Bait Shop: Messaging Which Narrowly Compels, Dr. Robert Zuber

2 Oct
The Middelgrunden Off Shore Windturbines located in the Øresund Straight separating Denmark and Sweden. UN Photo
From UN.org

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.  G.K. Chesterton

It might be a good idea if, like the White Queen, we practiced believing six impossible things every morning before breakfast.  Madeleine L’Engle

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. Kurt Vonnegut

Children see magic because they look for it.  Christopher Moore

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. William Blake

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains; Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend; More than cool reason ever comprehends. William Shakespeare

We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. Lynda Barry

It’s been a quiet few weeks from a writing standpoint, though a busy one in terms of fathoming what the next phase of our service is to be, service to causes larger than ourselves, service to those seeking more kind, inspirational and imaginative responses to our bevy of global threats than folks in my generation are currently able to generate.  

I am also reminded on this International Day of Older Persons that I am one of those, and that the task for us generically (If not gerontologically) is to share rather than control, to coach rather than compete, and to remind younger folks that –wrinkles and brain fog notwithstanding – longer years do not have to mean shrinking options.  Indeed, this has so far been a more productive and satisfying period of life than I had imagined it would be, than was the case for me in previous times, a season to invest in multiple issues and multiple actors at this moment of excess conspiracies and wanton policy foolishness. 

We have continued to engage UN spaces during its High-Level segment, despite the fact that, for us at least, the UN is in danger of becoming, as metaphor, smaller-sized bait on an increasingly exposed hook.  Despite all the pomp and circumstance, interventions by officials have largely lacked imagination, have largely deflected attention from the responsibility which in a state-driven system becoming more so, not less, is clearly theirs to assume.  Despite some valuable events on capital punishment (we will contribute to an event organized for mid-October on this very topic by our longtime colleagues at FIACAT), on nuclear disarmament in the midst of fresh threats of use by Russia, and on “transforming education” which was an important discussion if too schools-focused for our taste, the High-Level segment largely tread familiar ground.  It was left to officials such as Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados and the new President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, to remind the global community of our receding sustainable development promises and counter-productive policies such as those which seek to expand the “war on drugs” while neglecting the “first-world” loneliness, isolation and other mental health problems which generate the relentless demand for the narcotics which our “war” has utterly failed to extinguish.

We also did our own small event during the High-Level segment, a roundtable with Soka Gakkai International and the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy to launch the latest report by the Digital Economist, “Meeting the Climate Challenge” (https://docsend.com/view/d2d8aptxejxdiedy).  The somewhat overused title did not obscure some important insights including what Senior Fellow Satya Das referred to as our “Duty of Care.”  For us, this was a reassuring insight – that despite all of the attention on major international events which make more carbon than change, despite the “bait” of getting to hang out at Davos or UN “COP” events and discuss ideas (such as the DEs “global carbon levy”) with people who have the resources and access to implement them if not nearly sufficient will to do so, the planet is unlikely to pull back from the furnace to come without broader-based and more local commitments to care.  Care for our soils, for our trees, for our water, certainly for our children’s future.  We know, first-hand over many years, the limitations of policy to shift mindsets, to light a fire of change that can overcome the ashes of indifference.  Indeed, it is our view that our policy bubbles have largely done more or less all that policy bubbles can do.  It is past time to put our “duty to care” front and center in our climate response, and to do so in all the places where we matter. 

Despite all the splashy events with effective branding to boot, there have been some cold winds blowing through the UN since the easing of the Covid-19 pandemic.  As we have written before, some UN states have taken the opportunity to double down on their resistance to NGO participation beyond who the states might choose to invite themselves.  Access to events has hardly been impossible but has been granted with increasing caprice and some attitudinal version of “if you don’t like it, don’t come.” One doesn’t know from one day to the next whether a sojourn to the UN will result in a seat at a meeting or a rebuff due to some unannounced access change, including shifting meetings from “open” to “not-so-open” without a whiff of explanation.

Given the current state of affairs in our world, I can well understand why some states would not want scrutiny-obsessed groups like ours in the room, reminding delegations of the promises yet to be fulfilled, of the conflicts yet to be resolved, of the financial pledges yet to be delivered.  It can’t be comfortable for diplomats who work hard albeit “under orders” to have others constantly reminding them of hills yet to climb.  And yet, a colleague from Cameroon stayed with me for two weeks during the High-Level segment, a man attempting to protect and feed his people amidst a conflict which has received little policy attention and which continues to result in death, displacement and the wholesale degradation of the environment. While with me, the news came that his family home was burned to the ground. In essence, this is why we show up in line at the UN, day after day, year after year, hoping for a chance to plead the causes of people in desperate need who deserve as much from us as they were led to expect might be the case, certainly more than they have often received.

The discouragement of all this UN business, the small pieces of bait extending from the end of long hooks, has led us more than a few times to seek inspiration and imagination elsewhere.  This past month, the search took us to an all-September event led in part by our board chair, Christina Madden through her work with Criterion Institute, a “Convergence” of participants – most all women – in pursuit of a “feminist financial imagination.”  Despite online limitations, the discussions were beautifully moderated, allowing the conversations to drift between investment essentials and the values which, if well-embodied, can help ensure a feminist strategy free from reinforcing the patriarchal excesses of the current investment system in the main, a system which channels billions into private accounts devoid of any and all social accountabilities. 

It is hard in these “convergence” settings to find language forms which avoid the pitfalls of essentialist stereotyping, and which can effectively steer us away from the temptation to use money as dangling bait to attract status and power and not also to make change in societies now teetering on “brinks” of their own authoring. As such, we need reminders that our relationship to money remains largely uninterrogated, that we don’t actually represent many who we pretend to “speak for,” that the “faith” which drives many of us to search for inspiration and imagination beyond the usual suspects remains both largely “unhoused” and battered by circumstance; and is thus in need of reliable partnership including the provision of some of the reassurance we seek to “gift” to others.  We often embrace the imagination we are comfortable with, not the imagination which the world now requires, those “six impossible things” before breakfast which will never become incarnate until we have the courage to imagine them into existence.

The many and diverse events around the UN largely remind me on a daily basis that the world we love, the world that sustains the best and worst of us, the world that will continue on long after we have irretrievably soiled its blessings, that human world  is running out of time. The international day of older persons reminds me that I, too, am running out of time, time to discern and share with that shrinking number of folks who still care, at least a little bit, what I think, time to pursue the “magic” of inspiration and imagination wherever it can now be found, and then communicate it clearly and humbly to those many among us who, for one reason or another, are no longer inclined to take the bait.

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Humane Harvest: A Labor Day Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

5 Sep
Primary view of object titled 'Wall Street Banquet, Court of Fiestas, Corridor of the Agrarian Revolution'.
Diego Rivera “Wall Street Banquet,” via UNT Digital Library

The air was hot, vivid and breathless–a final fierce concentration of the doomed and dying summer. William Faulkner

People who traveled for so many miles through such horrific conditions in order to find work cannot accurately be portrayed as lazy benefit-scroungers. Patrick Kingsley

The first thing that a new migrant sends to his family back home isn’t money; it’s a story.   Suketu Mehta

Every commodity, beneath the mantle of its pricetag, is a hieroglyph ripe for deciphering, a riddle whose solution lies in the story of the worker who made it and the conditions under which it was made. Leah Hager Cohen

Harvests are a time to remember your sacrifice. William Kamkwamba

The sun was made to light worthier toil than this. Henry David Thoreau

I’ve always been amused by the contention that brain work is harder than manual labor. I’ve never known a man to leave a desk for a muck-stick if he could avoid it. John Steinbeck

In the US we are in the midst of another Labor Day weekend, a time less to honor labor than to forget about it if just for a time.  One more drive with the family, one more picnic with the neighbors before everyone settles in to the routines and responsibilities of fall. For many in this part of the world, this is the end of a summer with many desperate to carve out spaces to reunite with long-isolated friends and relatives or to visit some of the places which inspire mind and soul, places which remind us all that we labor on a planet full of wonder, a planet very much worth more of our care than we currently offer.

