Normal Range: Honoring a World of Difference, Dr. Robert Zuber

6 Dec
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If you are different from the rest of the flock, they bite you.  Vincent O’Sullivan

Everyone’s on the cliff edge of normal. Holly Bourne

In a society so governed by superficiality, appearances, and petty economics, dreams are more real than anything in the “real world.” Dominic Owen Mallary

Everything was perfectly healthy and normal here in Denial Land.  Jim Butcher

I claim to crave a bit of normalcy but now that I have some, it’s like I don’t know what to do with it. Gayle Forman

The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Sayaka Murata

Though they may not (yet) have influenced your own life in ways that are tangible to you, the UN managed a quite remarkable week, albeit mostly in virtual formats, holding events on issues from aviation security and Africa security sector reform to transforming rural food systems and addressing the distinctive aspirations and circumstances of people of African descent.

Amidst this cacophony of policy deliberations and interests, two significant events grabbed headlines while another didn’t generate the interest it should have.  On Wednesday, the UN Secretary-General presented his “State of the Planet” address (at Columbia University) in which he detailed our “assault on nature” which continues largely unabated into the present, an assault that requires an environmental equivalent to “silencing the guns.” The SG passionately reminded us of the many “suicidal” climate impacts that we have done too-little to mitigate and which threaten us with both political instability and biological collapse. As he so often does, he ended his “world on fire” remarks by reminding us that we now have the skills and technology needed to right this ship, but both now require the most urgent application.

One of those aforementioned (what Peru referred to as “slow motion”) climate impact is directed related to human health, specifically the frequency of deadly pandemics or which COVID-19 could eventually prove to be merely a warm-up.  Thus, it was with great anticipation that we greeted this week’s General Assembly special session on COVID-19 response which focused on ensuring that approved vaccines are understood by states and stakeholders as a “global public good.” The other priority (with leadership from Latvia) was on reversing course with regard to the current “Infodemic,” the preponderance of misinformation and disinformation – some perversely intentional – which has complicated vaccine rollout and disappointed the researchers who spoke to the GA in humble (and sometimes frustrated) tones about their aspirations for the vaccines they helped develop, test and authorize for use at a remarkable, unprecedented pace.

These two were the highest of a series of high impact events, and rightfully so.  Both climate change and the current pandemic (and their overlapping “Infodemics”) are creating havoc in communities urban and rural, jeopardizing both our food security and our mental health, making life uncomfortable for the most privileged and literally unthinkable for the least privileged with more sliding into the latter category each and every day.

Such was the context for the annual meeting of the treaty body on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities that we look forward to every year, a time when the hallways of the UN are usually filled with people who are “disabled” in mostly physical ways but who have often struggled mightily and successfully in an attempt to overcome for themselves and others what are generally recognized as the primary barriers associated with disability – activity limitations and participation restrictions. 

The pandemic spread made it impossible to gather on site as we are often honored to do, to be in the presence of persons who come to the UN with their walking sticks and wheelchairs, with their hearing assistance and seeing-eye dogs to make the case that their “normal” is as entitled to rights, respect and recognition as that of any of the rest of us; that participation in social and political life is not a privilege to be bestowed but a right to be recognized; that the “soft bigotry” that Australia highlighted this week is related not only to the codification of a more conventional “normal,” but also to an arrogant ascription of low expectations for persons who can’t “do what we do” as though they might not also be able “to do what we can’t.” 

These misplaced codifications and expectations exacerbate struggles within communities of disability, mighty ones in fact.  Persons with physical disabilities must navigate a world designed largely to reinforce the comforts and conveniences of the conventionally abled, and we have heard story after agonizing story over many years as their largely inaccessible homes and communities makes timely relocation from bombing and flooding, from famine and insurgencies, particularly treacherous for both themselves and those accompanying them.  Moreover, especially in this time of pandemic, we recognize that “disability” in many global regions is taking some precarious and unwelcome turns towards higher levels of poverty, epidemics of narcotics dependency and mental illness, and other factors making it harder and harder to thrive amidst a host of still-potent accessibility and participation-challenged contexts.

This “soft bigotry” takes other forms, from our increasing reliance on the “normal” within our families and other social bubbles to the functional denial of the rights and skills of those billion + persons in our world who struggle to find their way within societies which seem to be designed and crafted around the abilities they don’t have and not the ones they do have.  

Some of this seems not so “soft.” The tendency to shrink “room for exceptions,” or even to insist that others hold their places on a “cliffs edge” of our own sense of what is normal, is sadly not unusual throughout our life cycles.  Parents of young children can experience high and sometimes even competitive levels of anxiety as they assess whether their children are following a “normal” development path.   Older children can certainly be prone to “biting” or otherwise intimidating classmates who for one reason or another fail to conform to “normal” social expectations, especially those of the “cool kids.”  Later in life, those sufficiently privileged can create domiciled havens in communities which virtually guarantee that the only people seen and heard on a regular basis are those who look and act “like us.”

While some of this is understandable, especially regarding the development of young children, the general pattern here is conducive to another sort of “Infodemic” – the (mis) communication that what is different is to be deemed alien or even threatening until proven otherwise, such “proof” being hard to come by.  In this time of pandemic and economic uncertainty the tendency to roll up the metaphorical rug of our lives; to restrict the circle of concern to a more “manageable” size; to let others worry about the access, participation and other rights of persons with whom we are rarely in contact; to restrict our experiences in the real world and then allow others to fill in reality gaps with conspiracies and other “information” designed to push people further into dens of grievance and retreat; all if this creates an unwelcome context for difference, including of ability/disability, one that reflects yet another, albeit largely unseen, barrier to rights and respect.

The irony here is that, as the pandemic and its economic consequences spread and deepen, as the impacts of a warming climate accelerate displacement and exacerbate insecurity and political tensions, the numbers of the “not normal,” the people who now find it harder and harder to cope in societies which seem habitually distracted at best and hostile to their needs and interests at worst, these numbers are certain to grow.  And as those who gathered around a largely virtual UN this week to assess the treaty guaranteeing the rights of persons with disabilities recognize, our responsibility is only deepening to ensure that those growing numbers of persons in all their aspects and circumstances, with all their levels and types of ability, are not also forced to cope with life challenges in some lonely, inaccessible, insecure isolation.  

Whether we like to admit it or not, we live in a world of “exceptions” beyond range of our ascriptions of normalcy, people whose diverse talents and abilities, whose broad and even uncommunicated aspirations and longings, are still not in sufficient balance with our “normal,” our taken-for-granted, than our fragile social, security and environmental networks can likely tolerate.  We need to honor these billion + life forces better than we do at present, to watch and listen to them, to consider more of what they have to teach the rest of us, even if they don’t realize they’re teaching! Moreover, we would do well to regain some of our misplaced sensitivity to the access and participation needs of others, protecting them as jealously as we guard our own. And we need to do this as though our lives depend on it.

More than many recognize, they do.

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Lonely Exile: An Advent Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

29 Nov
Feeling lonely? You've got company. | The World from PRX

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.  F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them. Sylvia Plath

Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting. Khaled Hossein

They’d elevate small grievances; they’d cherish hurt feelings and ill treatment like they were signs of virtue. Amy Bloom

As we have said about many things in this strange and uncomfortable year, this Advent season feels like few we have experienced in our collective lifetime.

One of the reasons, I suspect, why Advent is not more resonant within communities and even across faith traditions is that we don’t routinely engage in the reflections and reactions that the season demands. The word “Advent” is perhaps best translated as “expectation.” The signature image is, as we have noted over many years, the lone person peering into the night sky, knowing that something is out there that can reverse the trend of lonely exile, that can provide a lift to relationships in disarray and the loosening of the iron grip of occupation both of our nations and our souls.

This peering into the Milky Way was never merely wishful thinking, for Isiah and other prophets had long-anticipated “a light to those who sit in darkness” indeed even to those who find themselves sitting “in the shadow of death.” And yet this expectation was accompanied neither by a timeline nor a script. Something out there would surely come, a visitation would commence that could “guide our feet into the way of peace,” peace in our families, our communities, our world, but the timing and the program elements were as yet unclear, as yet uncertain. And the wait for clarity was genuinely painful as “the simple act of waiting” so often is.

