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The Fallacies of Friction: A Holy Week Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

Where there is power, there is resistance. Michel Foucault

The friction between ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’ burns you, stirs you up, propels you. Marcus Buckingham

Occasionally when people in the grip of obsessive resentment were pouring out their ire and grievances, something in them, some small trace of self-awareness, heard themselves as others might, and was surprised to find they didn’t sound quite as blameless, or even as rational, as they’d imagined themselves to be. Robert Galbraith

Every grievance you hold hides a little more of the light of the world from your eyes until the darkness becomes overwhelming. Donna Goddard

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance. Robert Frost

When we make grievance our traveling companion, it blocks out light, it distorts our perspective, it consumes our hearts until there is nothing left. Merida Johns

Our culture is not this thing to be seen from a distance. We need to be embracing the friction of it all – that is where the energy is. — Doug Aitken

Change means movement. Movement means friction. Saul Alinsky

I have been quiet in this space but not quiet. In other formats I have been doing my small part at national level to counter the grievance which has become a form of embedded cruelty and at international level commenting on the peculiar brand of diplomatic indifference which refuses even to uphold the core principles which gave rise to the institutions which we have entrusted with peace and security in the first instance.

In these strange times, in some ways a throwback to manifestations of the human condition we foolishly thought we had consigned to history, I and many others have taken up the task of creating friction for those who believe they are above the impacts of their own bad work, those who believe that their lofty positions and distorted policies exempt them (or should) from resistance to the point where such is deemed an evil impediment to the fulfillment of their desires – a grievance and even vengeance-driven remaking of political culture in their own image.

As some of you know, I have long worried that my own country has become essentially ungovernable, full of people fleeing to the safety of bubbles where we can nurture our self-serving ideas and petty grievances without friction, without interference. We have become a nation of trolls with little taste for subtlety or even self-reflection. We “root” for people and ideas rather than examine their legitimacy and intent. Our collective arrogance blots out almost all of the inclinations we might otherwise have to humility, reflection or self-awareness, let alone to service.

What I just alluded to has been true of my country for some time. The current crisis is a symptom of a larger and more systemic problem which cuts across political and even religious affiliations. Our hearts are largely consumed by violence and greed, much more than is helpful for a society which seems to have misplaced its creeds, a society which is increasingly turning its backs on veterans, on the elderly and disabled, or on those seeking refuge from governments deemed even more cruel than our own. We have “drunk the kool aid” even when we aren’t thirsty and by so doing contributed to a society which seems comfortable with mass firings of government employees, mass dismantling of our health systems and mass deportations of non-criminal legal residents. A society where its leaders huddle to embrace a God of violence, riches and vengeance as though there had not been a subsequent message focused on forgiveness, humility and reconciliation attributed to Jesus of Nazareth. A society where what is true is reduced to what someone can convince us is true.

This society has needed and now needs even more the friction which communicates categorically “this is not OK.” This is not good enough. We will not return to a time long past when enfranchisement was for the few not the many, when a cruel but not so unusual hierarchy kept too many people in the places that they were “assigned” ostensibly by a God who ordained our lofty patterns of discrimination.

You’ve heard all this from me before, this indication that what we are now living through is a culmination of sorts, a culmination of increasingly inadequate leadership and a distracted, self-interested populace which has lost sight of all that must happen in this world – the good, the bad and the sometimes ugly – in order for us to enjoy the blessings that we too often forget we have.

In this current climate, I and others continue to resist, continue to provide a bit of friction to a government and a system that has convinced itself that its cruel judgments have some sort of divine sanction. But in this season of Ramadan (now concluded) of Passover and of the Christian Holy Week, we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of resisting a false religious narrative with one of our own making.

Indeed, we must remind ourselves that resistance is not righteousness, that to overquote Reinhold Niebuhr, “the evils against which we contend are the fruits of illusions similar to our own.” Resistance is an obligation for many as it is for me, but it is not a “counter-crusade.” It is not about swapping out one perverse view of God’s favor for another.

In this Holy season, we must also remind ourselves of the costs associated with being that source of friction which not all of us provide but which all of us need. This is the friction which helps us to be better versions of ourselves, refusing to divert our gaze from cruelty and poverty to which none should be subjected, refusing to allow the chores of the present to divert our attention from the needs and aspirations of those who follow.

But the friction which people like me attempt to apply in our now-adrift society cuts in many directions. We who attempt this work, including the work of inspiring resistance in others, are not immune from the responsibilities and impacts of that resistance – to challenge what we see while trying to be better than what we see. But also to acknowledge that friction wears us down too. Friction takes a toll on us too.

And this toll is in part a function of the culture of resistance itself – seeing the glass as forever half-empty, slipping into patterns of language that ascribe things to people – including evil –that apply in full measure to only a handful of humans, failing to appreciate the spring flowers, or poetry and music, or a thrilling sports match, so that we can get in one more “cut” of friction, one more pithy response to a systemic “monster” which remains much more formidable than people like me will ever be.

Indeed the consequences of resistance, of creating friction day after day, can produce their own grievances which serve neither our own work in the world nor the interests of those to whom we seek to connect. More than anything else, we must never lose touch with the people whose lives have been upended through policies which are anything but “people-centered.” Indeed, such loss of touch helps explain the predicament we now find ourselves in.

I’m a bit beaten up now but will spend this Holy Week recalibrating my own resistance and the effects it is having (or not having) on matters internal and external to myself, including on those whose response to the gravity of these times remains to be inspired. For those of you already in the friction business, even part time, we need to ensure that our voices and actions have all the impact that is possible. It’s going to be a slog for now as what “is” continues to lag well behind what could be. Let’s commit to locating the formula that can bring more hope to the world and ensure timely and healthy responses from ourselves.

Tags: grievance, resistancre, United States

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The Madness of Merit, Dr. Robert Zuber

23 Feb

Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in. Mark Twain

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. Thomas Carlyle

Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit and lost without deserving. William Shakespeare

It seems to never occur to fools that merit and good fortune are closely united. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman. George Santayana

The sufficiency of merit is to know that my merit is not sufficient. Francis Quarles

Not too long ago, I get an interesting email from a longstanding African colleague complaining about the decline in performance in both public and private sectors in his country. His concern was with a growing number of people who want a job, but don’t particularly want to do a job. The frustration at this state of affairs is understandable but, like most of our frustrations, this one also has a context.

In my country at the moment, one of our challenges is actually related to people wanting to do a job, trained to do a job, but who are prohibited by their own government from doing a job. One of the many unilateral Trump policies and related orders that I have deep problems with is the notion of “merit” thrown around mostly in the context of dismantling Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs. Such programs have been under attack in favor of a definition of “merit” which is ascribed mostly to white people – indeed white men – based on the “insufficient” and largely misguided assumption that the problems we face as a country are due to a bending the rules for “not-white men” who then transfer their erstwhile “incompetence” into the public domain.

There is so much wrong with this notion, one for which there is no viable metric and which seeks to pin the blame for our numerous social ills on some alleged retreat from those who can meet the standard (select white men) and those who must be accommodated to standard (pretty much everyone else).

