our goals and methods — more than they do at present if the stars in our firmament of peace and sustainable development are ever to be reached.

I have considerable sympathy for diplomats who are trying to steer an effective policy course amidst severe budget constraints and conflicting messaging from national capitals.  And I have particular compassion for those who have toiled in the fields of peace and human rights, of humanitarian relief and sustainable development, for so many years and who now find that work not only unfulfilled but considerably unraveled by a virus and the selfishness, corruption and ethno-centrism which it has unleashed.

Maybe we simply didn’t do things in the best way.  Maybe our own working methods have been as flawed as those of the institutions we critique.  Fair enough.  But as some in our world want desperately to get back to “normal,” in some instances at the point of a gun, we who have lived a long while under the shadow of different promise need to model a more honest, thoughtful and courageous way forward – to endorse ambition, yes, but not the folly and vanity that often accompany it, follies which for us can include a lack of both mindfulness and the practical respect and compassion that can reassure people that leadership is more than high-sounding words in elite settings uncontaminated by the ills that affect large swaths of global communities.

While life does indeed become more beautiful for some as they age, for others it portends grave physical and economic limitations as well as for those of us in policy criticism from the young who feel – and not without cause – that any abandonment by us of our ideals for the world and its peoples, or any indulgence by us in “what’s the use” cynicism, only serves to make their work to reach a new and better “normal” that much more challenging.  This we cannot, should not do.

We are in trouble now to be sure, but there is opportunity and possibility – and hearts looking for connection and reassurance — still within our reach.  We who have long been in this work have a special responsibility to reflect and encourage, to reach out respectfully to those poised to take over for us as well as those whom we may have overlooked over the years. And we must do this as best as we are able without malice, without vanity or ego, without “wrinkled souls,” modifying our wisdom to context but not abandoning the ideals that have inspired us, albeit unevenly, over our lifespan.

Together, we still have what it takes to “control the workings of inclination” that are, in this moment, bringing us to the edge of an economic, health and rights precipice.  And those of us who have been at this for generations still have a role to play in avoiding that cliff.  But as we age, roles and methods must shift.  Our task now is to demonstrate the will to make the changes that we need to make, not only those we are willing to make.

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Mamma Mia: A Mother’s Day Message to Fit the Times, Dr. Robert Zuber

10 May

Through the blur, I wondered if I was alone or if other parents felt the same way I did – that everything involving our children was painful in some way.  Debra Ginsberg

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. Margaret Atwood

Women, who struggle and suffer pain to ensure the continuation of the human race, make much tougher and more courageous soldiers than all those big-mouthed freedom-fighting heroes put together.  Anne Frank

It’s come at last, she thought, the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache. Betty Smith

Being a parent wasn’t just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.  Jodi Picoult

Mothers today cannot just respond to their kids’ needs, they must predict them–and with the telepathic accuracy of Houdini. Susan Douglas

It is a chilly and blustery Mother’s Day morning in New York – more like late March than mid-May.  It is also another day when legions must stay physically distanced from their mothers who, if you are not still young enough to live at home, remain beyond the reach of direct contact regardless of their health or other life circumstances.   For some especially unfortunate souls, this Mother’s Day is destined to be their last, leaving this life in perhaps a more fearful and discouraging manner than could ever have been imagined – without those loved ones alongside whom they have stood for many long years now unable to stand by them at this time of their passing.

I have been in many such homes and hospital rooms in a prior life, and I can barely manage a more heartbreaking thought.

Of course not all that heartbreak, not all of that emotional uncertainty and longing, is confined to the edges of a mother’s resting place.  The virus has adjusted some of what “mother” means, including injecting positive new opportunities for some to bond with children still at home, allowing them to witness to changes in their children’s lives that they might otherwise have been too busy to appreciate.  But for many others it ushers in an intensifying fear that the children they have borne will now fall further out of the loop, fall further behind their peers, will forever be watching their backs while others have their eyes on what little still exists in their purses and wallets.  It is not clear yet what “opportunity” will mean for these children in the coming phase – for employment, for schooling, for access to public spaces without the threat of violence or discrimination.  And for too many mothers, it is not at all clear what they should do – what it is even possible to do – to ensure the safety and well-being of children when there are now so many viral and political forces allied against those interests, so many invisible threats poised for a dangerous incarnation.

In various parts of this country and others, some mothers today have decided to join a lengthening chorus line – egged on by preachers and politicians – deciding to roll the dice on their own and their children’s future, hoping that the virus will degrade before their family fortunes do, betting on behalf of their children that efforts to reconvene “normalcy” and recover livelihoods will spare them the loss of a parent.

These are choices that, in the overly-sentimentalized mother’s days of past years, would have been inconceivable.  Those days were about flowers, “I love you mommy” cards, and dinners outside the home.  And while we all recognized that such ceremonial expressions were often better for business than they were for mothers, we did them anyway, collapsing too-often the sentiments that might well have been more beneficially distributed over longer periods into one Sunday in May.

Indeed, during such times, we collectively indulged a caricature of “mother,” the self-less, stay-at-home force with a seemingly uncanny ability to predict the needs of children before the demanding and whining could commence, a self-serving, taken-for-granted “fabrication” of a parent that, in too many aspects, didn’t always hit whatever mark was intended by our scribbled cards and floral arrangements.

This caricature needs immediate amending. In policy spaces like the UN, our primary focus is on “women” rather than mothers, acknowledging skills too-long undervalued and ensuring spaces for participation that are (hopefully) part of a larger project of engagement which recognizes the large number of voices of all races, cultures, religions, genders and social classes who remain on the outside of political and peace processes at a time when they should already be finding themselves much closer to the center.