While my own brain is still in fog recovery mode from a bout of Covid, it has not stopped appreciating all of the tasks that need to be accomplished in this world for my own life to have the unearned quality it enjoys.  For all of the inefficiencies brought about by (in this country for sure) crumbling infrastructure, bad health choices and off-the-charts levels of personal and communal grievance, there are many millions of people who dutifully teach our children to read, harvest and transport the crops that will sustain us through a long winter, who keep our trains on the tracks and our planes in the air, who ensure that (Flint and Jackson notwithstanding) water is safe from the tap, and who perform a myriad of other tasks whose reliability is perhaps even more essential as levels of social complexity increase and levels of trust in leadership and each other head decidedly in another direction.

I am grateful for all of this and more, even if appreciation sometimes wanes when the trains are running late yet again, my morning berries have been thoroughly colonized by fruit flies or when some other “first world problem” has consumed way more of my conscious life than should ever be the case.  Moreover, as retirement comes more sharply into focus, assessment takes its place alongside gratitude as a major consequence of a life lived long, if not always well.   For after all the writing and monitoring, the mentoring and challenging, the endless stream of houseguests and church guests, and the equally endless errands and other planning that such requires, what has come of all this?  What exactly was accomplished?  What piles were moved?  What policies were delivered to constituencies in a form they could recognize, beyond consensus resolution texts and mere promises of relief?

At this point, I honestly can’t say as I know.  We Global Action folks acknowledge the generosity of our friends and donors and cherish their belief that, at least episodically, we were able to help them preserve their own hopefulness, their own sense that despite all that we know, things are not as bleak for their progeny as they sometimes appear.  We know that many dozens of our interns are out in the world doing good work, often tilting at their own windmills, but also helping people to move towards possibility they might otherwise have forgotten they had.  We also know of the many groups at local level who we were able to help find a place at the table of global policy even if more than a few wondered at some point if the investment was worth the energy. We have worked really hard for many years, and it’s not over for us, but it’s also not been enough.  It was never going to be enough.

And yet despite the ephemeral nature of much of what we have done together, the “outcomes” of such mostly akin to fine sand slipping through slender fingers, there is a certain status (for want of a better word) which has long accompanied this journey.  We get less respect than we used to get, including in UN spaces, but we still get more than our portion.   We get more than the health care workers who endure horrific stresses to extend the lives of people who haven’t done enough to extend their own.  We get more than farm workers who labor in hot fields day after day so that our supermarket shelves can boast some faux abundance, workers with minimal access to health care let alone shade amongst the crops, workers who in many cases do not enjoy sufficient legal protections to allow them to visit family members whom they might not have seen in a generation, allowing them to share stories in person after long and sorrowful absences.  

And we get more than the teachers poised to receive a new crop of students, teachers who seem now to be suffering through one indignity after another, yet more assaults on an already-daunting profession by overly-anxious and/or entitled parents and by ideologues in legislative settings who have taken an often-warped view of “God’s will” as the pretext for curriculum which denies large portions of our history, establishes one version of faith as the “fertility cult” of choice, and ignores the pluralism in which a goodly portion of my own  society’s value to the world is grounded.

On this Labor Day weekend, we must admit that we live amidst a landscape of devalued labor, a landscape from which thousands of caring and devoted teachers and health workers flee their now-utterly politicized professions of choice, more and more people are plotting a permanent if perhaps unsustainable escape from their minimum-wage tedium, and those participating in the “great resignation” are only slowly finding ways to use their time on earth which do not involve months and years of soul-crushing, market driven, repetitive labor.  Moreover, we have not reformed our social status system beyond athletes, celebrities and political leadership, nor have we found the means to create genuinely multi-generational collaborations which allow younger people to gain their footing in a world they are destined to manage, while also allowing we older people facing our own inevitable decline to contribute (even sacrifice) meaningfully beyond the end of our formal employment.

As we in the northern hemisphere face the end of our “doomed and dying summer,” we also continue to face a crisis of labor – of people underutilized, too-often purchased and too-little respected, of status deserved but rarely conferred, people who now broadly threaten to withhold in one form or another the skills and engagement we simply cannot manage without.  As we conclude our seasonal and well-earned trips to the beach or mountains, and as folks like me look back over decades of work which accomplished barely a portion of what had been hoped for, it is clear that the multiple pains of our labor have yet to be adequately addressed.  We will need to more effectively respect and then harvest many skills of labor from all ages and backgrounds if we are to successfully climb out of the holes of acrimony and mistrust, of ethnocentrism and climate impacts, that we have dug for ourselves.  I am at a loss to see another viable path forward.

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Bomb Shelter: Deferring the Risks We are Expected to Face, Dr. Robert Zuber

24 Aug

All choices are fraught with peril, but inaction is the most perilous of all.  Frewin Jones

To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

A bend in the road is not the end of the road…Unless you fail to make the turn. Helen Keller

To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.  Anne Rice

To save all we must risk all.  Friedrich von Schiller

The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.  Tacitus

Burning bridges behind you is understandable. It’s the bridges before us that we burn, not realizing we may need to cross, that brings regret.  Anthony Liccione

I have been asked often over these past two weeks by widely dispersed colleagues about the 10th Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference taking place this month in New York.

While I no longer expend enough energy on the issue of nuclear weapons to be branded anything but an active onlooker, I have spent more time in these NPT sessions than I might have done otherwise.  This is due to the (relative) lack of policy activity inside the building, the exceptions this past week including some appropriately moving tributes to humanitarians killed or injured in the service of others and another policy event designed to extend treaty protections for the oceans and its biodiversity to areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ). 

While many stakeholders came to New York in the hopes of informing the NPT and BBNJ negotiations, to ensure that urgency rather than propriety dominated the affective policy landscape, processes continued the post-pandemic trend in UN spaces of calling for NGO involvement on the one hand while marginalizing it on the other.  Despite a few glimpses courtesy of short, infrequent plenary sessions, the BBNJ has been conducted almost entirely in informal sessions to which our collective participation is largely unwelcome.   The NPT has offered more opportunities to watch the proceedings but rarely to challenge their content or direction.  Moreover, the most important of the discussions, those taking place in the “subsidiary bodies” have been almost completely off-limits to those, many with considerable expertise themselves, who dared (foolishly or otherwise) to risk time and treasure (and burn considerable carbon)  in yet another attempt to ensure that delegations embrace a larger portion of their generally under-implemented treaty obligations and otherwise “meet the moment.”

Aside from stakeholder marginalization, what the NPT and BBNJ process have in common is that both are treaty processes dealing with what are widely regarded as existential threats to our very survival as a species.  The humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons use have been in full view since the “duck and cover” days of my youth, and more contemporary efforts to modernize arsenals (as opposed to de-commissioning them) have produced weapons which are quicker to deploy, more powerful, better able to avoid detection and other features which provide little comfort to those tracking the impacts of nuclear explosions on our already violence-prone and over-heated planet. 

In much the same manner, our oceans are rapidly approaching their own tipping points as water temperatures and sea levels rise, as the PH of the oceans continues to slide towards unhealthy metrics and as the open ocean remains in some of its areas a massive water-borne dump for ocean-going vessels and other polluters with degraded plastic becoming an increasingly prominent feature of the diets of marine wildlife.  As we need an NPT which is functional and accountable, especially to its disarmament obligations, so too do we need a BBNJ process to result in treaty obligations that extend and amplify our concerns for the oceans beyond national jurisdiction to the ubiquitous areas of our inter-connected seas negatively impacted by human activity.