But longing and waiting for a visitation are insufficient. This “way of peace” demands more of us as well. The visitation that can “guide our feet” requires us to use those feet to walk that path, to trust the direction but do so willfully and mindfully, to push ourselves forward and not wait for some unseen hand to keep pushing from behind. And as we walk, to engage in the two demands that, for me at least, signify the essence of the Advent season, the essence of our longing and response.

For me, the core of Advent takes the forms of Anticipation and Preparation: anticipation of the world made possible in part through the promise of a visitation; preparation to seize that opportunity, to be as ready as we can be as that world of promise takes its welcome shape.

On the surface, these two attributes seem like obvious conduits for the best of our modern age; indeed in healthy families, institutions or even governments, both play a key role. Such health requires an attentive and active investment in the world and its peoples, a willingness to see past our often-petty, soul-clogging grievances and our sometimes discouraging logistics to a time when, as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer puts it, we have “cast away the works of darkness” and now bathe in a light which is accessible to all and not just to some, a light which never dims in part because we ourselves have accepted the responsibility for illumination.

But all this sounds now like a bit fantasy, doesn’t it? Those in our time who dare to anticipate at all often see a future filled with obstacles for which we are no more prepared than we were for prior sets of challenges. We “expect” the next major storms to devastate coastlines, the next geo-political tensions to spill over into brutal conflict, the next species to be made extinct through our own greed and negligence, the next pandemics lying in wait to inflict their damage once the current virus has had its fill of us.

On and on, anticipating an epoch of impediments for which we do not know how to adequately prepare, indeed that our elected representatives and policymakers don’t seem properly equipped to address either. Rather than anticipating that time when our feet finally reach that place of light and peace, that time when anticipated visitation becomes trusted presence, we expect to see only the faintest glimmers of a world that seems perpetually beyond our reach. Indeed, especially in this pandemic year, it seems to many as though our sun is always setting, regardless of the hour.

But Advent calls out circumstances not in perpetual dusk — calls us to anticipate and prepare for the world that can and must exist beyond the loneliness that has disabled so many of our current connections, beyond the (non-virtuous) grievances that rob the world of light and disfigure our very souls, beyond the masks and social distancing which are necessary for physical health but challenging to emotional stability. We fear the dusk and the darkness which soon envelops it, but we fail to properly discern what such fear reveals about the status of our own resilience, our own courage to stay the course of peace, our own capacity to illuminate a path different from the one we are on now, a path inconsistent with Advent’s calling.

In writing this, my thoughts turned to a deceased Aunt who helped raise me but whose later years were a veritable cauldron of suspicion and grievance, immersed in conspiracy theories and half-truths she never bothered to interrogate. She was one of those people who when the phone or doorbell rang, would erupt in expletive-saturated discourse as though the voice on the other end had no goal other than to take her money or make her life more confusing and threatening than it already seemed.

With all due regard for the prevalence of elder abuse, I used to think that my Aunt was a relatively extreme, isolated case. But in this era of pandemic, climate and economic threats, when even a jaunt to the market has potentially grave health and budgetary implications, the numbers of socially isolated persons are vast approaching epidemic proportions. Indeed, one explanation for the failure of political polling to make accurate forecasts in the US election just concluded is the large number of people who now simply refuse to answer the phone or whose grievance-laden and conspiratorial responses made pollsters wish they hadn’t bothered.

Most of us are not as angry and self-protective as this, of course, but many of us seem unable to see past the current circumstances to that time when it is no longer necessary or appropriate to see others primarily as viral conduits or threats to our increasingly privatized spaces, but rather as fellow beings who need our touch, our encouragement, our tangible expressions of interest. It is thus cause for concern, especially apparent during this season of anticipation, that our heart-habits are still tracking in dubious directions, that the visitation of Advent finds so many of us in hardened, isolated, impatient, even desolate places.

As circumstances better enable, it will be instructive to see if and how we are able to pivot to a world where solidarity makes more sense than competition; where vulnerability makes more sense than isolation; where sharing makes more sense than hoarding; where showing interest in others makes more sense than demanding attention; where gratitude makes more sense than grievance; where our aching feet carry on the path towards that revelatory state wherein the world remains illuminated and lasting peace remains within our grasp.

This Advent more than others, such instruction still indicates a risk of of slipping deeper into “lonely exile,” a place of disconnect from ourselves but also from those who can bring richness to our lives, including those who can inspire visions of a better world and help enable the multiple preparations we must now be about in order to to get there. Thankfully this Advent can also serve as a reminder of what months of isolation, social distancing and face coverings have tended to obscure, that the keys to our recovery from this pandemic are also keys to our recovery as a species.

The blank stares which define so much our battered present must not be allowed any longer to blur anticipation of a healthier, fairer, saner planet. Something is coming to help push us down a path towards a world that is no longer falling apart, that is no longer shedding species and hope, that is no longer enveloped in a fog of virus, mistrust and indifference. Advent is our time time to prepare for that visit, for that push, and for that world.

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Attitude Adjustment: A Thanksgiving Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

22 Nov
Manage Risk to Stay Safe for COVID Thanksgiving

Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.  Thich Nhat Hanh

Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer. Maya Angelou

Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.  Voltaire

It is a pity that doing one’s best does not always answer.  Charlotte Brontë

This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.  Michael Ondaatje

Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold.  Nadine Gordimer

The Major was silent. He was at once appalled and also reluctant to hear any more. This was why people usually talked about the weather. Helen Simonson

During this past week of political turmoil within and beyond the US, together with a pandemic that is spreading in some regions faster than butter on a hot biscuit, a singular image shook me to my core.

The image was of a boy in Cameroon, a country I have visited several times and which has been in the throes of civil conflict for too-many years now as the Anglophone region bordering Nigeria struggles to maintain autonomy from an increasingly tone-deaf and even brutal government in Yaounde.  

And while I’m skeptical of many posted images on twitter and other social media, this is one which could not have been photo-shopped, could not have its takeaways easily manipulated through the framing of the image.  Here, a Cameroonian boy, perhaps 10 years old, is lying in the street, having had his feet and lower legs shot off apparently by Cameroon security forces, or perhaps one of the vigilante groups “serving” alongside national military contingents.

The boy was bleeding profusely as he grabbed at pieces of his shattered limbs, tossing them aside in agony as he no doubt realized they were no longer of use to him.  If he survived the trauma and the bleeding, if there was anyone there to bind the wounds and ease the pain, he would never do again what had come most naturally to him a short while earlier – to walk and run, to explore and participate in the street life of a community that now seems so diminished, so impotent in the face of the overwhelming reality of a young life on the brink, a life that now at its best is as shattered as the shards of his own limbs scattered across a familiar path.

This boy can never “kiss the ground” with the feet he no longer has.

I have seen thousands of similar images in the course of this work, some in person and more through the media platforms on which we are now, sad to say, increasingly dependent.  Like that tune you can’t stomach but also can’t forget, I have not been able to put this gruesome image out of my mind. This is a problem for many of in this work who imagine ourselves stronger and more emotionally resilient than we actually are. These images remind us of why we must stay engaged. But they also accumulate like toxins in our cells, akin to a poison we don’t realize we have ingested.

As many around the UN recognize, as attuned to US calendar rhythms as UN folks tend to be, this is our Thanksgiving week, a time both historically dubious and emotionally potent, a time when people now must make hard decisions about who to visit, how to travel, whether or not to accommodate the pandemic and lay low for just this once, just this year, in the hope that loved ones — especially our elderly — can survive our physical absence until the viral coast is truly clear.

It is also a week to contemplate the dual invitations implicit in this season; the invitation first to appreciation for the many blessings which we have received, the blessings which should constitute the core substance of our prayers however (and if ever) we understand them. Added to that is the invitation to giving, one which in normal times many would happily accept. But this year, those calls are often drowned out by a cacophony of grievances, uncertainty and loneliness; thus the invitation to give more of ourselves, more of the treasure we are now tempted to forget we have, more of the sensitive and intimate underbelly that is now mostly encased in thick layers of ideology and self-protection, all of this seems up for COVID-inspired grabs like rarely in our recent history.  

This is a time when the whole world seems to be messaging what we usually leave to our advertisers – that our lives are somehow less than they should be because we lack those core ties to “normal” patterns of consumption and connection that had defined our lives in what is becoming for many, a romanticized, pre-pandemic past.   In the void left by the sudden departure of that normal, we are collectively spending more and more time indulging our evidence-challenged assumptions about each other, acting out our anxieties by “tearing into each other,” and this for reasons we can no longer clearly explain, if indeed we ever could.  