But among those mis-positioned voices are many mothers.  Within the UN system, it is the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) that retains a laser focus on mostly newer mothers and the even newer lives they are bringing into the world.   For many, the obstacles that must be overcome in order to ensure healthy births and equally healthy mothers to care for them are formidable indeed.   From food insecurity to limited hygiene, the challenges for new and expectant mothers in many global regions remain heart-wrenching despite the best efforts of UNFPA, UNICEF and partner NGOs.  And with the complicating factor of COVID-19, invisible bonds of misery are likely to be extended across the seas, connecting the fears of young mothers with those older mothers gasping for their final breaths.

All around the world, it seems, the lives of mothers are becoming more complex in their physical and emotional circumstances.  All around the world, the needs of mothers to have their voices registered in community and political life remain largely unmet.   All around the world, women continue to endure in relative obscurity the pain and struggle which so often accompany the gift of new life which they bear.  All around the world, those who nurture at least part of our common future must work too hard to offer their testimony on what that future should look like, and to have that testimony respected.

I entitled this post “Mamma Mia” because I was advised by colleagues of the many emotions that this phrase has come to embrace, especially for persons of Italian descent.   From fear and exasperation to joy and surprise, the phrase captures better than most the range of emotions – deep and real – that characterizes the lives of so many mothers, especially in this time of viral challenge.   Many mothers know the heartache that life seems poised to inflict on their children, and understand as well the limitations of their ability to protect them from it.  And many mothers continue to bear at least portions of this heartache in private as the world swirls around them in all of its anxiety, greed and self-importance, oblivious in the main to what the current, pervasive and often cruel mis-applications of our human condition mean for the lives of the children who are just getting started walking their long and uncertain path:

Oblivious as well to the emotional and physical needs of mothers devoted — this day and every day — to accompanying such children while they walk.

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Gold Rush: Ending the Confinement of Youth Voices, Dr. Robert Zuber

3 May

eni

It’s going to take some time, this time. Karen Carpenter/Carole King

What a weary time those years were — to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability. Charles Bukowski

This is the age you are broken or turned into gold. Antonia Michaelis

Our lives were just beginning, our favorite moment was right now, our favorite songs were unwritten. Rob Sheffield

Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others. Hermann Hesse

The adult mind can lie with untroubled conscience and a gay composure, but in those days even a small deception scoured the tongue, lashing one against the stake itself. Daphne du Maurier

This past Friday I was privileged to log in to a presentation by students of Otis College of Art and Design as part of a class directed by Gina Valona and focused on creating conditions for “inclusive governance” and “environmental stewardship” through their organization T.I.A. — Transparent, Inclusive and Accountable government for all.

Her coaching of these young people has clearly been superb, and the results were stunning. Despite the COVID-inspired disruptions, limitations and discouragements, these students created a series of hopeful projects which, if they could be funded and duly implemented, would better connect the people of Los Angeles with their natural and built environments, helping them make healthier decisions, connect more effectively with government officials, and engage a much wider array of stakeholders in the longer-term, post-COVID work of sustainability. From mobile curriculum and “Green Mapping” to design for a TIA Mascot and a Los Angeles Environmental Center, these young voices were determined to be recognized amidst the gloom of an isolating, stealth virus and an economy on the brink.

This isn’t the only youth-energized project that we come across. We have extraordinary young people passing through our joint office regularly, many working on initiatives dedicated to lifting the veil of weapons-related policies that have been  allowed to continue threatening entire societies. And we have written previously about the (#1MillionTrees2020) eco-leadership of Burundi’s Emmanuel Niyoyabikoze which actually attracts more attention on our twitter feed than any other initiative we cover.

As we surely recognize, there is plenty more where that came from: Caring for the planet and its diverse communities. Living for others.

From our vantage point there are many good reasons to lend whatever coaching and publicity we can to youth initiatives. We recognize the need for our political and social leadership to get younger, more diverse, more attentive to the values and aspirations of generations now and those to come, more sensitive to the unique constellation of obstacles and limitations – from pandemics to climate threats – that force too many young people to sit on their often-legitimate impatience rather than directing their abundant energy to more personally satisfying and socially productive ends.

From those whose early lives have been dominated by the aspirations of schooling to the even greater number of young people seeking more immediate employment opportunities to keep their families fed and safe, we struggle still to make space for young people, to exit the ride we’ve been on for some time and let the next group of younger ticket holders take their seats. Their collective clock is ticking and too many of us seem deaf to its ominous warnings, more akin to a time-bomb than a travel alarm.

The UN struggles at times to hear as well, as do many of the governments which form its membership. But this past Monday, under the leadership of April’s president Dominican Republic, the Security Council revisited its responsibilities to promote and ensure participation through its Youth, Peace and Security agenda (Resolution 2250). Among the more compelling statements was the one delivered by UN Youth Envoy Jayathma Wickramanayake who questioned whether governments are up to the challenge of creating a viable, multi-generational, change framework. As Belgium made clear, rightly in our view, if the lives of young people are to bear the scars of climate change and pandemics, hate speech and economic upheaval, shouldn’t they also be consulted?

The Youth Envoy made additional reference to the frequent media images of “irresponsible youth” while lamenting what she sees as the less frequent images of young people renouncing violence and caring for the needs of their communities. Her statement points to one of the problems with discussions of this sort, the endless struggling over stereotypical imaging that mis-defines entire groups of people, indeed in this instance, entire generations; theirs of course, but my own and others as well.

The larger truth is that efforts of young people to find their voice, to find their place, to move past the obstacles that often seem both formidable and endless – these are often very personal, even intimate struggles embodying dimensions both individual and generational. They are struggles now buffeted by pandemic distancing and economic uncertainty, but also by gross inequalities that represent a large and hostile foot on the necks of millions of young people who will never be invited to policy discussions or consulted about the path forward in this seemingly impediment rich and opportunity poor world. If this is indeed the stage of life, as it was for me long ago, where we are either “broken or turned into gold,” we have for too long accepted “broken” as the inevitable outcome for so many young people, ensuring that their often-considerable idealism and rightful sensitivity to the hypocrisy of we older folks who purport to “lead” them will be forever buried under a virtual avalanche of survival-related concerns.