In both instances, there are grave reasons for concern.  The clock is ticking on both existential threats, and it is clear from the vantage points that we are still able to occupy that there is insufficient urgency on the part of delegations and negotiators to create and/or move existing agreements forward in ways that both speak to this uneasy moment and serve to bring us back from the brink of a ruin which we (including our policy leadership) have literally brought upon ourselves. We have created space to deliberate on this ruinous state of affairs but have largely failed to ask the questions that might set off a “whirlwind” of change beyond the narrow confines of diplomatic control. We have spent much energy (and wasted the energy of others) in an attempt to justify the unjustifiable, such as recent Russian nuclear weapons threats against Ukraine and the US position that, despite all evidence to the contrary, my government is upholding its commitments under Article 6 of the NPT.  For those of you fortunate to have escaped previous iterations of this double-speak, Article 6 is the disarmament pillar of this treaty, a condition which has been piously flaunted for the most part by the nuclear weapons states since the NPT first entered into force.

When colleagues ask us about the status of treaty negotiations and/or review, they are largely asking about functional levels of urgency in evidence amongst the delegations.  Do the people responsible for creating normative and/or legal frameworks to help ensure a future for human and other life genuinely understand the dynamics of this precarious moment?  Do they understand that the “inter-governmental processes” which they increasingly seek to protect from the undiplomatic utterances of those of us focused on doomsday clocks rather than UN clocks, that these processes and the “consensus” outcomes which more often ensure non-compliance than inspire its opposite have simply not yet delivered the goods, have not allowed constituents to rest easier or, in many cases, to rest at all?

After countless hours in UN conference rooms, I still wonder myself.  More to the point, the colleagues reaching out to us about these treaty processes are generally expressing more anxiety than confidence, more skepticism than gratitude. They are asking, as we might also, questions more human than diplomatic, questions that go beyond the diplomatic calculus of sufficiency to the wider concern of a world in flames that those tasked with response have done too little to remediate.

Is the diplomatic community both authorized and willing to turn a corner when a corner urgently needs to be turned?  Are they prepared to engage the hard (and possibly unauthorized) questions and not only the ones which will “cause no trouble” to their permanent missions or careers?  Can they properly assess the bridges we have carelessly burned such that we also avoid burning the ones we will need to cross over to escape the damage wrought by our endlessly tepid policy outcomes and the sometimes-misleading promises they communicate to constituents?

The polarities of the UN community’s relationship to risk have been clearly evident over the last week.  On the one hand are the humanitarians, those who feed and protect under dangerous conditions, those who lay their lives on the line to compensate for the policy failures of the states who pay the UN’s bills and largely – increasingly unilaterally – govern its policy processes.  And while peacekeepers are being attacked and humanitarian workers are being abducted, we fail to resolve the conflicts which threaten them (let alone prevent their occurrence). We continue to speak in repetitive tones in this UN space about “leaving no one behind” without communicating clearly that we understand the dramatic political and economic risks which need to be taken  in order to address what in our complex human history would be the fulfillment of a genuinely unprecedented SDG mandate.

And so we go forth in a system made up of often-bewildered civil society organizations, NGOs who too often reinforce a game we are running out of time to change, and diplomats who represent positions, often ably, which they largely do not create themselves.  Ours (if I might be so presumptuous) is a system which privileges consensus, not as an aspiration but as a de-facto veto, resulting in resolutions and other obligations likely to be implemented only in part if at all, documents couched in language likely to inspire only states already walking the pathways which our oft-compromised resolutions and treaties seek to define.

 As diplomats continue their work to create documents on which all can agree if not commit to actually implement, we continue to send willing soldiers, security officers and aid workers into the field, people who have worked through their need for safety in order to feed and clothe, house and protect those facing the ravages of war and terror, of drought and flooding, of environmental degradation, of exile from familiar people and places.  We continue to send them into the conflict zones we have not been able to resolve through political means, into zones of deprivation courtesy of endemic economic inequalities and a climate crisis which we are seemingly willing to allow to devour what is left of our forests, biodiversity and ice caps.

We know that diplomats around the UN generally work hard.  They are skilled at compromise, at pouring over text that would make the eyes of the rest of us glaze over.  They are also able to keep the windows of diplomacy open, to refuse to allow personal or national grievances to impede the potential for negotiating progress.  But their energy is not the energy that global constituencies can easily relate to, the energy that communicates that we are genuinely in trouble, and that we are willing to do what is needed and all that is needed to remove threats to our existence while we are still able to do so. 

Moreover, that we are willing to put more of ourselves on the line; we who function mostly within our bureaucratic and career bubbles, we who cannot pretend not to know, not to know what is coming, not to know what will happen once it comes, once the tipping points of violence and environmental degradation have been crossed for good.

If the processes at the UN these past two weeks are any indication, especially with regard to the NPT, it is still unclear if delegations can move beyond their training and instructions and convince the global public that they truly understand the moment.   We will find out tomorrow if global constituents have been misled once more by rhetoric insufficiently backed by devotion, the sort of energy that keeps humanitarian actors seeking out lives to save in our numerous killing fields.  Given the likelihood of insufficient movement, it behooves us to remind delegates that constituents deserve more than summary overviews of a month-long engagement, more than pledges “to do better next time.”

They deserve an apology. 

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Grasping the Proverbial Straw: A Policy Nod to Customary Wisdom, Dr. Robert Zuber

2 Aug

Do not call the forest that shelters you a jungle.   Ghana

There is no medicine to cure hatred.  Ghana

The teeth are smiling but is the heart?   DR Congo

A fool looks for dung where the cow never browsed.  Ethiopia

One who conceals their disease cannot expect to be cured.   Ethiopia

One who continually laments is not heeded.  Cote d’Ivoire

Seeing is different from being told.   Cote d’Ivoire

Evil knows where evil sleeps.  Niger

Fine words do not produce food.   Nigeria

The heart is not a knee that can be bent.   Senegal

One who upsets a thing should know how to rearrange it.   Sierra Leone

A roaring lion kills no game.   Uganda

Those of you who continue to read these missives know that the quotations at the head of the posts are often as impactful as the prose which follows.  These quotations mean much to me and often to the readers as well.  The ability to capture important human lessons in a sentence or two, to be suggestive without taking on the burden of being  definitive, to leave people with things to ponder as well as ways to grow, this is to my mind a considerable gift.

We who ply our wares in the halls of policy, with few exceptions, do not search hard enough for the images that can stimulate thought and growth beyond their initial utterance.  We use so many words – so many — words which are too-often redundant, repetitive and entirely metaphor-phobic, words often spoken as though we were merely reciting lessons handed down to us in some secondary school, words which may fulfill the “assignment” given to us by our superiors but offer little in the way of inspiration or takeaways, conveying little reason for others to hope or care.  Indeed, inside the UN as with other large institutions, there is little reason to believe that any of our “fine words” will survive the end of the meetings in which they are uttered, if indeed anyone much was listening in the first instance.

We are all constrained by our habits of thought and communication, it seems, and this surely applies to the language of diplomats and those of us on their margins who have internalized the culture of the UN and perhaps misplaced the reality that too many of our alleged constituents have largely tuned us out.  The world remains conceptually-speaking largely absent from our policy bubbles, not because there is an absence of truth in those bubbles but because the conveying of that truth is so often deficient in urgency, in potency, indeed in poetry.  Even during what could be construed as potentially profound UN events – last week’s successful General Assembly discussion and resolution on the “right to a healthy environment” and this week’s NPT Review Conference (nuclear weapons) the language used to convey concern is overly constrained by time in part but also by temperament.  We rush through presentations on important issues as though we have a train to catch.  We speak in the tones to which we are authorized, tones which rarely convey or capture the deep anxieties and misgivings of diplomats, but also of a global public now attempting to cope with a wider range of emergencies than they ever would have imagined.