Even for those of us who imagine ourselves in the “peace business” there is a fair bit of explaining to do.  We have tried our level-best in many instances, but our best “does not always answer” the questions and concerns which the world anxiously poses. To some degree, we seem to have achieved little more than putting disasters “on hold, “ a modest sign of success to be sure, but one which seems at times akin to ensuring a ready supply of umbrellas as a tornado approaches. 

In the institution of the UN where we routinely make our case for effective policy and the human values needed to sustain it, there often seems to be a fair amount of measuring success by putting looming disasters on hold, in part as a legitimate effort to buy time to see if a more sustainable solution to disaster threats can be negotiated and implemented, in part as what seems to be a not-always-subtle maneuver to kick problems down the road in the hope that another generation can rise above the consequences of their elder’s follies.

That said, there were some good and hopeful signs emanating from the UN this week, including a supportive, “fingers-crossed” Security Council Arria session on the peace process in Afghanistan; an adopted General Assembly resolution on a death-penalty moratorium that continues to gain traction and another GA session on reforming the Security Council; an event on how the medium of radio can both inflame atrocity crimes and promote social reconstruction; and a joint meeting of the Economic and Social Council and the Peacebuilding Commission that promises more coordinated responses to the diverse, “root causes” of armed conflict. In addition, although the UN does not insist on specific forms of governance from its member states, there was much timely and welcome scrutiny and active promotion of democracy this week with International IDEA at the controls.

Friday was also World Children’s Day, a time to reflect on the many promises made to our children which still remain elusive. Despite often herculean efforts by child advocates, children are leaving behind educational opportunity and re-entering a dangerous workforce across parts of Africa and Latin American due to the spread of the pandemic. Some children in Syria and Libya spend more time dodging bombs and landmines than balls on the playground. Children in places like Yemen are being deliberately starved to such a degree that their full functionality as adults will be severely impaired even if they mange to survive the current onslaught. Children are being displaced, then trafficked, then abused in the major cities of the so-called “civilized world.”

And then there is that image of the Cameroon boy that I simply cannot put out of my waking mind. His unimaginable misery does not in any way make me ‘’feel better” about my own life; if anything it encourages a toxic temptation to avert my gaze, to “talk about the weather” or other matters both banal and distracting. But I and others can surely recognize that as anxious as many of us are, as frayed around the edges as we now admit to being, the need to stay the course on policy attentiveness and practical concern remains acute. Thus my own Thanksgiving prayer this year is to appreciate others in larger measure, to offer more of what is left in me to give, and to hold on tight to my portion of our collective focus.

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Mess Halls: Curbing the Spread of our Current Chaos, Dr. Robert Zuber

15 Nov
Your Messy Room is Keeping You Unhealthy - Dr. Peggy Malone

Messes are made by people who want but don’t know what they want, let alone how to get it.  Joyce Carol Oates

There are more dishes to come, more flavors to try, and this time I will not spill or spit or drop or splash. Jay Rayner

We don’t have to wait for someone to make messes of our lives. We do a good enough job, ourselves.  Jodi Picoult

I’m shaken and I’m stirred.  Anthony Hamilton

You don’t know how much it is tiring to stay here, since Chaos is all I know. Mess is all I see; And noise is all I hear. Samiha Totanji

Like a button on a shirt buttoned wrong, every attempt to correct things led to yet another fine –not to say elegant– mess.  Haruki Murakami

Clean up your room!  Many Mothers

I spent some of my childhood sharing a bedroom with three younger brothers, a situation that was challenging both in terms of privacy and especially in terms of maintaining some semblance of fairness and order.

My mother, who had more children to care for than she needed and likely wanted, was constantly demanding that those of us responsible for turning that small room into a preview of Armageddon (mostly me) invested some of our life force in cleaning up the mess that was, as are so many messes in this world, so much easier to make than to repair.

The only blessing in this scenario was that there was a door to close, a way to keep the chaos of that room from spreading like a virus into unsuspecting corners of that small house.  But even inside the room itself, there were good reasons to restore some baseline of order, a baseline more likely to foster respect for the rights and feelings of other inhabitants, a baseline that allowed us to keep our toys and other belongings as “shared property” only when we chose to share them; not giving in to the chaos which enabled bullies like me to grab whatever they wanted over the squeals of disapproval from the other children. 

Needless to say, my mother had a different standard of cleanliness and “order” than her children did, and she struggled to get us to buy in to her standard without having to impose it through her own labor.   And people do, indeed, have sometimes wildly divergent levels of comfort around issues of order and cleanliness, as many in long-term relationships discover.  That said, there are lessons around “mess” that we would do well to consider, specifically the lesson that messes are more easily made than undone, and that the easiest way to clean up after ourselves is to resist the temptation to make a mess in the first instance.

I know that it is frustrating for some readers to endure these weekly attempts to analogize lessons from family life to civic life, from modest bedrooms to large conference rooms filled with important people ostensibly doing important things.   But let’s go there anyway.    For the world we now inhabit is surely characterized by one “mess” after another, many of which we could have seen coming if we were not so intent on averting our gaze; many of which have also given those of us in places of privilege an excuse to disregard the rights and needs of others, to grab more than our share of the metaphorical toys and stuffed animals, to get around to cleaning up after ourselves when it is convenient for us to do so and not when it is most urgent.

Unlike the chaos of my childhood resting space, for us in this larger world there is no door to close, no way to confine the consequences of the mess to the authors of the mess.  The chaos that we willingly tolerate for ourselves is also most often chaos exported, becoming yet another imposition on people who, in some instances at least, have their own issues with disorder and turmoil to resolve; people and communities whose messes are already challenging enough without additional external consequences from the discord which they neither caused nor can reasonably assimilate.

Those of you who read this weekly post and/or other (likely better) alternatives don’t need me to remind you about our currently over-heated mess threshold.   From a hyperactive pandemic to a conflict in Yemen that promises environmental ruin in the long term and starving children in the short term; from climate risks that have likely passed their tipping point to the growing numbers of displaced persons exchanging hopelessness at home for road-weary misery; from ocean creatures ingesting more plastic than prey to landscapes more prone to wildfires than wild flowers; the chaos that we have sown has deep roots and broad consequences, most of which inspire responses that are not as carefully crafted and boldly implemented as they should be, responses that seem to enable messes of longer-duration as often as they offer tangible improvement.

Even our democracies now seem in peril as more and more people worldwide seem to have abandoned the responsibility to push through the “messiness” of democratic consultation and consensus-building in favor of iron-like authoritarian voices telling them what they should want, what they should value and how they should go about getting what they have convinced themselves they are entitled to have.   Sadly, these are often the voices that justify their own mess-making at the expense of others, an entitlement to sow substantial short-term chaos secure in the belief that its consequences can be successfully exported as needed — that we can keep our own rooms reasonably in order in part by shipping messes off to the dwellings and communities of of others, largely against their will.

The UN which we engage relentlessly is a place at its best where nations and peoples can come together to assess and resolve common threats, to own the messes we have made and reverse the consequences we have largely ignored; and then together authorize and enact multilateral strategies to better ensure that there is less clutter and chaos on our planet, dampening down verbal excuses and political impediments preventing us from doing more to resolve the messes that perpetually beckon.

But at its worst, the UN is a place of inertia and obstruction, halls of policy where mostly privileged national lenses fuss over resolution and/or treaty language that guarantees (at best) tepid responses to our major messes, responses that are often not nearly as timely and robust as they need to be from an institution and its Assembly that are not yet as prescient, reliable and determined as we need them to be.

I am not naïve regarding the considerable value of a UN institution in which I (and my colleagues) have spent many long years. But the lessons that seemed clear to me when I first entered still apply. The longer we fail to acknowledge and respond to the messes that impact so much of our planet, the harder they are to resolve. And the less we are willing to control the consequential spread of our own chaos and disorder, the more mistrust and enmity we are likely to provoke in others.

My sense is that no amount of institutional self-referencing, no amount of speeches lofty or obstructionist in the General Assembly Hall or other multilateral settings should ever blind us to the degree to which the chaos, the mess, the “noise” of our world (including the cries of those whose lives are characterized by flying bombs, grave food insecurity and polluted waterways) have raised expectations for our policy. The world is crying out for new “dishes and flavors” to try, innovative solutions to threats and messes that have festered for much too long, fresh commitments from the most privileged that they will clean up their own spaces without off-loading the worst of their clutter on to spaces where it simply doesn’t belong.