At the UN on Monday, one of the most successful statements was delivered by the Ambassador of Niger, during which he pointed to the remarkable “optimism” expressed by many youth in his youngest of the world’s continents despite impacts on their young lives from violence, disease and unemployment. I have been in many parts of this “youngest continent” and have seen the talent taking shape in many forms and at many levels. I beheld as well the frustrations related to forms of economics and governance that are not making sufficient space for youth nor are they doing enough to nurture the skills and aspirations of young people, including those for whom displacement remains as likely a prospect as a university degree. How long will governments interpret youth advocacy and energy as a threat rather than an engine of social renewal? How long can this youth optimism possibly survive when the “gold” they might well become is so often ignored or dismissed by their elders?

It is surely a “weary” time for many of the world’s young people, a time when levels of trust in older folks are often lower even than levels of opportunity.   One of the blessings of youth has been, and surely remains, its varying but considerable levels of resilience, especially to disappointment.  We have all made messes in our lives, fallen out of line, suffered pain and heartbreak, sometimes self-inflicted.  Many of us have made decisions about labor and love that resulted in less than we imagined but from which we were able to move on rather deftly, to learn what we could and head out again on an uncertain, unpaved path. Many of us have boxed ourselves into corners but managed to escape their confinement and resolved never to find ourselves in such a place again.

But this time seems different, different of course from what people like me experienced long ago, but also different in terms of what is required of the youth of today. In this age of viral loads and climate meltdown, of mountains of debt and economies too strained to service them, the message to youth too often is that we expect them to remain patient while keeping their lives on hold, restraining their tongues, deferring their dreams, and socially isolating in confined spaces. It makes me sadder than I can communicate to think of so many energetic young people stuck in a starting gate with no clear sense of when the horses on which they are sitting will be released.

I know that the release will come. The obstacles will shift. The mean-spirits that dominate our political discourse will give way to kinder, more honest voices. The economic addictions that have imperiled the planet will evolve into a softer consumption. And the recognition will grow that young people are neither saviors nor narcissists, but people of varying portions of optimism, skill and energy who are often quite able and willing to help us all make the transitions we in our socially-distanced, stay-in-place realities are now so desperate to make.

But sadly, much of that is unlikely to happen as soon as it should.  The old habits and fresh challenges of the moment seem much too daunting. We must all keep working at ending the confinement of youth voices, youth potential; but also warning them honestly.

It’s going to take some time, this time.

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Repentance: An Earth Day Imperative, Dr. Robert Zuber

26 Apr

Sun Stroke

Earth Day, a useful idea that could only occur to a civilization estranged from Earth. Hugh Roberts

In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. Carl Sagan

I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.  Pearl S. Buck

But for us there was no wilderness, nature was not dangerous but hospitable, not forbidding but friendly.  Chief Luther Standing Bear

It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility.  Rachel Carson

In this state of total consumerism – which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves – all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. Wendell Berry

It was inevitable. This week, as states in the US controversially prepared to “open” sectors of their economies, a spate of articles has appeared proclaiming what would otherwise appear to be obvious: that many of us here in the privileged west have had just about enough of confinement, enough of economic uncertainty, enough of a contact-free life.

And perhaps most importantly, enough of cycles of news and “information” that offer too-little in the way of guidance or comfort, that fail to reassure us that our leadership is listening to the right people, making the right connections, demonstrating that they are as concerned with the loss of lives as with the loss of elections. It is this dissonance that, more than anything, piles frustration on top of loss, that makes us wonder if anyone is telling the truth about the values and habits we still need to adjust, the planetary matters to which we still need to pay attention, let alone for how long our “lives in limbo” are destined to remain in that state.

For all of its warts — and we have called attention to many over the years — the UN in the midst of its own forced isolation has been trying hard to keep our collective attention focused on the big picture –on science more than politics; on fairness and solidarity with states unprepared for viral threats still to materialize; on support needed to soften the blows of the devastating economic fallout that SG Guterres referenced this week in a virtual meeting on development finance, fallout that might well push states on the margins of viability into deeper holes of inequality and decimated livelihoods despite the global community’s best preventive efforts.

And as highlighted during two valuable Security Council meetings this week, we were all reminded that many of our global ills, while “reinforced” by COVID infections (as noted by Fiji), were not “invented” as the virus washed up on our collective shores. On Tuesday, under leadership from April’s president The Dominican Republic, briefers from the main UN agencies tasked with enhancing food security for millions painted a most disturbing picture. None was more devastating than the World Food Programme’s David Beasley who used his video time to “raise the alarm” regarding the current “hunger pandemic” that exists alongside the COVID pandemic, hunger which has multiple causes beyond COVID including armed violence, locust plagues, economic collapse and a spate of climate-related natural disasters. “We need peace,” he pleaded, in order that we might more successfully address both a looming famine for millions and still-growing COVID infections in all their causes and manifestations.

And then there is the proverbial elephant in the contemporary policy room, a threat which looms large in our panoply of challenges and which affects all others, and that is the climate threat. Despite the welcome improvements in air quality and emboldened wildlife that have resulted from our current social isolation, our ice caps continue to melt, our oceans continue to warm, species of all sorts still face immanent extinction, and calls in many parts of the world to “return to normal” raise the specter of new waves of pollution, extraction, warming and even violence once this initial stage of the current viral threat has run its course.