Thus the decision was made some time ago to balance our own narrative of global events with some profound utterances from other times and through other mediums. So far as I can tell, the only downside of this decision has to do with their sources, likely from too many men and too often emanating only from western cultural contexts as well.  That the quotations in the posts are still more likely to motivate and inspire than any of the “clever by half” prose that generally follows is, to my mind at least, an indication of how much we long for rhetoric which is more compelling than hard concepts gleaned from hard data, more than recitations about the “importance” of institutions and their policy products which have not done nearly enough to inspire our trust or confidence, more than concepts that pull us out of the contexts which still have much to teach if we would only pay more attention to sources of local wisdom and just a bit less to its relentless alternatives courtesy of major policy centers, corporate media outlets, university-based think tanks and published reports emanating from our global institutions.

Such alternatives have literally conquered the conceptual landscape in all but the most remote communities while demonstrating a limited ability (as have we all) to solve problems which now threaten our future as a species.  And thus we’re trying something different today, quotations not from literature and philosophy, not from the recognizable figures in our own fractured western history, but from proverbs; stories and images which people in diverse cultures have long used to communicate truths that, given the difficult and/or complex logistics which define so many of our lives, we have overlooked or forgotten altogether.  The underlying lesson of all these proverbs is that clues to a better life, to better communities, are at least as much in the seeing as in the telling.  The best proverbs take their material from the life around them, life that is available to all if not availed by all, life that has its own lessons to convey beyond rhetoric and textbooks, life calling on us to pay more attention to the insights knocking at our doors, to use all of our senses, to look for and share gifts of insight which can help us exercise caution where such is the more sensible path, and take a deep breath and push forward when more courageous action is warranted.

One of the limitations in the deployment of the proverbs above is my own inability to designate authorship beyond the nation-state.  The best proverbs, of course, have impact across cultural and even national borders.  But we also know that, in African and other global contexts, such borders are functions more of colonial convenience than local assent.   That the proverbs listed here mostly do not have a more specific cultural reference point underscores my own limitations.  Thankfully the lessons embodied in these and other kernels of insight have relevance across cultural divides as they have relevance beyond the limitations of the English in which they are here communicated.

But despite this, it is also the case that we now live in a world dominated far more by fact-checkers than storytellers, a world in which the data sets of our times are as  likely to drive us to despair as to trust and confidence, drive us towards indifference rather than engagement, drive us to see if we can “wait this one out” rather than participate in remediation with the energy and wisdom still at our disposal.   

On top of this, we also inhabit a time where many are championing their own truths in response to what has become a veritable sea of disinformation undermining confidence in any and all institutions and individuals who seek to do their homework and “play it straight” with what they know. We forget that while truth is not subjective as so many now seem to claim, it is always partial, valuable in the contexts in which it appears but not in all contexts, not in all circumstances, at least not in the same manner. 

I would suggest that our erstwhile preoccupation with “truth” grounded in an endless series of verifiable “facts” has not reduced lying – to ourselves and others – even while the cameras are rolling.  We have cultivated an extraordinary ability to accumulate masses of “facts” assembled to create arguments to justify ideas and behaviors which are barely, if at all, justifiable.  Even in global institutions such as the UN, complex arguments leading to one-sided critiques or inflexible assertions of “national interest” have become more and more the coin of the realm.  Acknowledgements of wrongdoing are almost non-existent.  Direct apologies are even rarer.  Clarifications of position are occasionally offered, but little is conveyed indicating that positions have been significantly rethought or revised based on fresh experiences or circumstances. We give lip service to the wonders of science as well as to the need to reach constituents “where they are.”  But the language of bureaucracy is rarely the language of community or culture, and our dominant syntax remains generally too conceptually complex, too “flat” in its application, too-often lacking in thought-provoking affect to inspire the local consent and revitalized initiative upon which the successful pursuit of something truly important like a “right to a healthy environment” ultimately rests.

We need softer landing spots for the accumulation and transmission of human wisdom.  The proverbs listed above and innumerable others of their kind from all corners of the world offer (at least to my mind) a more straightforward, if also incomplete, path to wisdom from a range of sources and from which the rest of us have become too-often detached.  Indeed, a “roaring lion kills no game.” Indeed, “one who conceals a disease cannot expect to be cured.”  Indeed, “one who continually laments is not heeded.”  Indeed, “fine words do not produce food.”  Indeed, “there is no medicine to cure hatred.” On and on, kernels of truth which instruct and provoke, which take what has been seen and convert it into words and images that can connect and inspire. 

Whether in this form or other, we in policy-land need to find more of those simpler and wiser forms of discourse which can stretch our experience, which can make our hearts smile as well as our teeth, and which can forge stronger and more urgent links between the world we are trying to build, the constituents we are trying to reach, and the people we need to become. 

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To Expect and Inspire: Sides of a Precious Policy Coin, Dr. Robert Zuber

19 Jul
See the source image

You see what is, where most people see what they expect.  John Steinbeck

To wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect. Jane Austen

You said we cannot sail through, how were you so sure?  Mehek Bassi

Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.  Samuel Johnson

Peace begins when expectation ends.   Sri Chinmoy

There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living. Nelson Mandela

You can devise all the plans in the world, but if you don’t welcome spontaneity; you will just disappoint yourself. Abigail Biddinger

As many of you know, the past two UN weeks were devoted to the High Level Political Forum (HLPF), a monumental effort by the Economic and Social Council to clarify the expectations of states regarding their commitments to the 2030 Development Agenda and to assess the SDG-related performance of states through a process of Voluntary National Reviews.

This HLPF represents, in essence, the half-way point in a 15 year commitment to sustainable development made in 2015 to shift the direction of a global community in positive ways, but one which has actually seen many core Sustainable Development (SDG) commitments experience course reversals.  Among others, we are not on track to reduce poverty, address food insecurity, eliminate our fossil fuel dependences, end government corruption or build the durable partnerships needed to bring the health and other material circumstances of global citizens up to even minimum standards in this polarized and unequal world.

Given these and other SDG setbacks, those which the pandemic did not help but also did not cause, one would have been forgiven for assuming that this HLPF would be characterized by the kinds of energy and passion largely absent fronm diplomatic discourse.  If there was ever a time to step out of line, to show both urgency and flexibility in terms of how we define the times and our responsibilities to those times, to inspire as well as deliberate, to reassure as well as to demur, this would have seemed to be it.

And we did get some of that, including in the plenary session on ocean health and in “side events” such as one on “water and climate,” another on “invisible” older women, and a third on the sustainability role of local and regional governments, all of which got us closer to clarifying the urgency of the moment and showcasing a bit of the determination needed to overcome challenges, in part due to the active presence in these meetings of issue-relevant NGOs.  And yet, as the conference rooms filled up and the ministers uttered their statements, we could well regret that the polar ice caps continue to melt into the sea, children wait in vain for another meal, our freshwater reserves continue to evaporate or succumb to plastic pollution, and we continue to put pressure on what remains of life-saving reserves by doubling down on water sucking agricultural and meat producing practices, as well as on automobiles which represent a double-whammy of massive water (in production) and fossil fuel uses.

In this and other UN settings, it is fair to ask if what we propose for state and non-state action is possibly sufficient to avert levels of looming catastrophe for which, as with the current pandemic, we remain largely unprepared.