Do we as a policy community have what it takes to make such a commitment? Are we willing to swallow some of the mistrust and downright orneriness that lead to sometimes bitter deliberations, such as was the case this week regarding a proposed e-voting procedure to allow the core work of the General Assembly to continue during a pandemic or other crisis? Are we willing to follow the trail of our own messes to ensure that our “solutions” don’t inadvertently create more discord, thereby impeding even more than is already the case the rights, development and stability of those we purport to help?

In my view (and hardly mine alone) a fair bit of what we in places of privilege and influence have wrought upon the world should shake us to our very core. But it should also stir a fresh passion in us, a passion to reverse our messy trajectories while we still can, to create more fairness and accountability within our institutional halls, to shut the door on the spread of our chaos of excess and indifference better than we are doing so far, chaos now firmly embedded in pandemics and armed conflicts, in climate shocks and social inequalities.

My mother knew little of such things. But she recognized a mess when she saw one, and she would likely recognize that we, too, have many messes still to acknowledge and confine within the spaces where we work and live.

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Race Track: Driving Discrimination from our Ranks, Dr. Robert Zuber

8 Nov
Social diversity is initially threatening but people do adapt over time – new research

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men. Alice Walker

We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust.  Thurgood Marshall

My color is my joy and not my burden. Bebe Moore Campbell

Wherein is the cause for anger, envy or discrimination?  Mahatma Gandhi

But she knows where her ticket takes her. She will find her place in the sun. Tracy Chapman

The Black woman in the South who raises sons, grandsons and nephews had her heartstrings tied to a hanging noose.   Maya Angelou

Excessive praise arises from the same bigotry matrix as excessive criticism. Stefan Molyneux

It is a glorious November Sunday in New York, a day more like late September than the Sunday after a US presidential election.  I had vowed not to say much about the election results, though there is plenty to reflect on, plenty that elicits fair portions of both celebration and caution; with especially deep gratitude to the remarkable poll workers and vote tabulators who ignored and even at times defied a bevy of threats, including from the leadership of the US Postal Service, armed protestors and a spreading pandemic, to deliver what appears by all independent accounts to be free and fair voting for some 150 million US citizens.  

Despite this gift, we know that threats to this democracy, as to others worldwide, have not been laid to rest.  We know that there are tricks left to be played by those still in power (and those heaping “excessive praise” on them), people who understand full well the metaphorical knives that have been drawn by prosecutors and regulators once they leave the sanctuary of the White House.  Those of us who have been holding our breath (at times even our tongue) that this period of political – even criminal – hardball will soon pass recognize that democratic oxygen is still in short supply and that the grievances – legitimate and otherwise – that have driven us to an authoritarian brink are likely only to intensify over the next 10 weeks.

Assuming that a genuine political transition occurs in my country, and that is no foregone conclusion, we anticipate that (what we interpret as) benefits from a new US administration will accrue in the form of climate action and other multilateral efforts to curb the pandemic, reduce social and economic inequalities, disarm weapons and promote sustainable development.  The UN, which has largely refrained from criticism of the US (as it does routinely with all major state powers and funders), can expect a bit of a post-inaugural holiday as dues are paid in full and abandoned political commitments that can readily be reinstated will be.

This US election season also cast light on a UN agenda that is often-discussed but less-often implemented, and that is the concern for inclusion, the basic belief that all should have a say on matters which affect them; the belief that our increasingly inter-dependent world requires diverse voices on a wide range of matters both complex and mundane, including on matters of governance.  In  the US, our own myth of inclusivity has taken a pounding in recent years by those in positions of authority espousing equivalences between “whiteness” and “greatness.” This has resulted in some hard-to-remove stains on our national character including children separated from families and parents afraid to send their children to the grocery store for fear of confrontation with store managers or police; but also ordinary citizens having to fight through what appears to be willful disenfranchisement as polling places were closed, ballots arbitrarily rejected,  and voting lines in some “minority” neighborhoods permitted to stretch for miles.   

While grievances in my country now spring forth like weeds in an abandoned garden, there are some that have deeper roots, louder echoes of oppression, producing more pervasive anxieties.  There is much listening we need to do far beyond our comfort zones, ideological bubbles, evidence-less presumptions and political preferences.  And a special listening post must be dedicated to those whose “ticket” has yet to guarantee them a seat on most every ride, the mothers and grandmothers whose heartstrings are “tied to a hanging noose,” those who live under threat every day that their next venture outdoors will trigger some hate-filled response or even a one-way trip across the nearest border.  

The UN in its own way has tried to keep alive the flickering flame of inclusiveness, insisting with varying levels of success that we find the courage and the means to ensure that those habitually left behind are invited to the head table; that their “ticket” to viability and safety is deemed as valid as any other’s; that their full franchise is both encouraged and protected; that the fruits of development (or a COVID vaccine) are distributed without politics or prejudice; and that the justifications we employ regarding the “causes” of our discriminatory ways are recognized to be largely without merit.

This past week there were several key events (mostly virtual) at the UN that underscored the ever-deepening relationship between inclusiveness and the promotion of peaceful societies. In the Security Council, in the General Assembly, and during events celebrating the increasingly gendered commitments of UN policing and highlighting efforts to abolish capital punishment, the mantra of inclusiveness and an end to discriminatory practices — as well as the incitement which stokes racism, xenophobia and other human behavior we could better live without — were duly reinforced.

Among the primary takeaways from this long and exhausting week included Malaysia’s lament in the General Assembly’s 3rd Committee that the COVID pandemic “has brought out the worst in us,” specifically with regard to racial and religious discrimination. And in a Security Council discussion on “drivers of conflict, Sir Hilary Beckles underscored the tangible steps needed to reinforce this current “age of apology,” while the Prime Minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines reminded delegations that we cannot hope to overcome chasms of distrust and apathy unless we can speed up our current “baby steps”

There was even more of value to digest including UN Special Rapporteur Day’s plea to address and eliminate the “habituation” in many societies that allows people to tolerate discrimination, Mexico’s call for higher levels of government consultation and trust-building with the most vulnerable and marginalized within national borders, and the Netherlands urging of UN member states to be better “truth-tellers” on racial justice.

While one could surely chide the UN for its own “baby steps” regarding its long-delayed success in gender-balancing peace operations and other core security-sector functions, the UN also enables valuable guidance on how hold together a global community which has too often threatened to disengage from one another. Keys to the reconciliation we need include broader-based consultations, higher levels of truth telling and truth-hearing, firmer commitments to address the scourge of incitement in public and online settings, and better protection of spaces where “public goods” (such as a potential COVID vaccine) take precedence over private interests.

But will we listen? The US president-elect’s oft-repeated claim to represent all US citizens — “those who voted for me and those who didn’t” — is a welcome if somewhat conventional claim, albeit with challenges destined to frustrate all but the most sincere and robust of -commitments. We have, regrettably, conspired over many years to create a culture that is long on acrimony and short on listening; long on grievances and conspiracies and short on evidence and compassion; long on self-delusion and short on self-reflection. We are less mindful than it is in our best interest to be, both about the demonizing we do routinely within our own borders, and the violence we inflict — directly or by proxy — beyond them. We simply cannot survive much more of this no matter who occupies the White House.

I want to end on a more hopeful note by referencing last night’s speech by vice-president-elect Kamala Harris. She delivered a strong and humane point of contact with women and men across my country (and likely beyond) for whom “color” has been a burden; a burden for those who have suffered much, often over many generations, but also a burden for those who can see no way out of their own predicaments other than through more threats, more intolerance, more dubious claims of “superiority.”

For Ms. Harris, her own burden seemed, for a glorious moment at least, to have become something more akin to a joy. As she proclaimed with great enthusiasm, “I am the first, but I will not be the last.” She has found her well-deserved place in the sun, but she also recognizes that if that same sun is somehow prevented from shining on all, the ones we like and the ones we don’t, the ones we trust and the ones we don’t, then the democratic values and processes we presume to cherish will eventually and finally slip through our grasp.

Clearly we need more “firsts” in our country and our world, “firsts” emanating from every corner of human community, especially where people are feeling neglected or abandoned, disrespected or humiliated. And as Ms. Harris rightly suggested, we need more “seconds” and “thirds” as well.