I am reminded in this context by a cartoon which appeared recently in the Economist depicting the human race slugging it out with COVID while a much larger opponent, that of climate change, looms in the background, egging on COVID to land a few good punches to make we humans even less able, willing and focused to engage our larger and even more formidable foe.

While there is still some debate among Security Council members regarding the specific impacts of climate change on conflict, a Wednesday (Earth Day) Arria Formula discussion organized by France and others focused on precisely this linkage. The briefers, including USG DiCarlo, insisted that climate threats will surely outlast the current COVID pandemic and that such threats tend to multiply occasions for conflict in much the same way, as Niger opined this week, that COVID has multiplied misery for populations already impacted by climate-affected flooding and drought.

The takeaway’s from this Arria meeting included a call from Crisis Group’s Malley to “shorten the timeline” on how we both prevent conflict and prepare states to respond more rapidly and effectively to a range of climate-affected threats.  It also featured a reminder from the ever-thoughtful Ambassador of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Rhonda King, that “our darkest hours” require more constructive forms of engagement that can yield people-centered solutions.

But how are such solutions to be pursued? During the Arria, the Stockholm Peace Research Institute’s Smith called for a “larger knowledge community” to engage these difficult relationships.   And there is surely good value to be had in bringing together policymakers, academics, scientists and other “experts” to examine challenges in earnest and suggest pathways forward.

But my own preference is for “learning communities” that can integrate but move beyond expertise to help those of us now tethered to our television sets and I Pads examine our relationship to a world in which some have taken far more than their share while others have yet to find their portion; persons who can’t bring themselves to pay sufficient attention to their own “helpless dependence” on economic interests that create material addictions and anxieties that we can now scarcely manage, that place endless consumer distractions in the way of a deeper sense of humility and wonder, indeed of repentance itself.

It may seem like an odd segue from COVID and climate impacts to personal repentance, but I am convinced that solutions to our multiple challenges will simply require more from us than isolation and social distancing: more than policy and expertise; more than a mere “pause” in our often-stubborn me-first-ness; more than simple apologies and facile commitments to “do better;” more than expressions of anxiety that get us no closer to personal growth; more than an annual day of appreciation for a planet which we then collectively desecrate the remainder of the year.

Within the confines of our COVID-restricted private spaces, while we impatiently await official permission to resume larger portions of our lives, please give a bit of thought to the ways in which those lives have interacted to the detriment of our neighbors, our communities and indeed the planet itself.  Repentance for such interactions requires much of those who choose that route – the acknowledgement of mistaken ways, the firm resolve to amend those ways, and the attentiveness and perseverance needed to turn verbal commitments into life-affirming habits, to trade away vestiges of anxiety and indifference for greater portions of humility and wonder. In these and other instances, repentance is a practice well-suited to the times.

Whether we accept it or not, whether we like it or not, we are not going to easily be rescued from our folly; not by experts or governments alone, certainly not by beings visiting from other celestial realms. The rescue we now require will only be secured if it includes ample portions of a more attentive, humble and resolute version of ourselves, indeed, all of ourselves.

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A Catch-22: Unpacking South Africa’s socio-economic plan amidst the global Corona-pandemic, by Sanet Madonsela

22 Apr

Editor’s Note:  Earlier today, the UN Security Council discussed the impact of COVID-19 on security and development options in the Great Lakes Region.  Here, Sanet Madonsela assesses her country’s current economic-health tradeoffs that, if not properly handled, will merely exacerbate misery in a country already experiencing deep economic uncertainties, instances of institutional corruption, and uneven access to health and other services. 

On the 21st of April 2020, South Africa’s President, Cyril Ramaphosa announced the country’s plan to inject a staggering R500 billion into the country’s social and economic support package amidst the global Corona-pandemic. This support package makes up 10% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). It is said to be the country’s biggest one-time fiscal outlay. While some economists believe the stimulus package to be well targeted, questions have arisen regarding how it will be funded. Of the amount announced by the President, only a mere R130 billion will be reprioritized from the country’s existing budget. Ramaphosa stated that the rest would be sourced internally as well as from international finance institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, BRICS New Development Bank, and the African Development Bank. Financial support from the IMF and the World Bank for Covid-19 is said to not come with the usual calls for structural adjustment. However, the political left, in South Africa remains skeptical of receiving funds from these institutions.

It is important to note that South Africa’s economy was bleak before the outbreak of the global pandemic. The country was experiencing a technical recession, credit rating downgrades, rotational power outages, and high unemployment levels. This has resulted in business groups and economists requesting the reopening of the economy. The President has experienced increased pressure due to the economic impact of the current national lockdown. He has responded stating that the country would take a risk-adjusted approach to dealing with this challenge. While opening the economy could ease the economic burden on the country, it could result in a massive outbreak of the virus. Instead, the country has implemented measures to cushion the blow of the pandemic. Amongst these are: subsidies for businesses and wages, social grants catering to the poor and vulnerable and the prioritization of the health sector’s budget. While the health budget will be boosted, details regarding how the health system will be capacitated have not been provided. While these measures could assist in closing the inequality gap in the country, they can create further opportunities for looting given the endemic corruption existing in the country.

The global Corona-virus pandemic has managed to expose the many internal challenges the country is faced with. It has highlighted the shocking levels of poverty, unemployment and inequality in the country. While some citizens have eased into the nationwide lockdown, others are unable to do so as they are confronted with overcrowding, poor sanitation and food insecurity. They face greater nutritional and hunger challenges. Some even fear dying of hunger more than they fear dying from the virus.

It is worth noting that that the lockdown of schools means that the 9-million children who normally benefit from school nutritional programmes will not have access to food. While government has implemented the provision of food parcels to impoverished communities, its’ efforts have been countered by officials allegedly hoarding and selling food parcels. This means that resources allocated to assist the most vulnerable, including vulnerable children, are now being redirected to opportunistic government officials and their supporters. They do this through exploiting the government’s now-relaxed procurements system in the midst of this global crisis.