When I spell this out in black and white (which I have had trouble doing of late) the absurdity of it becomes unmistakable. For one thing, it presumes that “merit” can be divorced from privilege and the role of “good fortune” in preserving and even expanding access to opportunity only for some and not for others. Moreover, it assumes that (in the case of the US) agencies responsible for training air traffic controllers or marines or surgeons or agricultural inspectors would make the conscious choice to deviate from their training standards to fulfill some unspecified DEI agenda, thus contributing to those quite happy to conflate admissions access and standards compliance.

Finally, it presumes that many of us are not looking askance at the inadequate “merit” of our erstwhile political leadership, people often without backbone, without principle, and without a lively sense of how their lofty positions are themselves the result of the privilege they are hell-bent on denying to others. From my vantage point, attacks on the competency of mostly women and minority interests have actually served to expose the fallacy of white male “merit” based on some alleged “right” to be the decisionmakers regardless of how cruel and incompetent such decisions turn out to be. We are seeing yet again the challenges associated with merit based solely on genetics and their social determinants rather than on hard evidence related to performance in the public interest.

Those of you who read these posts know where I am likely to stand on this. I have seen over the years people of diverse backgrounds who possess far more potential than opportunity, who must too-often wait in a long line behind those who continue to claim without shame “merit” based in large measure on some combination of family riches and connections, or even on race-based entitlements. I have long believed that we create the “merit” we need and desire for our societies to be prosperous and resilient, and that such creation fundamentally requires inclusion of access. Entrance doors to opportunity must remain open, and that can be (and largely has been) ensured without compromising the training, standards and capacities needed for exit.

The “equal opportunity” and “upward mobility” which constitute an integral part of our national mythology is being compromised at so many levels as ethnic and ideological conformity – and the grievances which now proliferate – “trumps” time after time, the need to ensure the full development and utilization of all our skills and capacities in whatever human package life has situated them. And that of course includes the “white male package.”

But how to move in that direction in these ethno- and gender-repressive times? There is a commercial I have seen once or twice and which I particularly appreciate, the tag line for which is “the key to riches is knowing what counts.” Knowing what counts. In my experience I don’t think that most people pay enough attention to this, pay enough attention to the specifics of how they define success, how they define riches, indeed how they define a life worth living for themselves and others. If they did so, maybe they would be more respectful of the “knowing” of other people, recognizing that there are many paths to living a successful life.

But even beyond this, we are not paying enough attention to the ways in which privilege bends the arc of access in the favor of ourselves and our circles, allowing us to indulge the fantasy of pursuing what counts based solely on merit utterly divorced from social and political context. Playing the game, if you will, without understanding the degree to which whatever success we have attained has been to one degree or another “gamed” in the direction of the interests of people like me and so many others.

With regard to the prescient Mark Twain, I’m not sure any longer that I can count on some notion of “heaven” to rescue me from the pretenses of my own life, including inadequate assessments and applications related to “what counts.” But I know that if there is such a reality, the thought that pets might deserve to enter before me and other humans is certainly a wakeup call. For me, this represents a call for greater inclusion, a call for eliminating ideology-based entitlements to practice division and cruelty, a call to make this plane of existence more like the vision of heaven which so many are seeking in another life.

Moreover, I remain convinced that our now highly-skewed notions of merit have no value in eyes of the creator who, if our religious traditions are to be believed, sees clearly the motives and intentions we largely hide from the world, putting forth instead the face that seeks to convince others that we have sufficient merit relative to our chosen tasks in the world and that, moreover, we sincerely intend the best for other people. Despite the ideology-based madness which characterize this moment, we can do better at ensuring that both our public and private “faces” convey merit which faithfully attends to task and which serves a larger public interest. The rest, at least in my view, is mere distraction.

Tags: cruelty, dei, entitlement, merit, meritocracy, philosophy, politics

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Service Station: A Pledge Worthy of a New Year, Dr. Robert Zuber

1 Jan

I cannot do all the good that the world needs. But the world needs all the good that I can do. Jana Stanfield

It is never too late to be what you might have been. George Eliot

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on. Robert Frost

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not. Andre Gide

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy. Tagore

I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve. Albert Schweitzer

Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time. Marian Wright Edelman

Understanding the true meaning of accountability makes us strong and enables us to learn. Sameh Elsayed

For more years than I am comfortable counting, we have posted our own version of the “year in review” on the front page of our website. That site has been essentially non-functioning for a year now and so we will offer this brief reflection here on what has been a difficult year for our values and infrastructure, but evermore so for the millions of people who have found no relief from armed violence and climate impacts, from displacement and discrimination affecting both the enjoyment of “guaranteed” rights and access to essential services. On a daily basis we see images and hear testimony of torture and other horrific abuses often perpetrated by people more inclined to celebrate their violent “achievements” than to question the fundamentals of their own humanity.

As most of you know, since our founding in1999 we have been little more than a small operation. Covid made us smaller still, though we still manage to make our modest contributions on a regular basis – to interns, to UN security policy, to scholars and advocates in many global regions looking for a UN foothold or a larger circle of concern, to people who maintain the hope that their faith can serve to bind people rather than divide them, to people with good ideas and good energy who need a push to ensure an audience for their contributions. Despite our small size and the oversized crises we attempt to influence, we are honored every day by the quality and richness of our collaborators. In every corner of the world, advocates put their livelihoods and even their very lives on the line to help ensure a more just and sustainable future for their families, their neighbors, their societies. We find much of what comes to our attention from these advocates inspiring beyond measure, a reminder that our “easy duty” at UN Headquarters also demands risk taking from us, risks commensurate with the front row seat we have enjoyed for a generation in UN spaces, a seat we didn’t necessarily earn but one which we can necessarily share with others.

In assessing the year now past and plotting out a strategy for the year to come, it is evident in ways which have not been this clear in some time that all of us who share this space are swimming against some powerful currents including authoritarian shifts in traditional democracies, donor fatigue among those who could normally be counted on to help address humanitarian needs, armed and at times genocidal violence bringing entire populations to the brink of complete collapse, shifts in weather patterns, ocean temperatures and related factors leading to alternate flooding and drought as our climate sends warning after warning we mostly refuse to heed. These are powerful, even life-threatening currents indeed, demanding more attention and remedial energy from us than we can easily muster.

But muster we must. It is important that we recognize our debt to those who have been accountable to their times, their deficits, their crises, as we must be accountable to ours. We have no illusions about our ability as an organization to move even the smallest of malevolent hills, but we can give all that we can give, share in a wealth of helpful ideas and strategies, open doors to the participation of others with more energy, wisdom and insight than we possess ourselves, and link issues and concerns in ways that challenge those in authority who seek to keep issues in some kind of abstracted isolation, those who want you to believe that all the problems of the world are someone else’s fault, those on a seemingly endless quest to find the specks in the eyes of others without dislodging the logs impeding their own.

As the world gets harsher for so many, we and others like us have clearly not made the case that we need to make, in part because we have espoused values more vigorously than we have put them into practice, values of democracy and equity, values of respect and dignity, values of service and compassion. We have too often forgotten that we are what we do, not what we claim to do, not what our “brand” attributes to us. We have also forgotten that there is sanity in agency, that failures acknowledged ultimately take less of a toll on our spirits than isolation or indifference.

We have another year of service before us, another year of pushing the UN community (including ourselves) to uphold standards and fulfill promises to weary constituents, weary from a world which has too often forsaken them, has too often over-promised and under-delivered, has too often offered excuses for malfunctions that we are insufficiently committed to fixing. In the end, 2025 will be much as its chronological predecessors were – about us, and the quantities of compassion, service, courage and receptivity to growth and learning needed to help this too-often mean and myopic world turn a corner before the path we have been blithely traveling comes to an abrupt end.