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Thought-Provoked: The Mindset We Need Now, Dr. Robert Zuber

1 Nov
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Learn why the world wags and what wags it. T.H. White

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.  Plutarch

Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.  Samuel Johnson

I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity. Eleanor Roosevelt

Her grandmother had once told her that one of life’s best lessons was not being afraid to look foolish. Melissa Senate

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead.  Susan Sontag

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.  Carl Sagan

Although it may seem premature to some, one of the tasks as the gut-wrenching US elections approach is to think about their aftermath and what we as a people need to do – need to become – in order for elections to do anything more than widen social divisions and confirm biases that it would be better to challenge.

 As is the case in most instances, and as I mentioned last week, elections in and of themselves rarely resolve national problems. Tuesday in the US may result in a bevy of new faces at the head of the table, but there is no guarantee that those faces will be able to “sell” disenfranchised or ignored segments of the population that government truly has their back.  And our elections, in and of themselves, certainly don’t guarantee that the US as an entity can restore its role as partner to those seeking a higher level of accountability from their own governments; or that we can once again pledge to become a reliable bearer of our own creeds and commitments.

The US is by no stretch the source of all problems in the world, but we must acknowledge our bad habits of thought and action, some of which have punctuated our 200 + year history while others have recently been added to the national menu.  There is no reason to dwell here on our cruel legacies of race or the delusions associated with our alleged “exceptionalism,” except to say that we must continue to interrogate and even “wrestle” with these demons if we are ever to bring them to heel. 

But beyond these, there is still something that seems deeply wrong with us – all of us, not just the ones who see fellow-citizens as enemies; not just the ones who pull cookies from a jar that isn’t theirs; not just the ones who vacuum up public wealth and horde it within privately-controlled accounts; not just the ones who are more concerned about the operation of their guns than the health and well-being of their neighbors.  Collectively speaking, we don’t listen well to others, we wilfully contain our concerns within our families and other “safe havens,” we are much too comfortable with what we imagine we “know” and much too sensitive and protective regarding any threats we perceive to what are so-often lazy, distracted and self-referential opinions.

In sum, we have become willfully incurious about others, about our planet, about the wonders, many still largely unexamined, that exist below our surfaces and beyond our orbits.  We are too keen to project our biases hither and yon, but not to ask the questions that allow others to share, and also to grow, and to invite such questions in return.  We “know” so much, apparently, about all sorts of things, including what our political adversaries are thinking and feeling, what they fear and hope for, what impediments, real and imagined, block the path of their fulfillment. 

Except we don’t.

In our post-election period, regardless of outcomes, we must find ways to recover our collective curiosity about our world and each other, a thirst for what there is to be known beyond what we claim to know, the larger realities and wonders that exist beyond the opinions and biases we barely comprehend and rarely interrogate, but relentlessly project and defend.

In this time of opinions both aggressive and shallow, a time when science is little understood but widely attacked, the ongoing efforts of scientists to examine, recommend and re-examine on urgent matters such as climate change, pandemics and environmental degradation are held up to ridicule and accused of being unreliable and even corrupted, often by people determined to project their own corruption on to others.

In this regard, there were some interesting rays of hope at the UN this week, including a small “Open Science” event on Thursday that shed some good light on our limited understanding of how science works, the curiosity that lies at its roots, and the “public” benefits that can accrue from its investigations.  At this event, the directors of UNESCO, the World Health Organization and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights joined forces to remind diplomats – and the rest of us – why science at its best matters so much to the lives we lead and the world we need. 

All speakers urged a less “secretive,” more open, transparent and community-engaged scientific community, one prepared to insist on a more democratic distribution of scientific benefits, including on a possible COVID vaccine.  Such “honest engagements” as High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet urged, must involve discussions of how science aspires to its best insights; the consulting and accommodating of evidence at all stages of investigation, doubling back on conclusions and findings, continuing to modify and enrich what might otherwise devolve into an artificially-inflexible consensus.  It must also be about communicating its “best sense of things” beyond the laboratories and research centers, helping us to see as clearly as possible what needs to be fixed, including in ourselves, and how such might effectively be accomplished.  It must be about asking the next question rather than settling for the last answer. And it must be about, as UNESCO DG Audrey Azoulay noted, learning to share research and its benefits better across borders as well to to cultivate the “collective intelligence” that we will need to tap into more regularly –beyond the confines of our laboratories and government offices, beyond the bearers of advanced degrees and owners of large bank holdings — if the problems that will continue to confront us post-election have any good chance of being solved.

Indeed, it is that precisely that “intelligence” from multiple sources and corners of our societies — intelligence that is generous, attentive, evidence-based, inclusive and courageous — which we must learn to tap in larger measure if we are to patch up this leaking ship.  As we plot our course forward with the leadership that we in the US will give ourselves on Tuesday, we will need heavy doses of all of these attributes, and then some, if the social ruptures, stereotyping and current levels of distrust are to be effectively combated; indeed if we are to emerge as a nation in more than name only. To this end, we would do well to cease our collective suppression of the “fire” of curiosity, curb our obsessive need for certainty, and invest more of ourselves in what “wags” this world still filled with incredible things to be known and which we are slowly, foolishly, dangerously bringing to its metaphorical knees.

As grateful as I was for the “Open Science” discussion, some of the most inspirational moments at the UN this week actually came from other, if complementary spaces.  At a UN-Habitat “World Cities Day” event, for instance, a youth climate activist called for higher levels of “responsible action” on climate change and reminded delegates that hers’ may well be the “last generation that can bring us back from the abyss.”  And in the Security Council, the ever-thoughtful Ambassador Singer from the Dominican Republic noted that, even after a decade of horrific, unprecedented conflict in Syria, the refugees and doctors, the prisoners and economically distressed have not given up; and “neither must we.”

And neither will we.

For the sake of the young activists now begging the rest of us to to “consult the science” on climate change, the civilians in war-ravaged regions desperate for provisions and the silencing of guns, the front-line health workers seeking guidance on how best to restore the health of COVID patients and reinforce often-ignored health guidelines, we must persevere. Tuesday’s elections may give those of us in the US (and perhaps others as well) the chance to reboot our cognitive skills and priorities and reset our ethics and relationships. If so, it’s a chance we simply must seize.

Birth Mark: Reminding Ourselves Why We’re Here, Dr. Robert Zuber

25 Oct
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The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.   Mark Twain

Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.  Diane Setterfield

My mother groaned, my father wept, into the dangerous world I leapt.  William Blake

A birth-date is a reminder to celebrate the life as well as to update the life.  Amit Kalantri

Lowly seeds are nourished in the earth, and then later the ravishing blooms appear. Moderata Fonte

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.  T.S. Eliot

You were born with a broken heart.  From the cracks of it love oozes out.  Lidia Longorio

This weekend represents, for me at least, the annual ritual associated with the closely aligned birthdays of the United Nations (important) and my own (not particularly important). 

This is not a “major” birthday for me, but it certainly is for the UN, marking 75 years of existence and generating strong and diverse assessments from those across a wide spectrum – those who stress the indispensability of the UN to global peace and progress and those who feel disheartened that an institution birthed in great promise and even love from the “broken heart” of a devastating world war could have squandered portions of that potential to the political machinations of its member states.

Indeed, these and other assessments are understandable.  The UN often comes across very often as a stodgy and predictable bureaucracy with member states calling the shots and represented by diplomats whose main task, it sometimes seems, is to put the actions of their own countries in the best possible light, even when that light is dim at best.   The UN is also brimming with NGOs, a number with large brands and budgets, that often pursue single-issue agendas and struggle endlessly over resolution language that governments are mostly free to accept or ignore as they see fit.  Moreover, regarding the core issue on which most people assess the UN – peace and security – the UN’s Security Council is often mired in political in-fighting that impedes its ability to prevent or resolve fighting elsewhere.

On the other hand, the UN is the place where a wide array of pressing concerns are raised for potential resolution in multilateral spaces; indeed the only “spaces” where such resolution is often feasible. Even while national interests temper levels of global urgency that many of these issues demand, that so many pieces to a more peaceful and sustainable world find meaningful expression in UN conference rooms and (now) online forums is a tribute to the norm-building across borders and regions for which the UN seems uniquely suited, even if circumstances on the ground don’t always shift sufficiently in response.