While the government’s immediate social grant increase is welcome, it should be noted that it would be insufficient as social grants tend to be redirected towards household expenses of adults who are usually employed. The Minister of Labour and Employment, Thulas Nxesi, confirmed that the country’s 3-million informal sector workers would not be covered by the department’s measures to lessen the impact of the national lockdown, as they are not registered for the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF). Government however, has now introduced a temporary distress unemployment grant to assist those who are not currently receiving any other grants or UIF. It is estimated that over a million people will lose their jobs as a result of the pandemic. The question now is “Where to from here?”

Like most countries, South Africa is faced with a catch 22 situation. Should they open up the economy to reduce the economic impact? Alternatively, should they extend the lockdown to ease the burden on a health system seeking to flatten the curve? Any viable solution would have to take into consideration the vulnerable health system, the high levels of unemployment, low economic growth, and the reduced income per capita. While some trade-off may seem sensible, it should be noted that an extended lockdown could undermine health services such as the immunization of children; while the blow to the economy could be fatal. Instead, a good mitigation strategy should be put in place to deal with the virus until a vaccine is available. It should be stressed that the immediate removal of the lockdown without a clear health and economic plan could result in both high levels of mortality and economic downfall.

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Dream Catcher: Perseverance in the Business of Change, Dr. Robert Zuber

19 Apr

See the source image

It’s strange how dreams get under your skin and give your heart a test for what’s real and what’s imaginary.  Jason Mraz

Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.  Louisa May Alcott

Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon.  Gustave Flaubert

I turned my nightmares into fireflies and caught them in a jar. Laini Taylor

Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.  Arthur Golden

I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight.  Charles Dickens

In my dreams, I never have an age.  Madeleine L’Engle

As affirmed by numerous medical professionals, among the more unsettling dynamics of the current COVID pandemic is its impact on our interior life. The dreams of many of us, myself included, are becoming more intense, more graphic, in some instances more frightening, dredging up experiences and reactions we’ve long forgotten (or in some cases merely wished to forget).

Part of this, of course, is the unconscious recovery of negative impacts from those other times in our lives when we felt a bit “shipwrecked,” when we could do little more than metaphorically turn our despairing eyes towards a horizon that seemed to offer some respite from our loneliness, isolation, currently taking the forms of being physically distanced from those we care about but also at some distance from what has given at least some of us a sense of identity and belonging in the world.

These are not trifling matters.  While most of us understand that our primary task at this moment is to keep ourselves and others out of intensive care, and to do what we can to ensure that children and the most vulnerable can find sufficient resources and medical attention amidst the current deprivations and restrictions of movement, we also recognize that, just a few short weeks ago, many of our lives were defined by a different set of routines, indeed in more than a few instances a different set of dreams.

Some of those routines and dreams had probably outlived their useful lives, were bringing us more anxiety than fulfillment; indeed were often residing in some realm beyond the reach of conscious choice and which in too many instances no longer approximated what we claimed to be our “highest aspirations” for ourselves or others.

But whether fulfilling to us or not, whether good for the planet or not, it is no easy matter to scrutinize and revise years of personal and professional habit, to let our best dreams “get under our skin” once again and help us to define what is both possible and preferable, to enable us to “strive afresh” in a world that, for now at least, doesn’t seem to be encouraging striving in any form.

Of all the reading I did this week, I was most impressed by an article suggested by a longtime friend and colleague, Lester Ruiz. The piece called “Beyond the Blizzard” (click here) raises the possibility that, in some fundamental sense, the “businesses” we have been associated with “no longer exist.” They (including Global Action) no longer exist because this pandemic is NOT like a blizzard, not like that scenario where we hunker down for a few days, shovel the sidewalks and driveways as best we can, wait for the sun to effect a bit of melting, and slowly get back to our normal ways.

So what is our normal now? How do we move forward with the most essential of our tasks and commitments? How do we overcome the anxieties that now dominate so many of our sleeping hours? How do we connect our deepest dreams to which, in some instances, we have only recently become reacquainted, with our current, indeterminate, shelter-in-place realities?

Most everyone has a story to tell in this context, some more harrowing than others, some indeed harrowing beyond the imagination of most of us.   Our story is not that at all, but is certainly a confirmation of the claim that the business we have been in for 20 years, the business for which we are known and have been funded generously by others – that business in some sense no longer exists. We cannot mentor young people at the UN because neither they nor we have access to headquarters and may not for some time. We are permitted to follow only the smallest portion of what diplomats are discussing now by video teleconference. And while the UN continues to make selective progress on conflicts such as in Yemen and seeks to protect its World Health Organization from unscrupulous attacks, it is the pandemic that dominates every aspect of policy as it dominates media coverage across the board. It is the pandemic that calls our priorities and commitments to account, even as it restricts options for keeping those that survive scrutiny in the public eye.

Like many others, we have to figure out the “business” that we are in now.   Perhaps it is, after all is said and done, the business of dreams, those dreams of fairness and equity, of access to clean water and unpolluted air, of leadership that actually inspires our better selves, of learning that both fulfills our obligations to the young and helps us to uphold and extend the best of the human spirit, of peoples that have cause to fear less and trust more, of weapons that are far less accessible that medical gear.

The dramatic image at the top of this post is of a “dream catcher.” I have several hanging throughout my New York apartment courtesy of Mac Legerton, the late Linda Bull and other friends. These symbols of indigenous wisdom act in my home as a “filter” of sorts, catching the most debilitating nightmares (as though they were fireflies destined for a jar) and allowing the best of dreams to pass.