As this new year unfolds, we give thanks for all that you contribute to keeping us on that safer, saner, healthier path. We appreciate it more than you know.

Tags: 2025, agency, Service, Values

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Crèche-ing Poverty: A Christmas Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

23 Dec

For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning―not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last. Frederick Buechner

The hinge of history is on the door of a Bethlehem stable. Ralph W. Sockman

The Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. J.I. Packer

I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year. Charles Dickens

How many observe Christ’s birthday! How few, His precepts! O! ’tis easier to keep holidays than commandments. Benjamin Franklin

Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home. G.K. Chesterton

Into this world, this demented inn in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ comes uninvited. Thomas Merton

The photo above comes via an exhibit in Barcelona wherein artists attempted to adjust the iconic crèche of Christmas to modern circumstances. It was well worth the effort.

For indeed in our time that scene of hay and barn animals and a baby born into conditions which belie a painful truth about poverty and divinity – that scene has been sanitized and sentimentalized to such a degree that we can barely feel the winter draft, let alone the uncertainty and even peril which must surely have punctuated the scene as much as the smell of livestock and the laughter of those more fortunate beings able to party indoors near enough to a roaring fire.

The artist gets it right, in my view. Three members of a modern-looking family huddled amidst the rubble of perhaps what was left of their home, perhaps in the ruins of one of the few structures in the area which still had something approximating a functioning roof.

And from which places might this scene have been inspired? In Gaza surely. Or maybe in rural Myanmar. Or perhaps Port-au-Prince. Possibly areas of Yemen or Central African Republic which have yet to accept the messaging regarding pathways to peace. Or perhaps in Darfur where people cannot currently count on any manner of shelter whatsoever from the endless betrayals, violent attacks and other miseries which daily batter their weary (and often displaced) lives?

So much ruin. So many seeking refuge in whatever makeshift shelter they can manage to find. So many holding out hope represented by the manger child but more immediately seeking secure-sufficient places for their own and perhaps others of the many threatened children of holy promise now among us.

Such security isn’t too much to ask, is it? Not too much to ask that we in our Christmas-obsessed traditions who purport to be redeemed by the birth of a child should commit more to the well-being of other children, the children who will never be idolized in crèche scenes but who nevertheless suffer the crushing poverty, the hunger and cold, the veritable stench of a world which has in all but rhetorically abandoned them and allowed their own God-given potential to be stifled if not altogether snuffed out.

At the UN and despite wholehearted efforts by Secretariat officials, numerous governments like Malta and Sierra Leone and diverse civil society leadership from advocates like Jo Becker and Lois Whitman, the plight of children remains precarious at best and criminally negligent at worst. I’ll spare you the stories and the moral outrage which tends to follow in their wake, but most who bother to read this will recognize that in so many global settings at this very moment, children are being used as target practice, as economic lifelines for otherwise impoverished families, as fighters in armed struggles about which they understand little, as the unwelcome means to satisfy adult urges, and so much more that bear little or no relationship to any conceivable, positive trajectory of intellectual, physical or spiritual growth.

That children are as resilient as they often appear to be is surely no excuse for our collective failure to honor them in every home and community, honor with even a fraction of the protection, wonder and appreciation which is due the baby in the manger, to recognize as we often do not that the “hinge of history” attributable to that child in Bethlehem is, in some more modest but discernable fashion, attributable to all. At core level, by failing to honor the “hinge” that represents the promise of all children, we have allowed the “hinge” of the manger child and his impact to corrode as well. In the theology with which I am most familiar, the incarnation event focused on a Christmas manger cannot, should not be conceived as a one off but as a flow-through, the power of the manger extended to all who enter this world in hope and promise.

I won’t go on about this much longer. At this time, you have people to hug, presents to open and food to prepare. But just a word about the degree of difficulty of keeping Christmas in our hearts year-round, keeping it as something more potent than a sentimental attachment to a holiday, but more as a call to use our hearts, brains and courage to create safe passage for all God’s people, for all God’s children. It is that passage which is sorely lacking for millions of children, thereby exposing our season of incarnation as more sentiment than fidelity — fidelity to precepts and commandments that we mostly engage only episodically, often when crises in our lives occur that remind us of our relative frailty and dependency, characteristics that we share in common with the children we are responsible for whether we fully assume that responsibility or not.

What seems like a very long time ago, I sat regularly in a conference room at UNICEF in New York, part of a committee to assess and recommend principles for what became the Convention on the Rights of the Child, now the most frequently ratified of all UN treaty obligations. But for all that energy and all that diplomatic consensus, it is clear that, where children are concerned, we are still far from home, far from ensuring a world fit for for nurturing and enabling young lives, far from extending the reverence for the manger child to those other vessels of divinity on a planet which some of us at least continue to believe has been redeemed, even if it so often feels like something considerably less than that.

Beyond the lights and gift-giving, beyond the holiday parties and TV specials, we can live out the promise of a helpless, shivering baby and his impoverished earthly family for more than a season. The children in our midst, the inheritors of a holy baby in an unholy manger, need more consistent care and vigilance from us, a gift worthy of the crèche we now reverence.

Tags: children, Christmas, Nativity, poverty

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Pedagogy for Preparation: An Advent Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

1 Dec

What you are is God’s gift to you, what you become is your gift to God. Hans Urs von Balthasar

Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. Toni Morrison

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows. Sydney J. Harris

Everyone is a moon and has a dark side which is never shown to anybody. Mark Twain

The more involved you are, the more significant your learning will be. Stephen Covey

Only someone who is well prepared has the opportunity to improvise. Ingmar Bergman

Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place. Rumi

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Re-examine all you have been told. Dismiss what insults your soul. Walt Whitman

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. Susan B. Anthony

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. Rebecca Solnit

Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness. Meister Eckhart

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. John Dewey

In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. Eric Hoffer

I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship. Louisa May Alcott

The least of the work of learning is done in classrooms. Thomas Merton

As some of you recognize, Advent is a special season for me, a time of preparation for what remains as one of the great mysteries, even ironies, of my faith tradition – the baby in a manger representing an incarnate hope for the world that has, needless to say, yet to be fully realized.

To put so much stock in such a vulnerable setting has always seemed a marvelous leap of faith to me. In our own time, some factions of Christianity seem to prefer the God of wrath and vengeance to the figure who left the cold manger to forgive – and transform — the coldness of our hearts, calling us to feed multitudes, put away swords, cease petty competitions, give cloaks to the poor, and help others to feel the grace that had long been denied.

For some self-proclaimed Christians, apparently, this post-manger Jesus is simply too naïve, too divorced from the dog-eat-dog societies which we have crafted for ourselves, too willing to extend an invitation to soften hearts and minds that we have willingly cased in metaphorical cement. Jesus may “get us” as the US television commercial proclaims, but for some in our Christian orbit, he apparently doesn’t “get” our times, doesn’t “get” the rampant “evil” knocking at our doors which apparently obscures” the “evil” for which we are also responsible while giving us license to hate and purge the “evil” which some of us are quite convinced lies wholly beyond our remit.

This time of what I at least would consider a form of pseudo faith would not seem to easily accommodate the self-preparation and commitment to growth and learning to which the season of Advent invites us all.