Given this, it turned out to be quite a good birthday week for the UN, with some hopeful progress on peacebuilding highlighted in Central African Republic and Abyei and with a variety of important discussions taking place across all six General Assembly committees.  Of particular interest to us were discussions focused on protecting free speech for academics and other citizens; on burdens to nations and communities arising from excessive external debt; on the status of minority groups  scapegoated for the spread of COVID and its economic consequences; on preserving the dignity and rights of persons displaced from their homes due to climate change and armed violence; and on the struggle to create safer spaces for journalists and civil society advocates seeking to report on and put a stop to war and human rights abuses.

There was much more this week where this came from, underscoring the UN’s role as a place where key issues and themes – virtually all with implications for international peace and security — can get at least some of the policy attention they deserve and, in the most successful instances, actually shift circumstances in families and communities for the better. 

Also in this 75th birthday week, the UN was able to announce two major breakthroughs, a cease fire agreement to pave the way for reconciliation and reconstruction in Libya and the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.  Both admittedly have long hills to climb before full sovereignty and sustainable peace is obtained for Libya, and before the nuclear weapons powers (not signatories to the treaty) agree to renounce their weapons rather than modernize them. And yet both bring hope and even inspiration to the global table, and both are testament to the UN’s increasing determination and skill in mediation, to the larger policy role being exercised by small island and other small states on issues from climate to nuclear weapons, and to the determination of NGOs long-seeking a pathway out of dangerous impasse that has for too long kept these weapons at the core of national security doctrines.

And so it goes for the UN whose trajectory is not so much unlike our individual ones – potential achieved and denied; promises kept and abandoned; changes to habits of work welcomed and resisted, truths about what can and cannot be accomplished shared and hidden.   For the UN there is much to celebrate but also to confess, to fix, certainly to “update.”  In that “twilight” in which the UN continues to bask, we must acknowledge that while we might not have evolved so much as a species, the world has shifted dramatically since the UN’s birthing.  And these shifts are now more rapid, more ominous, more complex. The UN’s relevance going forward  is thus related to how we mange those shifts; how skillful, urgent and inclusive our responses to current threats and challenges can become; and how resolved  we are to keep from “kicking the can down the road” for younger generations to deal with.

As individuals, as members of families and communities, as diplomats and policy wonks, we exist in our own twilight, between birth and death, between relevance and obscurity, between promise and fulfillment.  And for people like me who tend to celebrate too little and ponder too much, the “mark” of our birth lies in continually ascertaining why we are here, what our purpose is, what we most need to do, share and inspire before our own lights are finally extinguished.

This is a specific kind of “updating” which can be as relevant to the institutions we work with as it is for ourselves.  What is calling us to urgent action now?  How do we ensure that all our skills, wisdom and experiences remain in play?   Who do we need to reach – and reassure – that everything that can be done to uphold rights and improve circumstances is being done, that risks are willing to be taken to ensure that promises remain binding, that the most hopeful of our dreams are truly becoming incarnate, and that we refuse ourselves the luxury (even arrogance) of taking credit for resolving problems that didn’t need to occur in the first place?

In a world of threats such as climate change and biodiversity loss that are recognized but not yet remedied; of a spreading pandemic and the deaths, distrust and destroyed livelihoods it leaves in its wake; of political agreements and resolutions signed and then ploddingly implemented; of weapons banned but not renounced by those who hold them; none of us can say with certainty where this current iteration of human progress and folly is headed.  What we can say with some certainty is that the future will require us to break free from some of the habits and their justifications that keep us in the mode of chasing after crises rather than minimizing risks, of hiding our light behind our bureaucracies and their mandates, of consulting the same voices and expertise over and over rather than considering fresher (if not necessarily better) alternatives.  

As part of my own “updating,” I plan to spend some of this birthday and beyond looking intently for those “lowly seeds,” those voices and potentials largely unheeded, those stories of birth and inspiration largely ignored; those who actually have potential to generate the “ravishing blooms” which we have almost forgotten can exist at all, let alone exist for all.  If the UN is to turn its own 75th birthday into conditions for many returns (and we genuinely root for that outcome), it must better honor its own capacity to nourish inclusion, not only with regard to the issues and crises to be resolved, but with regard to the full range of persons with their own “birth marks” who are able and eager to contribute.

Ballot Blunders: Election Influence in a Partisan Age, Dr. Robert Zuber

18 Oct
Oregon's vote-by-mail gets scrutiny from inside, outside state

To win the people, always cook them something savory that pleases them.  Aristophanes

Numbers by themselves cannot produce wisdom and may give the best favors of office to the grossest flatterers. Will Durant

Good governance in a democracy is impossible without fostering in our communities and the electorate, an appetite for leaders who are committed to respectful conduct. Diane Kalen-Sukra

The wish to be elected cannot be more important than the wish to do the right thing.  Victor Bello Accioly

An election must be more than a search for honesty in a snake pit.  Stewart Stafford

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.  Alfred E. Smith

This is likely to be news to none of you, but the US is holding an election for president in a bit over two weeks.

And while national elections are frequently held with greater and lesser degrees of integrity – voting results New Zealand and Bolivia have recently attracted a fair amount of attention in the global press – the US presidential race has become something of an obsession (if not a circus), especially for policymakers and poll watchers in many global regions.

Despite (or perhaps due to) our commitment to weigh in on national issues only to the extent that they impact multilateral effectiveness, we have shared more of this obsession than would normally be the case.  It is a temptation at the ready to spend endless ink critiquing one’s own country under the guise of interrogating multilateral processes.  It is a temptation we have largely avoided over the past 20 years, though challenges to multilateral cooperation on pandemics, food insecurity and climate change have never seemed as daunting – and untimely – as they do at present.

Some of this recent obsession has a “bull in a china shop” feel to it.  Even after the past few years of attempting to roll-back US engagements in the world, my country retains an outsized influence in economic, military and even to some extent in diplomatic circles such as the UN Security Council.   And as citizens and leadership gawk in amazement (at times even pity) at the acrimony and disinformation that has infected our political life – or at least forced it out into the open – many fear the implications for small states and vulnerable peoples when rich and powerful states see their often sub-optimal checks and balances heading completely off the rails. 

When the largest animals scuffle, the smaller ones have the sense to move away.  But in a world that is as interconnected as this one now is, there is simply nowhere to run.  Many smaller states – in Latin America certainly but also in other global regions – have had to adjust with alarming frequency to the political and economic whims of their northern neighbor.  But in this time of pandemic and security unpredictability, when that neighbor seems to have less and less interest in honoring agreements and championing core norms and values meant to bind states in collaborative action, the chills felt across multiple global regions are no trifling matter.

And so this US election does matter to many beyond national borders as well – a referendum not on our hegemony so much as our sanity, not on our irascibility so much as our reliability.   Despite our laundry list of hypocrisies and self-exemptions based on some perverse notion of exceptionalism, there has been some sense at least that the values we say we admire – and that infuse most of the multi-lateral charters that we once sponsored and from which we now seek our distance – were deemed ours to uphold as well to champion for others.  There was some sense, albeit one now largely relegated to our rearview mirror, that to whom much is given, much is expected; that blessings are to be shared more than hoarded and that others have a right to judge us as we often judge others — by our deeds and not by our carefully and often self-righteously crafted brands.

As elections draw near and anxiety levels rise within and across borders, a couple of points on where we currently stand.  First a reminder that Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights – to which the US accedes — conveys to all people “universal and equal suffrage,” which pertains not only to the right to vote, but to participate in civic life and have access to public services.    These are rights which the US has steadfastly – if imperfectly – sought to encourage in other states. 

Thus the shock from many global quarters as measures to disenfranchise domestically have been as numerous and shameless as the disinformation that accompanies them.  Thus the shock as our pre-electoral discourse lays out political competition among erstwhile domestic enemies seeking each others’ ruin rather than among citizens who share a franchise and a constitution.   Thus the shock as domestic gun sales go through the roof as though we were preparing not for a peaceful transition of power but for a violence-prone showdown among people whose differences – real and provoked — can no longer be reconciled.