This world needs the best of our dreams to pass, and not only to pass but to find their full expression on a planet now reeling from the “adversity” of viruses in our midst and others yet to come. Those “ageless” dreams that we claim to have inspired our own work and that of so many others – including dreams we have misplaced or failed to follow over the years – we can here acknowledge that the nurturing and sharing of such dreams may now indeed be our work in the world, the best contribution we can make to healing our planet and each other amidst the current viral adversity.

If so, we can only hope and pray that we are up to the challenge.

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Covid-19 and Global Solidarity, By Professor Hussein Solomon

17 Apr

Editor’s Note:  Reader of this space are quite familiar with the words of Hussein Solomon, a good friend of Global Action, a leader of our efforts to promote rapid-reaction peacekeeping, and a distinguished lecturer in the Department of Political Studies and Governance at the University of the Free State in South Africa. Here he rightly calls attention to global problems (including the current viral pandemic) that can only be solved through a more deliberative global solidarity. 

In April 1994 the heinous apartheid regime in my country, South Africa, came to an end as its citizens celebrated its first democratic elections. April 1994 was also the beginning of the Rwandan genocide with almost a million Tutsis killed – a stark reminder of the grave dangers of ethnocentric nationalism. The demise of apartheid South Africa, more than anything else, was a demonstration of global solidarity in action. Anti-apartheid movements existed across the globe and these put pressure on their respective governments who in turn sanctioned the apartheid pariah. At one point, 90 percent of all South African exports were under one sanction or another compelling the Nationalist Party into negotiations with its arch-rival, the African National Congress. This then paved the way for a democratic dispensation to come into being. There was no similar attention or international solidarity with Rwanda as the massacres unfolded. Indeed, the United Nations responses were woefully inadequate – a fact acknowledged by Kofi Annan himself. But, it is unfair to lay the blame on the UN itself. The UN is held hostage by the national interests of its member states and these national interests do not always accord with the global interest.

Recognizing, the imperative for global solidarity and action and in an effort to prevent more Rwandas and Bosnias I joined other like-minded people across the globe through Global Action to Prevent War to push for the creation of a United Nations Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS) which was to serve as a rapid response force under the direct authority of the UN. The force was to consist of between 15,000 and 18,000 personnel and were to be a permanent, standing force pre-positioned at UNEPS-designated bases around the world. Despite our best lobbying efforts, no formal UNEPS arose as many nation-states continued to operate within the framework of the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. As conflicts raged across the globe, as death and destitution became the norm from Mindanao to Darfur and Colombia, states stubbornly guarded their sovereignty whilst paying mere lip service to global solidarity. In an act reeking of selfishness, political elites recognized that in a rapidly globalizing world, insecurity anywhere threatens security everywhere; whilst at the same time refusing to surrender an iota of sovereignty to an international body to secure the very citizens they are legally obliged to protect.

Fast forward to 2020, with the Covid-19 virus having already infected 2.2 million people, and resulting in the deaths of almost 145,000 of the world’s citizens. Political elites continue to act as if national responses will turn the tide against a pandemic which shows no respect for sovereignty or national borders. The European Union’s shocking aloofness to Italy’s plight in the face of Covid-19 demonstrates that even at regional level such solidarity does not exist. Perhaps the most selfish display of this kind of “leadership” emanates from Trump’s America which saw him attack the World Health Organization and prepare to cut off funds to the organization at the very point when the WHO constitutes the only truly international body to coordinate responses to a global pandemic.

In facing an existential threat of this magnitude, now more than ever we need to surrender aspects of national sovereignty and embrace global solidarity. This would mean strengthening the authority and capabilities of the WHO. It would mean compiling a global roster of health professionals. It would mean truly global efforts at finding a vaccine. And it would mean global production of everything from masks and face shields to ventilators. Only global solidarity can see us through this crisis.

As the pandemic moves to African shores, such solidarity would mean strengthening regional structures such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and our continental body – the African Union. It would mean accepting and taking our lead from the WHO. And it would mean bringing on board expertise from non-state actors like Doctors without Borders, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the International Red Cross and Red Crescent. It would mean embracing the true spirit of Ubuntu.

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Secret Service: Uncovering Commitments to Seeing and Knowing, Dr. Robert Zuber

12 Apr

How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see?   Bob Dylan

She was flushed and felt intoxicated with the sound of her own voice and the unaccustomed taste of candor. It muddled her like wine, or like a first breath of freedom. Kate Chopin

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. George Orwell

So we explain it to ourselves, justify it enough to sleep. And then we bury it deep, so deep we can almost pretend it never happened. Jesse Kirby

Lie until even you believe it – that’s the real secret. Holly Black

How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves – our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding. Andrew Sean Greer

As much of the monotheistic world finds itself in the midst of annual devotions and preparations, we find ourselves in the throes of what the theologian Paul Tillich used to refer to as the “already and not yet,” the often bumpy road we have collectively traveled and the better-maintained stretches that potentially lie ahead, the places in which we have currently invested our hope and confidence and the changes we have yet to make to ensure our common, sustainable future.

In discerning this unusual time, it is reassuring that so many voices in diverse settings are now questioning the virtue of a “return to normal,” recognizing the restoration of nature and community which, in many instances, has been a welcome by-product of human quarantine. Many of us questioned the viability of the path that we have fallen upon, the ride that we have been on for such a long time, in part because we claimed to have forgotten how to disembark.   It seems that it took a virus, and the utterly reckless deaths and disruptions –so often to persons living in poverty– that have occurred in its wake to pierce through at least some of our stubborn allegiance to structures of economy and society that have literally been killing us for some time.