Perhaps it is because I am now too old to embrace so much of our modern mind-set, but I remain almost serially disinterested in the incessant branding and self-promotion which characterizes the current moment. I am less interested in hearing what people “know” than what they have learned about their craft, about themselves and the “dark sides” of their metaphorical moons, about their responsibility to others close and far, about the world and its multiple challenges and blessings. I am less interested in where people think they “are” and more interested in where they’ve been and where they’re heading. It is the path that appeals to me, especially the path that beckons our better selves and which provides a context for the forgiveness of our less-better ones.

After all, if Advent is to mean anything beyond consulting our budgets and making sure our cars are sufficiently gassed to endure the malls, it means preparation of a special sort, a preparation that is one part attention and two parts assessment, one part seeking comfort in tradition and two parts allowing tradition to breath and grow, to stare down the inherited recipes for life and refuse to follow them entirely straight, to keep the windows of learning, growth and change open even as we stare into a mirror reflecting all we have been and failed to be, all we have neglected and all we have cherished.

And so as this new Advent adventure unfolds, I know that I too have learned, albeit often too late, often too casually, often with transaction in mind rather than grace. What I have learned, especially during Advent season, is reflected in some of the quotations above. Those same quotations no doubt also mark the limits of my current learning, mark the way still to sojourn on a long and wonder-filled path towards a life that is finally and ultimately in sync with itself, becoming more of a “gift to God” that might actually be in sync with God.

And what are some of those Advent learnings you might ask? Well as with my other posts, it might be more fruitful to visit the introductory quotations rather than dwell on my own reflection. But a few things come to the fore. For starters, I’ve often felt that many of us need a crash course in wonder, leaving those windows open for the unknown which is not entirely unknowable, making space for the new ingredients which could spice up a recipe, or even energize a life. So many of us struggle with letting God be God, giving ample credence to the belief that God honors our path, honors our growth, even when we backslide, even when we misrepresent grace in all its forms, even when we fail to acknowledge that our failures are not God’s failure, our spiritual ignorance is not God’s ignorance, our enemies are not God’s enemies.

There is something seriously wrong at this time given those within my own faith tradition who proclaim to know precisely what God wants from us, what God has in mind for us, but who are so often steeped in grievance, preferring to vanquish rather than to forgive, proclaiming enemies as though such was a badge of divine favor rather than a symbol of divine distance. I’m not sure I always know what Advent requires of me, but I’m pretty sure that making and destroying enemies is not it.

And this leads me to the next point, perhaps the final one lest I test your patience further. For faith to be real, and for the quality of learning which faith in Advent seems to require, it must be fully and practically engaged. I know that there have been times – too many in number – when I have talked a better game than I have played, when I have doubled down on the learning I’ve acquired and shut the windows on the wonderous revelations which continue to flood our world, albeit those which we largely ignore. I don’t always recall that we have actually been given metaphorical guidance for this revelation in the form of parents and guardians who routinely, at times even seemlessly, adjust their caregiving to the stages of the children under their charge. We know that children are continually evolving, and we know that our own adjustments to their growth are the healthy and loving responses. Truly, the life of Advent is also about change and the God who honors it, who adjusts the forms and contours of divine love as we struggle to move in directions which allow us to celebrate a created order which needs more care from us and about which we still have so much to learn.

This learning may have something to do with classrooms but has more to do with life itself. We point here to an immersion experience, immersing in the not-yet-known to both confirm and revise what it is that we thought we knew about faith, about the world, or about ourselves. It is learning as a preparation of sorts, but a preparation which is more layered and nuanced than merely breaking out last year’s metaphorical tree ornaments, social schedules and cookie recipes. It is about preparing ourselves to be those “spiritual beings having human experiences,” to learn how best to both be active and to sit still, to be both curious and grateful, to be both attentive and reflective, to sail our own ship and help others sail as well by risking a more robust and dynamic worldly presence, by learning all that we can in those places where learning is best served, the world which we believe has experienced the gift of divine presence and which calls us to share in that presence yet again.

Of all the quotations at the front of this post, the one from Toni Morrison probably expresses best my understanding of the Advent Season. For love, indeed, is a diploma, an elusive achievement that is greater perhaps than all other achievements to be had in this world, one which tests us, humbles us, confounds us, sometimes bringing us to our knees, sometimes bringing us to our senses. Love is a hard practice. Faith is a hard practice as well. During this season, in a time of armed violence, acrimony and division, a time when trust is scarce and forgiveness scarcer still, it seems as though Morisson’s “diploma” is further from reach than ever. But there is a path of learning and preparation for us to follow. There is a way forward to graduation for us.

So far as I can tell, the Advent path to this graduation is to recommit to turning at least some of our mirrors into windows, to learn and prepare as though the full flowering of our spiritual and physical lives depended on it. Advent represents our annual calling to do precisely that.

Tags: Advent, learning, preparation

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The Monsters We Indulge: A Post-Electoral Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

10 Nov

We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. Marcus Aurelius

Let faith be the bridge you build to overcome evil and welcome good. Maya Angelou

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

We are all mistaken sometimes; sometimes we do wrong things, things that have bad consequences. But it does not mean we are evil, or that we cannot be trusted ever afterward. Alison Croggon

The evils against which we contend are the fruits of illusions similar to our own. Reinhold Niebuhr

Do not accept an evil you can change. E. Lockhart

Sometimes, the wicked will tell us things just to confuse us–to haunt our thoughts long after we’ve faced them. Sarah J. Maas

Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things. Terry Pratchett

And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody. And yours, he replied with a smile, is willfully to misunderstand them. Jane Austen

I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world. Charles Dickens

Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. Dietrich Bonhoeffer

May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. George Carlin

I’ve been getting a number of messages from various parts of the globe inquiring about how I was reacting to the recent US election results. I’m sure many of you have similar stories to tell and I’m also sure that your reactions to the messages have been similarly diverse – bewilderment, outrage, fatigue, perhaps even a measure of relief in some instances.

I won’t dwell on this too much now because, for me at least, such reactions at this early stage would largely lack perspective. The election is over. Unless somehow the House of Representatives flips, and perhaps even if does, we are two months from the likely start of mass deportations, a reoriented economy in the form of tariffs and fresh tax breaks for the already wealthy, new challenges to women’s rights and a federal bureaucracy where the litmus test for all applicants is loyalty to a president not a founding document.

The Democrats were anything but perfect in this election cycle, are anything but perfect in any and all aspects of governance. But it is interesting nevertheless that so many voters– including droves of Hispanic men and white women – chose to support a candidate so manifestly opposed to what might otherwise appear to be their interests. Or perhaps people in my orbit have merely failed to grasp what those interests are, how they might have been balanced for others in ways similar to how we seek to balance our own.

How to explain all of what is happening now in our world? The short answer is, I cannot. Many have honed in on anger around commodity prices and immigration in whatever form those are understood and, in the case of prices at least, are probably pointing fingers in the wrong directions. But point they have – we pretty much all did – and with an outsized consciousness of the “obvious” flaws of our adversaries with little sense of how the “garbage” some of us ascribed to others might motivate hatred in return with a fervor that at least some folks have managed to sustain.