As the agencies of the UN know full well, elections, are a pre-condition for good governance, not its guarantor.  But elections matter most when they are conducted with proper regard for rights of access, and when they are free of fraud and intimidation, as they can then contribute to elevating the legitimacy and authority of the duly elected government.  To those ends, many millions in the US are now determined to cast their ballots, even if it takes a full day to exercise their right to do so, and even if it is often with fingers crossed that their ballots will not arbitrarily be discarded or “harvested;” fingers crossed that the local heroes who have committed to deliver massive numbers of ballots by mail, who will count and certify ballot totals, and who strive to minimize illegal impediments to the legal exercise of a franchise, can somehow help produce a result that we can, quite literally, all live with.

In this context, the campaign season for this election is as troubling as any potential outcome itself, for it reminds us once again of how far we have fallen from the grace that our founders sought to bestow on those who would follow, a grace that we have sullied through selfishness and willful ignorance, through self-justifying lenses of partisanship and a corrupted nationalism which, as lamented this week in the General Assembly’s Third Committee by UN Special Rapporteur Okafor, “obscures multilateral benefits.”  Added to this is our propensity for short-termism that soils our own bed and risks a world for our progeny bereft of any bed at all.

Though we are hardly alone in this, we in the US have slowly chipped away at the effectiveness and credibility of our structures of governance.  We seem more willing than ever in my lifetime to gouge and humiliate each other in order to “win” and, if victory eludes us, to then deliberately and systematically undermine those who prevail even before they are formally inaugurated.  As the Washington Post wondered this week, can any election promise a viable path out of the extreme partisanship that has marooned us on ever-distant islands of opinion and practice?

We’re about to find out.  If you are in the US and legally able to do so, please vote.  If you are not so authorized, help us prepare for the possibility of fresh assaults on the integrity and legitimacy of multilateral processes that we and so many others have strived to uphold.   In either case, we would do well to prepare as best we can for choppy seas that will take all our wisdom and patience to calm and will leave more than a few immobilized with some incarnation of post-electoral nausea.  This election might actually result in a path that takes health disparities and climate threats more seriously, that honors more of our international commitments and shares governance-related information more transparently.  But an election alone will not be enough to rebuild trust in each other, to restore credibility within and across borders where it has been discarded, or to heal domestic divisions that have in some instances been festering for years.  

A commitment from elected leadership to “respectful conduct” would surely be one desirable electoral outcome, as would leadership more interested in “doing the right thing” than in consolidating political power. But these outcomes require common undertakings by the rest of us as well:  a pledge to respect each other across differences and to uphold rights and dignity of those beyond the boundaries of our tribe better than we have done to date.  Whether we recognize it or not, we’ve mostly all been swallowing pills of partisanship and self-interest. If upcoming elections are to achieve the larger result we need them to achieve, it’s past time for us to toss away that bottle.

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Partisan Appeal: Making Space for Conflict-Related Mediation, Dr. Robert Zuber

11 Oct

In case of dissension, never dare to judge till you’ve heard the other side.  Euripides

A judge, replied the Empress, is easy to be had, but to get an impartial judge, is a thing so difficult. Margaret Cavendish

It is not possible to completely eliminate mediation between you as an observer and the history you are trying to understand. Ken Liu

The fact is that in spite of his cautious nature the scrupulous Giese more than once jumped to premature conclusions. Even when on their guard, human beings inevitably theorize.  Stanisław Lem

Meditation is essentially training our attention so that we can be more aware— not only of our own inner workings but also of what’s happening around us in the here and now. Sharon Salzberg

[We live] rather in the midst of imaginary emotions, in hopes and fears, in illusions and disillusions, in fantasies and dreams. Ernst Cassirer

All roads taken lead us only to ourselves.  Kilroy Oldster

This was another busy and mostly virtual week at the UN in New York as all six General Assembly committees began their work to craft resolutions corresponding to core UN priorities:  disarmament and the rule of law, human rights and financing for sustainable development, special political missions and moving remaining territories towards self-governance.  Watching this process over many years, we lament that the relationship between these carefully-crafted global norms and concrete improvements in the lives of constituents is not always apparent and certainly could be made more so, especially to the constituents themselves.   

Beyond the committees, two events stood out for me given my own interests and biases.  The first was an event organized by our friends and partners FIACAT together with the European Union focused on cementing recent trends towards the abolition of capital punishment, a particularly noxious remnant of a time when we believed more fervently in the “value” of vengeance and retribution, when we acceded to the alleged “right” of the state to take life without recourse to accurate assessments of guilt let alone to the evolving sentiments of the public.  A case now in Oklahoma involving one Julius Jones who most assuredly did not commit the crime for which he is being held – often in solitary confinement – and for which he might actually be executed is only one of too-numerous instances demanding a rethink of an irreversible punishment within those dwindling number of states (including my own) that continue to employ it.

The other discussion of note took place in the Arria Formula format of the Security Council, wherein this week  Germany, Vietnam, Switzerland and Belgium sponsored a discussion on “Mandating peace: Enhancing the mediation sensitivity and effectiveness of the UN Security Council.”   Such mediation is encouraged under Article 33 of the UN Charter as one of the “non-coercive” tools available to the UN and especially to Council members  in discharging their duties to maintain international peace and security.  This particular discussion was based on a report crafted for this occasion by researchers at Notre Dame University with the same title as the event itself.

This Arria Formula sparked high levels of attention from the entire UN community.   As we have noted in the past, UN member states are becoming increasing nervous about a Security Council that is often frozen by its own internal controversies, by the willingness of the permanent members to ignore resolutions they seek to impose on others, and by conflicts that are not addressed at sufficiently early stages and thus require coercive responses when less coercive measures – including mediation – could have put out the fire at a point when it could more easily have been contained. 

States have increasingly embraced the language of conflict prevention, and this to our mind has been a welcome development, at least on the surface.  So much hunger and displacement, so many disruptions of educational and health access are due to conflicts about which we have collectively dragged our feet.  And when we have gotten on top of specific threats, our recourse to the language of “condemnation” and the threat of sanctions – both Council-approved and unilateral – has had a predictably polarizing effect on conflict parties.  In an era where trust is at a premium and political interests are highly partisan, states increasingly recognize that coercive responses are likely only deepen the distrust we need to overcome if progress on preventing and resolving conflict is to occur and, indeed, if our entire multilateral apparatus is to achieve more than rhetorical victories over all that now afflicts us. Sadly this “all,” Turkey and other states reminded the rest of us at this Arria meeting, remains headlined by the “scourge” that is armed conflict.

During this session, one state after another enthusiastically advocated for mediation resources and other, early-applied, less coercive measures in response to conflict threats.  In so doing, many states such Costa Rica and Italy recognized that the background of mediators is one key to success, advocating for mediation that is both gender-balanced and gender-sensitive.  Saint Vincent and the Grenadines took this one step further, noting that where the application of resources such as mediation are concerned, “neighbors know best.”  Indeed, calls came throughout this discussion for mediation that prioritizes “what is happening around us in the here and now,” with special attentiveness to, as Finland noted, the increasing “complexities” that characterize conflict contexts.  And if the Security Council can fully grasp, as claimed by SRSG Haysom, that “negotiated settlements must take priority over imposed settlements” (though both can unravel), then mediators must be given space for flexible responses to shifting conflict circumstances and Council members who might be overly addicted to coercion must hold in mind the importance of  isolating mediators from responsibility for any subsequent imposition of sanctions or other coercive means.

Amidst calls from Portugal and others for regular deliberations on maximizing the value of mediation and other “Chapter VI” responses, it is important that member states be clear with themselves about the often-profound degree of difficulty in maintaining the integrity and independence of mediators given the current avalanche of partisan views and “minds made up” long before all relevant evidence and context have been considered.   We are indeed inclined, perhaps more than ever in our recent history, to “jump to conclusions,” to bend facts to suit our personal and political interests, to live in a self-authorized realm of “imaginary emotions,” illusions and fantasies. We have substituted out honest inquiry with conspiracies and rooting interests.  We have cashed out insights that could benefit all for the sake of biases that elevate partial truths to universal status.  And we are amply suspicious of the motives of others, even when it is our own motives that require closer scrutiny.

I have seen a bit of this tendency myself in years of counseling.  At the level of conflicted couples and “neighbors,” suspicion is often palpable.  People are quick to assume that mediators who struggle hard to maintain independence are actually giving in to partisan values and outcomes, that once the curtain of “what is best” is pulled, it will surely reveal grave mis-readings of the “history” that mediators allege (and often honestly strive) to understand.  Indeed, many of us nowadays spend so little time listening to persons and ideas that threaten or oppose us, so little time exploring self-accountability for festering disputes small and large, that we can barely imagine what non-partisan engagement might look life.  Too often, we are simply waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the mediators or counselors to “show their hand” and commit the errors that reinforce our fears of and reservations regarding discussions mostly shielding biased revelations.