And yet as we exit the seasons of Lent and Passover and enter the season of Ramadan, it is not clear that we have yet pinpointed the specific changes that we collectively need to make, changes that are being undermined by much of our leadership as much as encouraged.   We focus now on things like fabric for masks, as well we should, but still too many heroic health workers remain without their full protection. And, in a paradoxical sense, we have yet to take down the metaphorical masks that we wear each and every day, the masks made of flesh that fail to keep out the virus but which keep our lies and secrets deeply buried, so deep that they act like the earth’s molten core, affecting most every aspect of our lives from a depth that is largely beyond our reach.

And so before we completely shake off the beneficial effects of our holy seasons, before we book our return trip to the familiarity of gross inequalities, clogged arteries (streets and veins), polluted cities and waterways, weapons (forever it seems) on the march, and resolutions and legislation focused on the health and security of “horses that have already left the barn,” let’s take a moment for an “unaccustomed taste of candor,” a look at tasks that we can undertake  from the relative (for some) comfort and connectivity of the places where we are waiting out the viral storm.

One suggestion is that we examine our collective proclivity to highly selective perception, the skill we have honed to acknowledge only the information that suits our purposes or that helps us cover mistakes that we make but refuse to own.

Our virus-affected politics are now drowning in such selectivity.   “Nobody could have seen this coming,” one after another leader maintains.   “Nobody knew the extent of the threat,” insist others.   In instance after instance, those who should know better (and in fact did know better) employ the “plausible deniability” card, the notion that “information never reached my desk,” “I never saw the memo,” and so forth. And this is generally linked to the altogether suspect claim by that very same leadership that “once they knew” they “did the right thing” with determination and resolve.

Many people want to be convinced by this, so much so that once these lies are exposed, once it becomes clear from media reports and leaks by people close to power that our leadership turned its collective head and pretended not to see, the focus has already shifted from the pandemic we could have done more to prevent to the pandemic which we are anxious to move past – to bury the dead, take in the vaccine once its ready, and get those shopping malls, lending institutions and cruise ships back on line.

There are two points to make here in this context. The first is that it is not only leadership that turns its head when it is convenient to do so.   To some degree we are all “jellyfish” on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding, adjusting our metaphorical shape to fit the times rather than insisting that our longstanding self-deceptions escape their prisons and share the disinfecting light.   We choose to turn our own heads more than we acknowledge; turn away from persons in need or from the internal rubble of disappointments and deceptions that impacts so many of our movements and reactions.  And we pretty much all employ a now-familiar brand of deniability, a narrative about “missing emails and phone calls” that we simply don’t want to deal with, of sharing the half of the truth that puts us in a more favorable light, of acting as though we don’t see and hear what we clearly see and hear.

This is what we do.   It may not cost lives but it makes the lives we live less authentic and less connected; in some sense making them less of a life.

The second point pertains to the implications of our increasingly securitized societies. I often find it painfully amusing that in an age of drones and spy satellites that can determine what people are reading from a distance of hundreds of miles; of increasingly sophisticated forms of espionage, ubiquitous surveillance and cell phone cameras, and websites that relentlessly track our personal preferences and drag intimate details of our personal lives out from the dark for inspection and (often) ridicule; that leadership with regular access to updated intelligence and expertise from all corners of the earth can so often get away with “not knowing.”

Most often, they only pretend not to know. They only pretend not to see.

These willful deficits of knowledge and perception have become the cardinal tools with which our leadership too often justifies a failure to act, or more precisely, a failure to act in a manner that is both timely and sufficiently robust. These are the tools that allow leadership to sleep at night while so many others remain sleepless, wondering how their families are going to manage another crisis not of their making, survive another opportunity for our “not knowing” leadership to consolidate their political and economic power at the expense of the many who were barely holding on before this virus cut through their remaining options like a hot knife.

As we emerge from the worst of this current viral iteration as well as our own special seasons of faith, we must do better than run towards a now-romanticized version of normalcy and the muddled “truths” that underlie its attractions. We must do better than to allow the falsehoods that have enabled so much of our broken politics and economics — as well as those that exert so much power over our individual lives from their deep and hidden places — to resume their perches of illegitimate authority.

Many of us have more time on our hands now than we ever thought we would.  Let’s use some of that to insist that our leadership — and we ourselves — examine and expose the places of secrecy and willful ignorance that run contrary to the core of our faith traditions and that are, even now, paving fresh pathways of misery and deceit.

Our “not yet” can truly be brighter than our “already,” but only as we admit to knowing and seeing what we actually know and see, and to insist that our leadership does likewise.

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Dark Cover: A Plea for Greater Policy Vigilance, Dr. Robert Zuber

5 Apr

From:  University of Oregon

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. Carl Jung

So many distractions, when all she wanted was silence, so she could understand what was going on. Rehan Khan

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me; all day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. Sylvia Plath

Father McKenzie, writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear. No one comes near. The Beatles

The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow. Carson McCullers

So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak to one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Yes, we may be in the midst of some great existential crisis, but we’re simply too busy to notice. Douglas Rushkoff

God’s creatures who cried themselves to sleep stirred to cry again. Thomas Harris

This was another of those weeks where the profundity of the quotations above is likely to overwhelm the wisdom of the prose below.

There were indeed some items of hopeful policy significance this week beyond the medical madness.  At the UN, the General Assembly a resolution was tabled that affirmed the critical importance of multilateral cooperation necessary (in the words of Mexico) to ensure global access to medicines, vaccines and medical equipment to fight COVID-19. The announcement of the resolution was followed by pleas (from ourselves and others) that this resolution be swiftly actionable within and between member states.

Also this week, the Security Council presidency turned over to the Dominican Republic for April, a move which not only signaled a month of kind and competent leadership, but which virtually guaranteed that the Council would take up the peace and security implications of COVID-19, which to our mind and those of many others, are implications overdue for consideration.  Indeed, a briefing by the Secretary-General provisionally scheduled for this coming week will likely touch both on COVID-19 response and his related call for a global cease fire to ensure response effectiveness.