Whatever else one could say about this election season there was certainly no shortage of hateful rhetoric, no end to the recriminations leveled by many people — including in my own orbit –against folks we know only by the conspiracies and dubious theology they espouse or perhaps by their fervent rejection of the “expertise” we in our policy bubbles inflict on people we don’t know, don’t want to know, don’t care about, and don’t pay attention to.

This has been a condition of our society for some time, the singular dismissal of the other, our growing comfort level with stereotyping devoid of real evidence, giving in to the arrogance of defining our ingroups by the best of them and our outgroups by the worst. We increasingly live in bubbles of our own choosing, at times even our own creation, but we forget that the reality as seen from a bubble is only a caricature of reality, only a small and insular piece of a broader truth which literally defies any and all facile understandings.

Whether we are able to sit with this or not, ours is an age of growing economic disparities, of manifestations of faiths which have little or nothing to do with their founders, of privilege magically transformed into merit, of rights in urgent retreat, of threats ignored or addressed in a manner guaranteed to magnify misery beyond what could ever be rationalized. There is much beauty still in the world and in ourselves but we’ve concealed so much of that behind curtains we’ve forgotten we’ve woven and hung.

None of this is news, of course, we flawed humans giving in to impulses incompletely understood, we who deign to make decisions for others whose realities are willfully sealed off from our own, we who parrot and even impose values that we fail to live by ourselves. This in itself is not newsworthy. The wrinkle for me in this last political cycle was the persistent and generally uncritical recourse to “evil” in describing political and religious “others” and their intent.

Evil, needless to say, is a loaded word, loaded with perverse meaning, with hostile intent, with self-righteous venom. And this is true whether we are describing evil actions or indulging in more essentialist determinations of evil as “of the devil,” the evil that cannot be healed, cannot be redeemed, cannot be transformed into something more closely approximating “civilized” let alone Godly behavior. This is the “evil” that ostensibly transcends individual acts towards an ontology which designates some as redeemed and others beyond redemption, the erstwhile “children of light” casting the “children of darkness” as destined for places beyond grace, beyond options, beyond reconciliation, beyond compassion.

I don’t entirely know what is gained from such designations, that “evil” which transcends the specific violations which we who hurl invectives have largely not done enough to prevent or transform. Moreover, such designations fail to honor the testimony of philosophers, literary authors, sages, psychologists and others, testimony which makes clear that the lines which separate good and evil in we humans are often thin, indeed. We forget that we must within our religious traditions constantly elevate the status of forgiveness not out of piety but out of necessity. For if it is not available to others neither will it likely be available to ourselves. And needless to say, given the metaphorical wolves we all struggle to keep at bay, forgiveness is needed at some point by each and every one of us..

And let’s be honest. To move as we now do in my country, as we did so often during the political campaign just past, move towards the positing of those we oppose as devils incarnate is to set in motion something we remain unlikely to control. We need to remind ourselves and be reminded by others that the essentialist “evil” we are too quick to ascribe is evil allegedly baked into the genetic makeup of our adversaries which cannot be negotiated so much as exterminated. We have seen this ugly (and in my view unjustified) conclusion incarnate at times in our own political and religious history – “God” or circumstance justifying mass carnage against others treated more as “things” than as humans deserving of dignity (as is now happening in Gaza and other zones of global aggression).

We are no stranger to this ugliness but the stakes are surely higher now, stakes which our current dispositions might well predict our collective ruin just as surely as climate change or nuclear weapons.

One of the things that we have repeatedly warned diplomats about over many years is their readiness to embrace “condemnation” as a response to the evils against which they ostensibly contend. In psychological terms, the more an individual or government is “condemned” the less impact condemnation actually has. To oppose is noteworthy, even heroic, when circumstances call for it. To condemn is largely an indulgence, an act which creates artificial distance and shortcuts the courage and mindfulness necessary to call out policy and practice which diminishes all of our better selves. It is simply too easy for we humans to transition from abusive acts which we believe warrant robust rejection to broader ascriptions of evil which deny all of the relevant connections between what we condemn in others and what needs fixing in our more immediate contexts.

Long ago, Socrates proclaimed the relative equivalence between evil and ignorance. We have, in this political season, demonstrated willful ignorance of our political adversaries. Sadly enough we have also demonstrated willful ignorance of ourselves, specifically the ties that continue to bind us, like it or not, to even the most vocal of those adversaries. These next years will likely be much as the prior years have been, a test of our basic humanity, of our willingness to confront and transition away from our own illusions with the same fervor that we attack or otherwise seek to diminish the illusions of others.

I think we can manage to do this, albeit with fingers and toes crossed and, for me at least, eyes scanning the heavens for guidance.

Tags: evil, Human Nature, political discourse

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An Electoral Primer for our Deeper Selves, Dr. Robert Zuber

27 Oct

Always forgive your enemies nothing annoys them so much. Oscar Wilde

I suppose I’ll have to add the force of gravity to my list of enemies. Lemony Snicket

Prodigious birth of love it is to me, That I must love a loathed enemy. William Shakespeare

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people. G.K. Chesterton

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it. Voltaire

Let’s have a toast. To the incompetence of our enemies. Holly Black

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Dear All,

This post is going to be on the “short but sweet end.” There are many lessons to be learned from this electoral season , including how far we all have fallen down the shaft of greed, indifference, grievance, enmity and ignorance. With so much political rhetoric seeking to tear us down and exploit divisions beyond what any evidence would suggest, it is time for us to hold our society and our responsibilities to it in a better light, beginning with the thoughtful casting of ballots over the next week or so.

However, you come down on the political spectrum, and this here is not my business, there are at least two core duties which I feel are my business and which we all need to keep in mind.

The first is to reject the notion that our country is so dysfunctional, so ridden with corruption, fear and hatred, that only a singular politician (or group thereof) can save us. That this is a claim made largely by a rapidly aging former president is certainly to be noted, but it is also a notion which is now baked into our political infrastructure of many stripes, a virtual credo of our unresponsive bureaucracies and elected officials who act as though they’ve been issued an American Express card with such privileges that the metal in which these cards of privilege are made of has yet to be invented.

We have messes to clean up to be sure, but we have also allowed the fog of personal and political grievance to seep into our private domains, allowing for the indulgence of more fear, more hostility, more indifference to pain and violence than is good for any of us. And rather than welcoming and sharing the sun that burns off the fog, too many of our churches have magnified the grievance, have given succor to some of our worst instincts, those which Jesus and indeed all the world’s great religious figures came to highlight and then to offer another path. I can only speak for my own tradition here, but I am constantly at practical odds with a growing number of “Christians” who have blinded themselves to the complexities of our collective souls, who have as well meandered so far from the teachings of Jesus that they now actually find such teachings quaint or naïve, apparently not what the God of Leviticus had in mind for “His” most ardent followers.

And this leads me to the second point, which in many ways merely flows from the first. In this political campaign, we have found precious little counterpoint to the more strategic, competent indulgence of enemies and expanding enemies lists which are ridiculous at one level but also an increasingly dangerous component of the social fabric we are now weaving. People we only know well enough to hate. People we fear as though the world were little more at present than a minefield full of the sorts of “horrible” folks not like us who increasingly populate our movie screens and social media feeds. Indeed, more and more of us seem convinced that the world offers little but scary people and scary movies, a world where your best options are to tend to your own business and vote for people who claim to be “tough enough” to keep the monsters at bay.