During this Arria Formula, a German minister wondered aloud, as a response to the report under consideration, whether Council mandates on mediation, including in the context of peacekeeping operations, are simply “too political to succeed?”  Certainly they are often seen as such by conflict parties, especially those whose biases and rationales for ongoing violence have also been allowed to harden.   But this points to an even larger problem, one we at GAPW strive regularly to identify, and that is the hard road that inevitably leads us back to ourselves.

In the end, as important as carefully worded resolutions and carefully crafted mandates might be, we must take time to address the social climate that we have conspired to create, one enabling the growth of hyper-partisan worldviews, a climate conducive to the insistence on unbiased perfection in our mediators that we are unable to guarantee in ourselves.  If we want less coercive, more inclusive solutions to conflict, and we certainly should, it will take more than discussions about our policy tools and options; it will also take discussions focused on our capacities to engender trust within a security and political environment that is now giving too many people sufficient reasons to withhold the risk of trust altogether.

Slowly, inexorably, our views and affiliations have calcified as dramatically as our arteries.  It is this hardening of hearts, and not a lack of UN Charter guidance on mediation and other non-coercive tools, that constitutes the greatest impediment to the development and implementation of flexible, context-specific, attentive, trustworthy responses to conflict threats. This “other” conversation, the one about our human capacities and barriers to progress we erect ourselves, is one that we would do well not to overlook.

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Bee Keepers: Bending the Curve of Life under Stress, Dr. Robert Zuber

4 Oct

By the Late Tara Tidwell Bryan

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.  Rainer Maria Rilke

That bird sat on a burning tree and sang the songs that this creation had never heard before. Akshay Vasu

The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. Anaïs Nin

 If we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us.  Wendell Berry

I don’t know how one can walk by a tree and not be happy at the sight of it?  Fyodor Dostoyevsky

We were all forged in the crucible.  Gayle Forman

Because God took one look at Adam and said, ‘Wow. This guy’s going to need all the help he can get.’ And here we are.  Nancy Mehl

I had a lovely and important message this week from a former intern now working in Vienna.  A Polish citizen great of skill and big of heart, she lamented her current assignment with a multilateral agency, not out of ingratitude so much as impatience to move beyond bureaucratic maintenance towards those issues in the world that now beckon so many in her generation.  As she put it to me, “I wish one day I could do something that actually matters.” 

The stakes are high for this generation and the need to matter is often acute.  Indeed, I think we under-estimate the longing of many people of all generations and life-circumstances to have or recover lives that matter more, incorporating higher levels of significance and even adventure than their daily routines and “realisms” generally encourage.

Many of us scoff at people of middle age who harken back to secondary school as the highlight-reel of their lives.  But there is a clue in this that we are in danger of missing and are, in turn, endangered by missing.  I remember listening to family members talking about their military service with a fondness that exceeded most all of their story-telling.  That fondness, I was quite convinced, was related not to the violence of war but to the significance of service.  This was a time in their lives when what they were doing really mattered, when the merits of their sacrifice were both encouraged and honored in a way that, in many instances at least, had not happened to them since.  Few listened to them anymore.  Few sought out their advice or paused to hear their stories.  Their service was “past tense” but so was its mattering.  What was “forged in the crucible” of war had become voices largely of nostalgia, almost empty of any larger impact.

Staying on this theme, I have seen so many photos since the recent, dismal US presidential debate of “patriots” who have been dubbed (and denigrated) as right-wing warriors, folks apparently preparing for some sort of “war” with their fellow-citizens, testing the limits of official response (and implicit permission) by grabbing their guns, donning military-style gear and taking to the streets to “defend” some makeshift iteration of morality, order and legacy.  Without endorsing one iota of the tendency to conspiracy and lawlessness, I also wonder how long what I see in their faces and hear in their words has been simmering?  But it is apparent that, in part due to a self-serving shout-out by the US president, these folks matter now, more than they have perhaps mattered in many years.  Their ideas and actions have consequence again, both for their own self-worth and – as they see it at least – for the future of their country.

There is no part of that truth-defying intimidation and incitement that I can support; but as someone whose ideas and opinions on global issues and the “psychology” of our collective responses carry more weight than they surely deserve, I don’t overlook the fact that the people who do matter in this world continue to represent an all-too-small subset of the people who should matter. And some of these folks, in ways that are sometimes both violent and reality-challenged, are now declaring their insistence to matter.

The irony for me in all of this is that there are now so many crises vying for higher levels of attention and response, many of which have been either enhanced or exposed by virtue of the current pandemic.  At the UN this past week alone, three events of existential importance, mostly virtual, called attention to threats that we have not done nearly enough to mitigate and for which we lack both full disclosure from leadership and sufficient hands-on-deck to truly care for our present and do “full justice” to our future.

All three of these High Level events were dripping with opportunities to matter, and all attracted a bevy of senior leadership from the world’s governments.   Friday’s discussion on nuclear disarmament highlighted the dangerous expansion and/or reintegration of “modernized” nuclear weapons capability into national strategic defense doctrines, complete with threats to resume nuclear testing and move offensive capacity into outer space.  There was also some reflection (mostly by Palau and other small states) on the impact of excess military spending on funding access for development needs and related global concerns including those highlighted in the UN General Assembly earlier in the week.

One of those concerns took center-stage on Thursday as states convened to assess the impact, 25 years on, of the Beijing Platform for Action on women’s equality.  With statements (mostly by men) lasting well into the evening, one leader after another delivered prepared and often unremarkable statements seeking to convince us that gender equality is both indispensable to peaceful societies  (surely right) and  lies at the very heart of their domestic policy — though equality progress in many of these societies remains limited at best.  Perhaps the presidents of Luxembourg and Costa Rica put it most helpfully as they focused their remarks  on enhancing the “practical dimensions of equality” at a time when “not one nation” can claim to have achieved the goals of Beijing.  “Not one.”

Lastly, Wednesday’s High-Level event was, to my mind at least, the most urgent of the three.  On this day, world leaders and others convened virtually to assess the rapidly declining health of global biodiversity  on land and in the sea, a decline so precipitous that it directly threatens the health of our agriculture, indeed calls into question the viability of the entire food cycle, not only for ourselves but for the still-abundant life forms with which we are still privileged to share this planet.  And while most of us are rightly appalled by the sight of slaughtered elephants and emaciated polar bears, biodiversity loss is felt most acutely at the lower levels of the biological chain:  the bees which are disappearing from our farms and gardens, the insects whose presence is no longer in sync with the birds who need them to sustain their migrations, the coral reefs which have been bleached into oblivion by warming seas. The image offered up by the director of the UN Development Program, of trucks full of bees traveling  to save California farms from unpollinated crops, was a stark reminder of how disruptive we collectively continue to be to the natural rhythms and needs of our now abundance-challenged planet.

The science on this potential mass extinction event we seem determined to create is clear.  As UNSG Guterres noted on Wednesday, we must now find a way to “bend the curve” on biodiversity loss and we are running out of time to do so. Such bending requires more thoughtful attention to economies pitched more to destruction than protection. But it also requires more initiative and activity at local level, urgently appealing to those many people (including and especially indigenous people) with the energy and skill to matter: to help lay the groundwork for a future in which loaded guns, clenched fists, predatory economics, bloated military budgets and unresolved inequalities and exclusions no longer have pride of place.

Such a future must also be more attuned to the very human though often unrequited desire to matter.  A young woman from India speaking at the biodiversity summit responded to what she interpreted (and not without reason) as a string of often “empty statements” by global leadership:  “We are ready to do our part,” she intoned, “Are you?” 

Like my former intern, this young woman is clearly determined to matter, and there are many millions more like the two of them. Our task now is to get back to work on what ails us as a species and as a planet, in part by getting to the heart of what it means to matter, what people of diverse backgrounds require such that they can call forth more of the “riches of life” for themselves and for all with whom they come in contact. It also means learning how to better accompany each other as we “sing the songs that creation has never heard before,” including songs revering the presence of the bees, the trees and other life forms on which our own survival depends and that we simply must do more to keep.  

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