That said, there are still grave dangers lurking amidst the “corona darkness” that threaten many millions.   As we noted two weeks ago, and despite the SGs call for a global cease fire, conflict still ranges in Libya, killings still persist in the Anglophone regions of Cameroon, bombs keep falling on Yemen, homes continue to be demolished in the Occupied Territories, weapons access spreads unabated.  And while the current lull in human activity seems to have brought about a brief, welcome respite for parts of the natural world, too many of us seem poised to produce and consume with a vengeance once the “all clear” signal can be heard across the globe.

And the current danger runs deeper than merely taking our eyes off global situations that still require our active vigilance.   For the virus has inadvertently provided cover for political leaders to assume powers they shouldn’t, and make decisions they shouldn’t, on the assumption that our attention is fully distracted by mask making  and hand washing, by figuring out how to pay our bills and providing plausible explanations to our children for why their playgrounds have been closed, why their schools and daycare have been shut down, why they must now keep at least six feet distant from the people they have routinely run to hug.

Such distractions are legitimate and understandable. But they are also allowing our political leadership — swaths of which have proven themselves to be far more ambitious than competent – to make decisions “under cover” of the current viral darkness, often with implications which we are too distracted now to follow but that serve to double down on policies that are as likely to punish political adversaries as heal division; that are as likely to strip besieged families of their full complement of economic and health options as to help restore their dignity and ability to care for elders and children.

Historically speaking, it is not unusual for unscrupulous leadership to use crises (of which this is surely a major one) as an excuse to consolidate power, punish opposition, strip citizens of human rights and otherwise centralize authority. In the current virus crisis we see elements of all of these in societies as far-flung as Hungary, Brazil, the Philippines and the US. The power grabs; the misuses of funds; the consolidation of resources which are then parceled out based on loyalty rather than need; the daily attempts to manipulate information flows, putting out narratives which are almost completely self-serving rather than public-serving.

I am obviously more familiar with what is happening in the US though my eyes remain as attentive as I can keep them to stories from other regions written by journalists and others with contacts and perspective, often taking risks with their ears pinned to the ground.   And the pattern in my country is one that is steadily being mimicked in other parts of the world: the endless self-congratulations; the equally endless lying, or at least speaking without knowing; rhetorical “explanations” that scramble media outlets and sow public confusion; the shrinking of options for medical care and for exercising the right to vote; the repeated implication that the interests of leadership and their friends take precedence over the common interests.

One common thread in all of this is the assumption of these erstwhile leaders that we are simply too busy to notice – too distracted by the logistical and emotional burdens of coping with a crisis that (as one of my friends noted) we can’t see, can’t smell, can’t track its own stealth. It is enough just being ourselves now, tending to anxious children, navigating grocery stores and pharmacies, writing sermons (and other opinions) that “no one will hear,”caring for sick loved ones and, in the worst of scenarios, watching them die at a distance and then being buried with none coming near. God’s children (if you will) are too often crying themselves to sleep and then stirring to cry again.

And under cover of this “corona darkness,” the very leaders who ignored the threat whose impacts they could well have minimized – certainly prepared for with more integrity and resolve – the very leaders who allow their closest supporters to exploit the rules that others are struggling to follow; these people are, in more than a few instances, using the crisis as a back-door opportunity to push their own interests and agendas beyond where they could push them through any other door. All of this scheming is taking place while the discouragement descends on more and more people; while the distractions multiply and intensify; while the bonds of human connection become further frayed; while people remain legitimately consumed by the immediate, including the immediacy of family protection.

What Sylvia Plath referred to as “malignity,” is appropriate in this context. We know that temptations are ever-present for people in power (at whatever level of power) to take advantage of “opportunities” provided by crises to see what they can get away with, to fill the airways with silence-busting nonsense such that people are severely challenged just to figure out what is going on around them. This is nefarious business under the best of circumstances. But when those who dismissed and even mocked the warnings of the coming darkness then turn around and attempt to exploit its cover, one is challenged to find the most appropriate condemnation. It hasn’t come to me yet.

In our own smaller policy context, we were among the groups these past weeks calling for “media distancing” from the counter-scientific half-truths, utter manipulations of timelines and prior pronouncements, and other often-misleading proclamations coming from some of our political leadership.   We know — if we had ever forgotten — that we need better now from our media, from our civil society, from organizations such as ours. As the political elite cleans house of anyone deemed “disloyal,” even highly-respected Naval Commanders and those tasked with federal oversight, we need more people in that space of discernment and analysis, and we need to better honor those who have already risked much to keep that work alive.

In some instances we are now seeing the positive benefits of that “distancing” taking the form of more geographically and ethnically inclusive interviewing, more compassionate reporting, and more soliciting of expert opinion from the medical and scientific communities. This includes more space for the unique experiences and expertise of the women and men who risk their lives in intensive care units and makeshift clinics trying to keep as many of us alive as possible. As the current darkness motivates more and more to “shorten their thoughts,” there are thankfully still numerous people of integrity out there in a crowded media universe who can help keep those thoughts less distracted, better informed and more alert. Indeed, the families we now strive so hard to protect may ultimately depend as well on maintaining higher levels of vigilance.

People will, as Jung noted, do almost anything to avoid facing their own souls, to avoid looking at themselves through the same mirror that they so gleefully hold up to others.   In this time of viral darkness, there are precious few leaders who have demonstrated that they can truly face their own souls, owning the errors that have occurred on their watch and that — deviously or not — have endangered many lives.  Before this time of darkness runs its course and the next one prepares to descend, we must find the words and the energy to insist that they do so.

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