But as we know, fear and its co-pilot anxiety are the raw materials for societies whose best features are increasingly closeted. Not a shining city on a hill but a dark dungeon filled with potential enemies we don’t know, don’t want to know, and don’t have a shred of sympathy for. Not a model for the world but a country caught up in the muck of competition among political adversaries who have become acceptable, even desirable, depending on political proclivities. Not a beacon of freedom and opportunity for all but only for some, only for those who can buy their way to political influence without ever having to put themselves in front of a voting public, perhaps also for those who look like the “nice” folks we are, not the folks who invoke anger and discrimination in our often-unexamined selves.

Let us not delude ourselves: These legacies are likely going to be with us regardless of the electoral outcome in just a few days. We are likely in too deep to just walk away from electoral outcomes as though this one was just like the others. But we must cast our vote, we must encourage others to do likewise, and then we must all do our next part to clean up the messes our votes have failed to address, including enmity at the ready to deliver a package we surely don’t want and likely don’t even remember ordering.

I have heard people I generally respect talking about leaving the country in case their candidate is not elected. That is a choice I will not be making. This is the country of my birth, the country that many of my relatives fought and died alongside so many others to preserve. It is also the country that other countries in this world need to be better and do better, to at least project the value of equality, maturity, fairness and generosity even if these and others of their ilk are now more elusive and in shorter supply than we might wish.

We have work to do before election day. We have more work to do afterwards. Please stay the course.

Tags: elections, Enemies, Hatred

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Behind the Curtains: Reflections on the Security Council’s Tensions and Contradictions, by Yewon (Hannah) Lim

14 Oct

Editor’s Note: Yewon came to us via the Republic of Korea and Columbia University and she proved herself to be quite an adept commentator on UN events, both in the High-Level Political Forum and in the Security Council. This is the last of the reflections from our summer 2024 cohort and I am particularly pleased to share it with our readers. I am continually impressed by the diverse and talented younger folks who literally fall into our lap. We are so very grateful to have shared with Yewon and the others this small portion of our common journey.

The Security Council (SC) Chamber is adorned with dark turquoise patterned wallpaper that stretches across the two sides of the room, and at the back of the room, behind the nearly perfect circular meeting table, hangs thick, lengthy curtains that flow gracefully from the ceiling to the floor. Between the curtains, a large mural is painted on the white marble wall. All of this creates a space that appears rich and sophisticated, with just a touch of frivolity. As a stranger to this room, the atmosphere seems at first, quiet, calm, undisturbed, almost subtly serene, and still. Yet, what is discussed in this space is often the opposite–intense, stifling, restrictive, cold, and at times, hostile. As I reflect back on my relatively brief time here at the United Nations (UN) this summer, including time at the High-Level Political Forum, there are several observations and personal reflections I want to share specifically concerning the Security Council.

The UN SC meetings occur most weekdays at 10am. For general debates, the meeting continues at 3pm until all states who wish to speak have spoken. As the meeting bell rings announcing the start of the meeting, state members finish taking their seats around the table. I open my laptop laid out in front of me and insert the interpretation earpiece on one of my lobes as the President calls the meeting to order. The President gives the floor to the briefers, and then each of the representatives takes turns deliver their speeches. Heated debates, amicable conversations, and pragmatic outcomes were some of the elements I expected from the meetings. However, it was, in fact, very political, formal, bureaucratic, and curiously unwelcoming and distant. This was especially so because state members would mostly read from pre-written scripts.

One of the meetings I attended which was truly intense, political, and even hostile was the discussion on the situation in the Middle East concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The bombardment of hospitals and schools, military raids, the number of dead women and children, food insecurity, health systems on the brink of collapse, all of these and more were repeatedly mentioned, representatives mostly condemning the acts that led to such devastations, and then calling for a ceasefire. Each of these meetings invited representatives from the State of Palestine and Israel. There were a few instances when the Ambassador from Palestine would point fingers at the Israel representative, passionately urging state members sitting in the room to uphold the UN Charter and international humanitarian law by acting instead of sitting around simply discussing what to do about this heinous war which has occurred ever since October 7^th 2023 attacks by Hamas.

In response, the Israeli representative would use phrases like “child rapists” to describe the Palestinians and argue against the points the Palestinian Ambassador had previously stated. The atmosphere was hostile, intense, far from respectful and void of understanding, as might have been anticipated given that the two states have been at odds for decades. Their deep-seated hostility is historical, passionate, and complex, which is why such discussions were not easy. Indeed, it was obvious that there were no practical outcomes after these heated conversations. All that was addressed was what the situation in Gaza was like and the statistics that supported what each of the member states said throughout the meetings. The death of civilians continues to rise whilst these individuals sit in their suits and ties on the comfortable chairs in the Security Council chamber.

The hostile dynamic between Israel and Palestine was not the only one. Such political hostility was clear between the United States and Russia, mostly over Ukraine but over Gaza also. The Russia representative would put the US in the spotlight, accusing it of being perpetrators of the longstanding policies of the West that continuously excluded the interests of Russia and other non-Western countries. He painted the US as a serial violator of fundamental agreements and highlighted US reluctance in multilateral engagements. They mentioned widespread US corruption in one of the meetings, using the example of the Pentagon’s inspector general of the US army who did not report weapons violations, which he asserted was only the tip of the corruption iceberg. On the other hand, the US representative accused Russia of fabricating lies and constantly distorting narratives, mentioning that it is “… unfortunate we all had to sit here and listen to that…”. The members would further elaborate on their respective failure to uphold multilateralism and the UN Charter, highlighting that Russia is hypocritical as they utilize the SC as a platform to broadcast disinformation. As the US and Russian representatives delivered their statements, the other Ambassadors were often on their phones, a clear sign of their political dissatisfaction with each other.

As part of an often-small audience listening to their statements, I was often shocked and bewildered at the irony of the meetings. The UN was founded on the values of multilateralism and cooperation, peace and security, integrity and accountability, and so on. Few of the meetings represented these values. Instead, they displayed the opposite, pushing for more of a political agenda instead of a peaceful and dignified one. I wanted to have a conversation with each of these representatives and learn more about their personal stances, instead of what their statements represented. What were their names – instead of “the representative of the Republic of Korea”? Do they truly care about the issues they talk about every day, or do they only pretend to care? Are they likewise frustrated about these meetings which are often long on statements and short on progress? I had no way of knowing. After each of these sessions such as the conversation on the situation in the Middle East, I would leave the chamber disappointed and discouraged. I realized the most I could do is write about my observations and experiences during my time here at the UN.

Despite all this, my time at the UN was a profitable one for an evolving student such as myself, not yet sufficiently exposed to present real-time ongoing global issues and conflict. If learning about the world and the issues our society faces is a priority, sitting inside the walls of a classroom is one way to go, but the opportunity to watch and listen in on Council members was quite another. I learned more about the world, exponentially more in fact, outside of the classroom in these meetings. It was a great space for me to hear first-hand about the current situations in states that are struggling with international peace and security. It was much more tangible and concrete than reading about it from literature, news articles, or textbooks, as important as they can be. I realized the significance of being present in an environment that existed for the purpose of making the world a better place. If there is one difference between myself at the beginning of my internship and now, it is that I am much more educated, informed, and interested in global politics, international relations, and issues relating to peace and security. The frustrations were not simply frustrations but also a catalyst, sparking my passion to change the world, directing my attention to pursuing a career in organizations that actively tackle global issues, specifically in areas that are directly impacted by war, because I believe it is a scourge that needs to be addressed right now. As is often noted in the Council chamber, the fate of so many of the world’s peoples, especially women and children (who often have little or no say in resolving the violence) continue to hang by a perilous thread.