Stepping back for a moment, I was reminded this week of a position which has long guided my own thinking – that how was assess is largely a function of what we expect – that multiple people can look at and describe the very same situation and yet assess it differently based on their own expectation of performance.  Indeed, around the UN as elsewhere, much of the difference in how we identify and evalauatae the performance of this system is a function of what we have been led to expect or allowed ourselves to expect. 

And, I must say expectation levels seem to be headed south as quickly as levels of ocean health. Responses to some of my own frustrations about UN progress on sustainable development or the maintenance of international peace and security is some version of “well, what did you expect?”  The flaws in this response, to my mind at least, are obvious in an institution which seeks on the one hand to raise expectations for multilateral engagement while simultaneously dampening them with reminders that, well, it’s the governments that determine objectives and outcomes and the rest of us can do little more than make our case and hope that some other than the usual suspects is actually listening to what we say.

Another flaw in this complex and often-troubling scenario is the assumptions that expectations are what we have of others, that our role in this drama is largely a passive one, waiting to see if persons or institutions can deliver on what are often inflexible and even fantastical assumptions about how “others” should behave, how the world “should” work, expectations so often disconnected from reality, so often insufficiently flexible to circumstance but also insufficiently engaged with the people and/or institutions to which the expectations are directed. 

I must say that most of the quotations I unearthed for this piece (and didn’t include) failed both the flexibility and engagement tests.  One after another cautioned against having any expectations in the first place, not as a result of some Buddhist epiphany but so one could avoid “disappointment.”  As with so much else in life, the choice to recalibrate these dubious assumptions, to refine our expectations such that they remain both flexible and engaged was difficult to find. That we should be willing to see what is actually present, to refrain from predetermined notions of what “ought to be,” notions seemingly also designed to limit our own participation, is a curse which we have the ability and the obligation to curb.

Where this HLPF was concerned, it was a struggle for some not to give in either to a passive cynicism or a deep disappointment that, yet again, conclusions were not sufficiently relevant to the urgency of the times and young people were no closer to securing a world they can live with.   After “consensus” adoption of the Ministerial Declaration for this HLPF, delegations began to pick apart its provisions, with one caveat after another directed towards language in the Declaration from which delegations maintained the right to distance themselves, some on sovereign policy grounds, others on grounds of culture. Especially troubling to me was the fact that this distancing was most often directed towards language on climate change and reproductive rights, areas of particular urgency for our young people as the planet continues to bake and women’s rights continue to lean in the wrong direction.    

For us, despite another round of discouragement, these caveats must be understood as setbacks but not deal-breakers. If there is not sufficient urgency or inspiration in UN conference rooms, there is still space for us to supply it.  If delegations try to “go small” in keeping with their instructions from capital, we can do our part to expand the frame, to keep the focus on areas of greatest threat, to reassure constituents that we will continue to apply an active and flexible lens to global problems which we know are unlikely to disappear unless we do.

We also recognize that the “cherry picking” around the operative paragraphs of the Ministerial Declaration is unlikely to reassure an anxious global public wondering if the many ministers and leaders of diplomatic missions gathered for this HLPF actually understand what is now at stake. Perhaps they’ve simply heard it all before, heard it so often in fact that there is no longer shock value, no longer anything to hear that can inspire anything more than tepid motions towards a “consensus” which is unlikely to motivate states not already “all in” on sustainable development to significantly shift their national priorities.

What we need to add to the mix is more inspiration, words and images that can move people, move them in ways that our “flat,” cautious and cliche-ridden policy language often cannot, move them to take up their rightful place in the world and affirm the life that can still be theirs.

Indeed, the most inspirational moment of the week might well not have been in the HLPF at all, but in the Security Council of all places where Colombian and UN officials convened to honor the release of the Final Report of the Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Co-existence and Non-Repetition. The Declaration emerging from this report is most everything a document of this sort could be — smart and humble, informed and forward looking, generous and fair, tethered both to a complex national history and the spontaneity of its current moment, this and more in gorgeous, moving prose which seeks to vindicate the “blood of brothers” shed over and over by mapping out specific pathways allowing a weary nation to “go further until we love life.”

At the UN, it is now most often the president of the General Assembly who speaks in such tones. But he will leave his office soon and it is up to the rest of us to decide how to maintain that culture, a culture that inspires and assesses courageously, a culture that is not satisfied for one moment until the words on paper become hopeful change for the millions who long for it. For us and others the task is also to maintain flexible expectations in the face of the “unexpected sparks” of change, along with a posture which conveys that a sustainable peace still lies in our hands, especially so as we are able to resist the temptations to see only what we want to see or hurl pre-deteremined expectations at others from the sidelines.

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Village Idiocy: An Educational Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

10 Jul
Edvard Munch

I don’t know why I cannot sleep – I slept just fine at school.  Kathy Kenney-Marshall

You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Doris Lessing

Instruction does much, but encouragement everything.  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.  Jacques Barzun

Once a student’s mind is set on fire, it will find a way to provide its own fuel.  Sydney J. Harris

You can’t eat straight A’s.  Maxine Hong Kingston

Under a cruel eye outworn, The little ones spend the day In sighing and dismay.  William Blake

The first week of the 2022 High Level Political Forum (HLPF) is now history. Some interesting and important discussions took place over these past few days on ocean health, gender equality and food security , important not only because they represent top-level priorities for the global community but because they serve as a reminder of our numerous dangling promises, dangling in that the urgency of our collective actions continues to fall short of the responses which the urgency of these times demands.

The HLPF also took up the issue of “education” this week, which as usual for such conversations at the UN was a bit of a hodge-podge of aspirations and cliches, largely dodging the core question of how we who have made a mess of the planet can possibly guide and inspire the youth who are soon to inherit it.

Yes, the “children are our future.” Yes, life-long learning is an aspiration worthy of pursuit. Yes, education in one form or another is essential to the fulfillment of the Sustainable Development Goals, if in fact they are to be fulfilled by our 2030 deadline. Yes, education needs to become more universally accessible, in part because so many children need to “catch up” from pandemic disruptions and in part because we continue to leave on the table so many skills and aptitudes, every one of which will be needed in some form if we are to set this carbon-saturated planet on a healthier course while we still have time to do so.

But in our rush to promote “education” as a sustainable development aspiration, in our campaigns to “innovate” the educational landscape (as with one HLPF side event), I worry that “well-educated” adults are dodging questions and concerns which may not complicate discussions in UN conference rooms but which plague educators (and those who aspire to educate) in a variety of settings.

I have been blessed in my life with some excellent teachers, both in and out of schools, especially in my early adult years, teachers who shared what they knew and gave what they could, teachers far less interested in replication than invention, who rooted for me to become more than I actually became. I have also been blessed to know a bevy of gifted teachers who are contemporaries — John Thompson, Bev Haulmark, Christopher Colvin, John Suggs, Barbara Zelter, Virginia Cawagas, Rien van Nek, Carolyn O’Brien — these and many others who have worked from time to time within school structures but also understand something of the limitations of classrooms, the degree to which the “self-perpetuating thought-regime” we represent can serve as a lifeline for some youth but can also constitute something of a “prison” for others.

In this age, we tend to be enamored of “school” as a physical entity, a place full of chairs and desks in a row, rooms that are age-segregated and hierarchical, driven largely by the expertise of the one in front of the room, concentrating on skills and tasks that we have concluded are essential to “educated” beings but which may not in fact be sufficient to the lives they are destined to lead, lives in significant portion defined by the storms which congregate on the horizon and which they had no real part in creating.