Clearly, in order to tackle global conflict, the UN must fix the problems that lie within the institution, and this includes the Security Council. States must step up to the task and rub the dust off their eyes which conceals the reality of these meetings. Such meetings are too often impractical, redundant, ineffective, and unproductive. How can the SC members encourage multilateralism and cooperation when they fail to maintain an amicable relationship between themselves? Of course, there are several Council members which maintain good terms with others. Yet, I am left to wonder how many of these are actually grounded in politics, not sincerity, which is a realistic concern seeing that the UN is a fundamentally political organization. However, this too must evolve. Despite apparent differences, states must find it within themselves to eagerly come together each morning to the SC, full of compassion, integrity, and the willingness to listen actively to contrasting views. Members must better cooperate through lively, results-oriented conversations, instead of reading from their politicized pre-written scripts. .

Tags: Internship, Middle East, Security Council

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Two Faced: Healing the Ruins of a Broken Year, Dr. Robert Zuber

6 Oct

Let Ruin End Here. Danez Smith

God hath given you one face, and you make yourself another. Shakespeare

The most common form of despair is not being who you are. Soren Kierkegaard

I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing. Agatha Christie

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. Henry David Thoreau

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time, I rest in the grace of the world and am free. Wendell Berry

Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools, that don’t have brains enough to be honest. Benjamin Franklin

When one with honeyed words but evil mind persuades the mob, great woes befall the state. Euripides

A year ago this week, as images of horrific violence by Hamas started a year-long recalibration of international relations, indeed of international law itself, people caught up in the wilfull malevolence of violence born of violence and begetting violence which continues to occur on a scale that we have not seen for some many years.

My response in the aftermath of the Hamas attack was to pen a (not particularly well received) piece entitled “Weighing in on Weighing in,” in which I tried to describe the short term, soon to become long term, impacts of old wounds revisited and new wounds inflicted, a Jewish people which had not –could not – assimilate one more of the many abuses perpetuated on them over centuries; and here faced off by another people, long occupied with serial miseries and indignities inflicted at the hands of an Israeli government which early on made it clear that any modicum of restraint – this October – was simply not in the cards.

The reasoning for that earlier piece was my early recognition that wounds had been ripped open in ways that left people little flexibility – perhaps even control – over their more and less intense emotional reactions. Almost immediately after the attackas opinions hardened to an almost unprecedented degree, friendships frayed, organizational partnerships cooled. “Who you stand with,” became the litmus test of continued conviviality, as though such “standing” often required something more than clicks on a social media page, or perhaps some street and campus“outrage” generated by high levels of anxiety about the state of the world alongside (as would be the case for me as well) an incomplete understanding of what might just be the most complex geo-political interactions on planet earth.

This hardening of opinions was often swift and unforgiving with implications far beyond individual friendships and organizational dynamics. The UN also became entwined in it as well as US vetoes kept the Security Council (though not the General Assembly or the International Court of Justice) from issuing resolutions which at least promised some tangible respite from the horrific violence inflicted in reaction to October 7. A few Council members refused to condemn the Hamas attacks or pay sufficient attention to hostage release. On the other hand, the Council’s responsibilities to uphold their own resolutions and international law were reduced to mostly handwringing regarding the staggering number of UN personnel, humanitarian workers, journalists and health workers killed by Israeli bombs. But as Council members slowly sought to challenge IDF operations, the more Israel made clear that it will do what it needs to do, while claiming (not entirely without evidence) that any of the other countries around the Council oval would behave just as Israel was behaving if something similar to the Hamas attacks were to happen to them. On several occasions, Israel’s diplomats even resorted to calling the UN and its Ambassadors “terrorists” for not recognizing and supporting the erstwhile righteousness of Israel’s cause. Even in these diplomatic halls, categorical opinions proved (and still prove, one year on) highly resistant to reconciliation. Numerous calls for a cease fire and the restoration of respect for international law have been stubbornly rebuked, as were prior resolutions over many years calling for an end to occupation, terrorism, settlement expansion and settler-related violence. Thankfully in UN forums outside the Security Council, clearer calls were made for an end to what can only be described as collective punishment, the destruction of entire neighborhoods, their infrastructure and inhabitants, justified by intelligence confirming wanted Hamas (and now Hezbollah in Lebanon) elements therein.

I have had something of a front-row seat to the diplomatic dimension of this multiplicity of carnage which has been characterized by reckless military incursions with little regard for civilian life, feckless resolutions with little or no enactment, the desperate measures taken by Gazans to find some basic nourishment and reasonably potable water only to find instead a sniper’s bullet, the “collateral damage” of child after child relegated to a life without limbs let alone any modicum of inner peace, the weapons gushing from multiple fronts into a widening conflict zone which only threatens to widen further, the hardening of “theocratic posturing” by those politicians and insurgents whose theology is anything but beyond reproach, the resurrection of “like it or leave it” governance reminiscent of the US during the Vietnam War, the dramatic rise in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia which seemingly fails every distinction suggested between the dubious actions of governments and insurgents on the one hand, and the deeper traditions struggling (and deserving) to maintain their full dignity and respect on the other. There has also been a failure, including by some prominent western media outlets, to properly account for the millions across the Middle East and beyond, including in Israel itself, who refuse to swallow the bait, who see in the current carnage a path to ruin which will only grow in intensity and sorrow, which will only catch more and more innocents in its snares.

As with so many other examples nowadays, this is a horrific mess of our own making, a failure to uphold our own creeds while endlessly and obliviously pointing fingers at others all the while claiming some perverted notion of “divine sanction.” This failure has left so many on the edge of despair and pushed so many others over the edge. I have an easy life relatively speaking, as there are no bombs exploding outside my apartment window. There are no children in my back room suffering from health-related traumas while wondering if they will survive the next aerial assault. I am not spending my days preparing funerals of hostages, journalists, children, aid workers, these and more killed during a year-long cycle of violence which has been two-parts predictable and three-parts contemptable.

And yet throughout this horror and the emotional “dodge ball” that we have all been required to play, I have worried deeply and daily about our capacity to turn back from this newest of brinks, to become “who we are” with the caveat that we are now demonstrating only a portion of that capacity, certainly the portion that revels in destruction and righteous hate, certainly the portion that is willing to swap out our God-given face for a more grotesque version of our own making, certainly the portion that prefers tricks and treachery to honest engagement, including being honest with ourselves. The Middle East is not the only global venue for horrific violence and abuse, for displacement and collective punishment. It is not the only place on earth where authoritarians pursue authoritarian goals – including the goal of keeping themselves out of jail once they no longer enjoy unchecked power with which to insulate themselves from accountability. Israel has often reminded UN diplomats over years of occupation critique that Israel is the sole functioning, “moral” democracy in the region without completing the sentence – that democracy is more than voting and that morality transcends – often considerably – ascriptions of national or ethnic interests.

In trying to make sense of this past year and my own generally inept contributions to a peace which passes understanding (to quote my prayer book), a few images and memories have reverberated. I recall several of my Jewish friends who I feel may have been pushed into taking a harder Zionist line than otherwise might have been the case had the violence on October 7 not been immediately followed by more intense, anti-Semitic recrimination on October 8, rekindling fears of discrimination lurking below every human surface. In addition, my social media feeds over the year have been filled with images from the Auschwitz Memorial archives (@AuschwitzMuseum), images of so many children and their families led to a collective slaughter once more in their collective history for no reason other than being Jewish. At the same time, I have kept a lengthy file from over 20 years of covering the major UN bodies which include multiple files chronicling abuses by an occupying power against an occupied people, abuses which are now being committed on a much larger scale, albeit a scale consistent with a past characterized by episodic bombings, settler violence, home demolitions and more. These allegedly “Godly” policy excesses are accompanied by an almost complete disregard of UN resolutions and other efforts to keep alive a “two-state solution” which is currently, at the very most, on life support.

One wonders if ending the occupation would have prevented an October 7, would have done more to end the toxicity of hatred now directed against Jews and Arabs. I cannot say. This option is not given to us now. What is given is more saber-rattling by regional states, more bombs falling in civilian areas, more journalists and aid workers under direct attack, more acts of terror and retribution, and certainly more children facing lives without limbs, schools and hope, children who bear no responsibility for the carnage we continue to witness no matter how many officials claim otherwise, no matter how many snipers blithly use the children of Gaza as target practice.

The quotations above, especially from Wendell Berry and Agatha Christie, are there not for your benefit but for mine, this person of privilege and relative access who has not been able to move the pile of violent intent a single millimeter over many years of trying, who has no defensible solution for the acrimony which has swept over friendships and partnerships like a dense fog, a person who can only incompletely process the profound moral backsliding which people across the world, including in my own country, have succeeded in recent times to normalize.

In some ways I seem to have been broken by all of this seemingly intentional reverting to a dark place from which we thought we might finally have escaped. But if this ruin is to end, and if I and others are to contribute something positive to its ending, then I must – we must reject the darkness, the hatred, the creeping dystopia. Much better is to renew as best we can our full embrace of that “grand thing” which is life itself. For a time, those of us who have been granted this blessing must learn to “rest in the grace of the world,” if only long enough to be able to return to the practice of discernment, the practice of healing, the practice of peace. There is, in the end, a way to convert our own blessings into pathways of healing and reconciliation for those who have so long been “racked with sorrow.” May we find and choose that path.

Tags: Gaza, Israel, reconciliation, UN

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More Intern Reflections on UN Policies and Processes, by Antonio Persi

3 Oct

Editor’s note. While it wasn’t for as long a time as we had hoped, we were pleased to have Antonio Persi with us for at least part of the summer. He missed the High-Level Political Forum in July but was able to attend a number of General Assembly and Security Council meetings and other UN events. As he transitions to the University of Chicago to study Anthropology and Public Policy, I asked him to jot down some of his UN Impressions especially related to how the system engages and includes young people. Excerpts from what he shared with us appear below.

Upon my arrival, I quickly discovered that the UN was riddled with disputes. At surface level this is not alarming, as disagreements and the explication of varying beliefs serve as the basis of representative governments, but as time went on (in both the Security Council and General Assembly) I was alarmed by the longevity and quantity of these quarrels and how these examples of conflict and vocal dissent did not seem to be leading diplomats to any real resolutions. Bickering only seemed to further limit options on already gridlocked attempts at unified international responses to pressing issues. On the other hand, while the atmosphere at 42nd and First Avenue was not always “inviting,” I enjoyed the absence of sugar coatings and was captivated by the shocking reality of where the world stands today.

Achieving a stable Security Council that truly and equally represents the civilians its resolutions seek to affect is a difficult and perhaps unrealistic task for the current Council–a group that already struggles with too many divergent opinions. But this does not excuse the stagnant nature of the UNSC, a chamber which largely reflects the global status quo following World War II. In a particular meeting regarding African Representation on the council the GAPW team sat through remarks delivered by virtually every member state in the United Nations, diplomats who mostly stated and restated that a change must be made, and that Africa “deserves better” which is surely true. The President of Sierra Leone actually saw fit to fly to the United Nations to commence this eight-hour long session of the UNSC which highlighted the Councils–and perhaps the United Nation’s–stubbornness to adopt a more representative process. While never explicitly mentioned, the meeting also seemed to be a clear attempt to remove the right of permanent Council members’ ability to veto a resolution, but I am just as confused as anyone on how this is going to happen. P5 members of the UNSC have vetoed the inclusion of new permanent members time and time again, deadlocking the changes that most states say they desire. Besides getting nowhere, what these day long disputes do is waste precious time and resource needed by countries to resolve more critical issues: the UNSC meeting on African Representation was meant to conclude before 1 PM but went on until about 5 pm, which meant that UNSC discussions scheduled for that afternoon regarding conflict in the Middle East ended up being discussed in more private settings with no transparency or official dialogue observed.

The need for a younger perspective within the United Nations has never been greater. The truth is that the United Nations–and society at large–has fallen victim to the notion that power and influence can and should come with seniority. I won’t negate the importance of longer-term education and experience, but perhaps that very education is the issue at hand. It is–with some variance–the education that shaped our nation’s diplomats and political leaders of today, an education that so often leads to policy gridlock and teaches one how to achieve solutions in the context of international dynamics that are no longer relevant to today. The negative consequences of this can be seen beyond the UN’s lack of perceived authority. In some of our most “objective” areas of understanding, recent discoveries show how scientific technology, and the taught knowledge it relies upon, discriminates and works against minority groups, their communities and interests.

Through interpreting the selective wording in diplomatic speeches and watching the interactions between national representatives when off the clock, it is clear that the neutrality of these chambers is compromised. Diversifying councils, envoys and conferences will continue to be the most effective way to mitigate the effects of this complex network of international alliances. Unfortunately, the word diversity feels almost intrinsically tied to race and other key factors of identity: but as we share our definitions of diversity, we often forget the inclusion of age. Different generations are naturally going to think in different ways, each is facing their own respective world and future that looks so vastly different than the other. I would argue that the world my generation is facing looks more like a pressure cooker than ever before; because of this I feel that we have shown resilience, determination and integrity like never before. In my professional experience I have seen issues like representation handled better through councils of high school students than by diplomats at the United Nation.

This drive to see change and our “blank-slate” naivety is why we as a generation stand out. Advocacy efforts have skyrocketed in my generation proving that we want to be heard, and we are ready to face the complex challenges of today. We just need somebody to truly listen. This act of listening is not satisfied by holding “youth” events in UN chambers at 5 pm on a Friday during which tired interns are talked at for hours on end with no room to include their own opinion.

If our objectivity is stripped from us upon birth (or perhaps upon conception) and we accumulate bias through time and lived experience, then how could reaching objective conclusions on critical issues be as simple as hiring the most experienced candidate? We must look to younger individuals whose formative years are not yet in the past. For it is their lack of exposure to biased “qualifications” coupled with their determination to reach ethical and just outcomes that will ensure that their contributions to the system can be thoughtful and representative of people who see little appeal in the efforts of the officials tasked with governing them. As important as youth involvement will be in revitalizing the efficiency and effectiveness of institutions such as the United Nations I fear that few hopeful peacemakers will want to involve themselves in a system in which life-saving aid is leveraged in the name of hegemony and true representation feels like a utopian dream

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