What, we might rightly ask, constitutes that base of skills and knowledge about which some broad consensus is feasible? As we know, at least in the US, schools have become something of a battleground for the ideas and values which parents seek to have reinforced through formal education. How do we talk with children about their own national history in all its messiness and complexity without resorting to slight-of-hand measures such as redefining slavery as “involuntary relocation?” How do we expect schools and our professional educators to prepare students to address existential threats such as climate change and hate speech the existence of which some parents and state officials are unwilling to acknowledge? How are teachers, including the very best of them, supposed to accompany and encourage young people in keeping with the aspirations which motivated their own professional choices when the trust and friendship necessary to accompaniment is institutionally discouraged?

So many of the teachers I know in so many global settings are stuck somewhere between lighting fires in the young and extinguishing them, between sharing lives from which young people could potentially learn much and hinding behind an ever-thickening professonal protocol, between reinforcing the metrics of school assessment and telling them the truth about the genuinely tenuous relationship between good grades and good lives. While they are in school, we want students to do well, to pay attention and resist the temptation to either snooze or act out. But school is not life, it may not in many instances even be sufficient training for life as it is now unfolding and, in any event, you “can’t eat straight A’s.”

The equation which many now draw, even inadvertently, between education and schooling is dangerous both to successful schooling itself and to a world which fails to examine the many factors which influence how students learn, what they learn and, most importantly, what they do with what they know, including how (or if) they continue on a path towards higher levels of wisdom and cognitive synethsis. The educational configuration enveloping our youth is surely in large part about school, increasingly about social media, but also about churches and corporations, families and libraries, neighbors and public servants. It is, in my view at least, important to keep all these formal and informal options alive and assessed, not only for the benefit of young people who may not thrive in more formal settings, but also to reinforce the idea that education is not only what teachers do, but what we all have some responsibility to do, each within our own domains and each with varying degrees of formality and bureaucracy. So long as “education” is left to increasingly harried, overly-scrutinized and under-appreciated teachers, the gaps separating those who make decisions in this fractured world and those who may well become victimzed by those decisions will only widen.

If indeed lifelong learning is a viable educational goal in this world of multiple threats, it will take more than classrooms to inspire it. More than grades and degrees. More than standards-driven learning which over-simplifies reality and prepares students ,for a world which will surely have shifted and shaken under their feet barely before they can even get those feet “wet.”

In the UN General Assembly this week, in a discussion surely relevant to the HLPF, delegates met in informal session to debate elements of a “Declaration on Future Generations” to be presented in September at the GA’s 77th session. While there were no teachers or students present for this conversation, there were a few helpful observations from delegations, including from South Africa and Japan, both of which noted the heavy threat levels under which schooling and related social functions are now forced to take place. Japan expressed the hope that such a Declaration, including its educational elements, could serve to “turbo-charge” our commitment to the SDGs, fulfill our promises to future generations and restore some of the confidence lost by many global youth in many of us global adults.

This is not about “business as usual” rhetorical flourishes on the value of sustainability and innovation. Indeed, as a UN Special Rapporteur reminded, “innovation does not come cheap.” It requires more of our resources, but also more of our humanity including our sharing of lessons learned along our own life paths, the lessons we were often too slow to learn ourselves. There is too much in our world as it is, including violence and strife in multiple forms which, as South Africa and the European Union implored, we should all be loathe to pass on to future generations. But as it now stands, pass on we shall, and the question is who and what can we entrust to the preparation of the young people who are set to assume some weighty responsibilities, whether they are ready to do so or not.

Lest we add villages of idiots to our long generational list of dubious “accomplishments” we must invest more of ourselves in the education of the young in the best and broadest sense of the term. Invest more of ourselves in all aspects of the “configuration” which shapes the values, hopes, anxieties and aspirations of our young people. More than curricular “innovations” and snappy, data-driven assessments. More than the perpetuation of systems which denigrate teachers and create apartheid-like systems of access. More than adults who claim to know more and possess greater wisdom than we do interfacing with young people who know we don’t.

These urgent times require more from each of us if our young people will be able to manage what we are now likely to bequeath to them. I hope at least a portion of them are still listening.

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Muddle House:  Confusion over Policy Outcomes, Dr. Robert Zuber

4 Jul
“Hope 1” Pinterest.Com/MX

There’s too many men, too many people, making too many problems. And not much love to go around. Can’t you see this is a land of confusion? Genesis

Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.   Fyodor Dostoevsky

There I was, cold, isolated and desperate for something I knew I couldn’t have. A solution. A remedy. Anything.  Brian Krans

I felt like I had swallowed yeast, like whatever evil was festering inside me had doubled in size.   Jodi Picoult

Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.  Alain de Botton

I had talked too much. I had said too little.  Patrick Rothfuss

Fear grew in places unlit by knowledge.  Roshani Chokshi

It’s hard not to feel a bit frayed at the edges these days, confused and worried in equal measure about our personal and global prospects. 

Collectively speaking, we are binging now on acrimony and misunderstanding, perfectly willing to believe the worst of others while postulating a priori goodness for ourselves. In so doing, we absorb all the misinformation needed to turn neighbors into adversaries, parroting political positions with passions which belie the lack of attention we have generally paid to the untoward consequences of that for which we advocate. 

As you well know, there are so many fires raging in the world beyond those raging in our conflict zones and bone-dry forests, so many guns ready to be fired in anger or despair; so many leaders willing to sell out portions of entire populations to preserve the power that will hold them aloof from legal jeopardy; so many people searching for even a short respite from their manifold pressures and deprivations, never-mind finding some actual solution or something akin to a permanent remedy.

I don’t think I am alone in this, and God knows I have contributed to the confusion of others on multiple occasions (perhaps even at this moment). But more and more, regardless of where people sit on the political spectrum, I literally don’t seem to “know” what people are talking about.  I hear the words, I recognize the syntax, but the lack of “sense” regarding what is being said and not said, the hard-core principles detached from worldly experience and evidence, the need to believe beyond what can be reasonably justified, let alone practiced, all of that and more leaves me generally baffled.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be.  I, too, have elements of life which are “there” not due to any structural or cognitive inevitability but rather to my “need” to have them there, my “belief” in certain things which stretches potentially corroborating evidence into some grotesque caricature of itself.  I get it.  I’m not immune from participating in some of the craziness I have made a humble living helping to identify and address, most recently in multilateral policy contexts.

I certainly acknowledge that ,this “land of confusion” we have crafted for ourselves is a place where fear and anger increasingly occupy spaces “unlit by knowledge,” spaces often ceded over to the various demons of our sub-consciousness which, rather than exposing them to the light and freeing up their hiding places for better uses, we have instead converted  their  spaces into something both insular and habit forming,  not unlike a shelter from bombs or tornadoes now deemed too comfortable and familiar to abandon even in the absence of direct threats.

People sometimes assume that, because of our decent policy access, we are somehow immune from  confusion from societies which justify each and every manifestation of “what is good for me is good,” which force 10 year old rape victims to bear children in the name of “life”, which keep other girls of that age and others  out of school in the name of some “religion” or other, which drive economic inequalities to the very limits of human endurance, which rationalize armed violence with wanton fabrications of politics or culture, or which continue to see fossil fuels as the “solution” to a world already consumed by plastic waste, agriculture-killing droughts, and heat waves at the top of our blue planet  that make it easier for polar bears to get sun stroke than find food for their cubs. 

But no, we aren’t immune.  Policy access in and of itself is not the antidote to “feeling lost, crazy and desperate” at times, a condition which defines more circumstances than we imagine. Increasingly we have ingested so much metaphorical yeast that we are bloated with anxiety and uncertainty over the state of the world while questioning our own willingness  (let alone that of officialdom) to rise to this dangerous occasion, to address the nasty wounds quickly turning into nastier infections, including of our basic humanity, our commitment to the dignity of all, not simply the dignity of ourselves and our tribe.

The UN, as most of you who frequent these posts recognize, has long been recognized by us as a place where most of the crucial issues facing our fragile planet find analysis and expression.  At the UN/ECOSOC High Level Political Forum beginning on Tuesday, one planetary promise after another will find space for dialogue and assessment, the latter likely to serve as a reminder of just how much further we need to go to honor the complex and urgent commitments we made to global constituents in 2015.

This HLPF follows on the heels of several other big-ticket events including the UN Ocean Conference (Portugal), the World Urban Forum (Poland) and the Biennial Meeting of States (BMS8) to eradicate the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons held in New York. It has become typical of UN scheduling that its most important events are heaped upon other important events in ways which sow confusion among those in the wider global community seeking to keep track of what is being negotiated and ascertain whether outcomes from such events are in any way sufficient to address the urgent challenges which define our collective present. What do we have a right to expect from these grand, expensive and carbon-saturated global events?  What changes in places of need can we anticipate and how can we determine if the pace of change is adequate to reverse crises both clearly identified and well underway? And at another level, how do we know if the lofty gestures and noble commitments embedded in these outcomes represent genuine, good faith efforts to do what is needed and all that is needed to set the current precarious circumstances on a more hopeful course?

To be honest, there are too many times now when we come away from our monitoring and assessment of this frenetic UN policy environment more confused than reassured. We know a number of the people at the helm of these grand events, and we know them to be largely people of high character who worry with reason that the world we are apparently consigned to pass on is one unfit for their children or grandchildren. But as with all of us, character is not defined by the cautious, measured words we speak — and speak and speak again — so much as by the stories our lives communicate, stories about how we have been humbled and at times even transformed by the things we’ve experienced, the responsibilities entrusted to us, and the magnitude of global crises about which we are, sadly, still largely hedging our bets. If we are honest with ourselves, it is often those things left unsaid, including our own testimonies of compassion, loss and success, and even personal transformation, which could energize and inspire global citizens longing for a viable path forward. This sharing could well take forms of inspiration and reassurance, inspiration for making our hearts and limbs grow fuller and stronger together, and the active reassurance that we simply will not under any circumstances, with all the tools, energy and wisdom we can muster, allow weapons, famine, poverty, species loss or hate speech to have the final word.

The Klimt painting which adorns the heading of this piece serves as a reminder, to me at least, that if hope can be visualized it can be realized; that this “land of confusion” we have concocted for ourselves can truly give way to more honest and intelligible engagements with the challenges that remain within our competent and caring remit.  But progress must be demonstrated if it is to be believed, demonstrated in a way that can dispel the confusion and cynicism endemic in these times. It is our contention that, as helpful as they sometimes are, the careful speeches and tepid resolutions now emanating from our diverse and under-connected policy chambers remain largely insufficient to convince a weary and bewildered world that there is, indeed, “enough love to go around” to make those commitments real.

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Boys Club: A Father’s Day Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

19 Jun
See the source image
Edvard Munch from Fine Art America

That was when the world wasn’t so big and I could see everywhere. It was when my father was a hero and not a human.   Markus Zusak

No one ever thanked him.  Robert Hayden

Boys are beyond the range of anybody’s sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.  James Thurber

I’ve learned a lot about how the male mind works, and as a result I’ve been having nightmares for months.  Yvonne Collins

Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man should catch young and have done with, for when it comes in middle life it is apt to be serious.  P.G. Wodehouse

A boy’s will is the wind’s will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

An emphasis on fathering is necessary because of the enormity of its absence.   William Paul Young

He’s still her dad. The rest is just geography.  Jennifer E. Smith

As most of you know, today is Father’s Day, at times replete with awkward moments where, in my family at least, we struggled with perfunctory gift giving to men who had become used to not being thanked for the many subtle and even anonymous things they did for others, men who generally did not offer discernable clues regarding things they might like to have or if the day even had any meaning for them, men  who often ended up picking up the check for an erstwhile “Father’s Day” dinner held at a restaurant they would never have chosen on their own.

As fewer of you may know, today is Juneteenth, a day of marking the effective end of trans-Atlantic slavery, an effective end to men and their families chained inside the hulls of boats making the torturous and often fatal transit across unforgiving seas, the “reward” for survival being sold at auction, separated from loved ones, and now facing an ultimate test of preserving some semblance of the humanity that the brutality of “owners” and the circumstances of enslavement were conspiring  to break down altogether. 

Father’s Day indeed.  Even the simple recognition that those working in the fields were of greater value than the horses and dogs that roamed the property was often more than anyone could expect.  After all, once such value is acknowledged, it becomes morally problematic, even for the most abusive, to see slaves as mere conduits for sexual satisfaction or a bumper crop at market. 

In this precarious time, it would be reasonable, if a bit cheeky, to start drawing lines, the ones that bind ingratitude to grievance, and then to disinformation and then to hate speech, and then to discrimination, and then to outright brutality, sexual violence and even enslavement.   These lines are not tight but neither are they irrelevant.  We reap at least some of what we sow in this life, and much of what we sow now is with inattentive, ungrateful and self-interested hands.  Gratitude, whether to fathers, other family members, or the wider community of interests which sustains our complex lives, remains the first principle in diverting those aforementioned lines towards more productive and dignified sojourns. It is now a principle too-rarely grasped.

But not only now. When I was younger it seemed commonplace to blame mothers for all that was wrong in society, all that was wrong with children who had strayed from whatever path was deemed normative within the family and the wider community.  Having so strayed myself, it was indeed difficult to face a bevy of challenges I was largely unprepared for without casting blame on one or both of the parents to whom I was biologically and culturally tethered.  But there was little doubt in that time that mothers bore the brunt of the liability for who and what their children were to become and that much of that was unfair, in part the consequence of some overly-enthusiastic male psychologists who forgot to remove their own blinders before issuing their pronouncements.

In more recent times, certainly within the policy bubbles which I find myself, while individual males could be honored for their accomplishments, their bravery, even their humanity, the notion of “male” itself has taken a serious hit.  At the UN, the amount of time spent on issues of women’s participation and violence committed against them is quite formidable, not inappropriate at all given levels of abuse perpetrated against far too many women and girls in conflict settings and given the backhanded manner in which the guardians of patriarchy dole out their concessions to women who have in many, many instances outgrown any need or desire for such patronizing largesse.

That said, there is little spoken in UN policy spaces about men and boys, even less that is as thoughtful as it is critical.  For the most part, we don’t have “gendered” policy interests at the UN.  We have women’s interests.  And while the unmet needs of and abuses experienced by men and boys are slowly re-entering the discourse – including surprisingly this week at a good UN event on sexual violence in conflict – we have a long way to go to replace the stereotypes which are now, in my view at least, actually impeding the arrival of a time  when the daughters and sons of fathers can make their way in this wildly unequal world with some hope of finding meaning, purpose and accomplishment during their time on this earth.

It is worth noting here that in the search for quotations for this post, it was necessary to wade through many which were alternately bastions of sentimentality or “clubs” of incrimination, and more of the latter than I might have expected. Indeed, many of the quotations uncovered ostensibly focused on boys were actually offered by young women communicating in one way or another their “nightmares” courtesy of a male mindset which, I suspected at least, they had invested little in understanding beyond how it impacted them.  Let’s be clear. When fatherhood is interpreted through the lens of an absentee and boys are equated with sleep disorders or communicable diseases, whatever pathologies are being cleverly “exposed” are only likely to spread.  After all, most of us of all genders and backgrounds have a hard enough time weaning ourselves from the expectations that others have of us. 

As some of you know, though it is not much in the grand scheme of things, I’ve been funneling money in modest increments for years to organizations accompanying farm workers through their difficult and compromising labors, providing assistance for health and legal access needed to sustain themselves and their families.   I love the painting by Munch adorning this post because, despite current stereotypical limitations, it captures the essence of so many parents I know, so many fathers and mothers who work themselves to the bone in exchange for the affection and respect of their children, conveying an herioc promise to them each day that they will return to the sometimes-dehumanizing fields and factories, even to zones of conflict, to ensure that they have enough, that they are safe enough, that they can navigate the world well enough, that they are loved enough in terms both sentimental and (especially) practical.

Just as I know many boys undeserving of even an analogical whiff of pathology, so I know many fathers who remain resolutely present and active, who strive however they know to keep their promises to their children; to do what they can and guide as they are capable in order to ensure that the “long, long thoughts” of their progeny can lead to dignified and sustainable futures as we pass through these multiply undignified times.  I honor those efforts on their face, but also in the hope that such honoring can lead to a more abundant replication of the best of what I know fathers to be and do.

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Lawn Party: Recalling a Movement Still in Motion, Dr. Robert Zuber

13 Jun
Huffington Post

Sorry for the inconvenience. We are trying to change the world. Kate O’Donnell

Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.  Leonardo da Vinci

The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime. Emma Goldman

Where you need to be calm, you burst out in rage, and where you need to be on fire, you remain indifferent. Abhijit Naskar

Dedicating your life to understanding yourself can be its own form of protest, especially when the world tells you that you don’t exist. Samra Habib

Kindness, and the commitment to see the other as deserving of human dignity, demands of us to protest, resist, and do all that we can to fight that which says otherwise.  Bruce Reyes-Chow

One of the most important struggles of humanity is to ensure that our ‘fight against hate’ does not become ‘hate’ itself. Adeel Ahmed Khan

Yesterday morning, I dug up my tattered copy of the tepid New York Times coverage of an event that rocked my world at the time but, 40 years later, didn’t rock the planet and its inhabitants in quite the way we who worked and lived through those days might have anticipated.

The event was the so-called million-person march in and around Central Park in New York City, a mass mobilization calling for an end to a nuclear arms race that threatened all life forms and which, or so we hoped, was near a tipping point where sanity might prevail and weapons might be relegated to some scrap heap or other as powerful nations came to their senses and relinquished their nuclear hostage-taking for more positive and collaborative engagements.

Part of the backdrop for this march and its preparations was the Second UN Special Session on Disarmament a follow-up to the SSD1, held four years earlier, which produced mechanisms, largely of dubious effect, to expand and implement the institutionalizing of the UN’s disarmament obligations in accordance with the UN Charter and what was, even then, the clear and demonstrable wishes of many member states.

In hindsight, SSDII more or less threw the million marchers under the bus, leaving it up to the US and (then) USSR to negotiate deeper cuts in nuclear arsenals but not to threaten the pride of place of such weapons in the security postures of the most powerful states.  Despite an almost unprecedented outpouring of public sentiment, it was clear that little would come out of the UN this time to complement that cocophany of voices.  And while there have been notable achievements in the nuclear field since 1982, including the establishment of nuclear weapons free zones and, more recently, a treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, the states harboring nuclear weapons continue to modernize and (in the case of the DPRK) test them.  40 years on, while the area of influence for nuclear weapons and their possessor states has significantly shrunk, the dangers posed by those weapons have not.

In this time of reflection and commemoration referencing the march on the Great Lawn, I’ve been doing a bit on my own.  I’m grateful for the initiatives by some peace and security-oriented youth groups, including our office mates Reverse the Trend to assess that long-ago time, a march that preceded their entry into this world but the successes and failures of which they have surely (and often anxiously) inherited.  Unlike some of their elders, they have refused to embrace a singular nuclear weapons focus, understanding as we all should that these weapons are not the only existential threat we face as a planet and that a sole focus on such weapons is insufficient to move the international system to an urgent reckoning with discrimination and inequalities, food insecurity and ocean plastics, biodiversity loss and massive weapons flows, severe storms and burning forests,  the result in large part of our commitment to unsustainable lifestyles and addiction-like war preparations.

These youth seem to understand, better than many of the people who marched and chanted and left their footprints all over Central Park, that eliminating nuclear weapons remains essential but also elusive and is in itself insufficient to a world experiencing wolves of many stripes baying at every door and window in the human household, their haunting sounds reminding us that time is limited to spring into action and save ourselves from ourselves.

Reverse the Trend and some of their peers have been doing interviews about June 12, 1982 – what happened, why it happened, who was responsible, that and more.  I spent two years of my life preparing for that march, working alongside other peace groups, trying to manage “ incoming” from pervasive anxieties, moutains of responsibilities and egos off the rails, wondering how such flawed people as we were could possibly lead a movement without its own fatal flaws, wondering as well how we could possibly make the disarmament case to people living in poverty or under oppression, people we neither knew nor referenced, people waiting for an invitation to our Lawn Party which apparently never arrived.

I don’t talk about that event much.  Too much time has passed, time to nudge oneself into a role that was more significant than the one actually occupied, time to romanticize and/or demonize people and processes deserving of neither, time to manufacture and defend meaningful connections between that Lawn Party and the very mixed impacts which have followed in its wake.

I learned much from that time, learned that I had things to discern and contribute, learned that the peace movement and its advocates were not always deserving of the public confidence they sought, learned that cultures of war and violence breed weapons-related threats no matter how many people come out to trample the grass in Central Park, learned that part of the solution to what ails us as a species lies not in our institutions but in the integrity and humanity with which individuals who work in and manage such institutions attend to those structures and their attendant responsibilities.

I also learned how unforgiving much of the work of peace and security can be, how many relationships could not stand up to the pressure of a world under siege, some of which could apparently not survive even a whiff of self-scrutiny.  Indeed, amidst the burnout from many months of unrelenting activities, there was a sense that all of these efforts, all of this forced interaction, was transitory, was not much more than a moment in time when we dared to believe in our collective power of voice before being reminded that the afterglow from this party only lasts so long, only illuminates so much, only captures the heart for a season.

I’m glad this march happened and I’m grateful to those who allowed me to be part of it.  But the skepticism of those days has not entirely abated for me.  I still cannot fully trust ideas of peace put forward by people who are themselves lacking in self-reflection.  I still cannot fully trust ideas of peace put forward by people who see no connection between their lifestyles and their policy aspirations, those who assume that the erstwhile righteousness of their cause accrues virtue to themseleves and their character independent of any character-related insight or effort.

That bar applies to me as well. 

The Party on the Lawn is now a distant memory. The grass in the park has fully recovered. The softball crowd has long ago resumed their competitions. The party crowd still with us has dispersed in directions hard to detect, some to new structures of nuclear weapons advocacy, some to work in other and (we hope) complementary issue sectors, others in retreat to a now-familiar world of increasing anxieties and logitstical demands. We all did a good thing 40 years ago, but it was not without its flaws both methodological and personal. The younger ones are now trying to figure out where they stand in relation to what we did and didn’t do. We need to be honest with them and with ourselves. Their party is only getting started.

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Sight Lines: Beholding the Other in policy and practice, Dr. Robert Zuber

22 May

Self and other is less of a dichotomy than a continuum. James Hamblin

I’m sorry it took me so long to see you, Alina. But I see you now.  Leigh Bardugo

Human fate gives itself to human fate, and it is the task of pure love to keep this self-surrender as vital as on the first day. Martin Heidegger

We reveal most about ourselves when we speak about others. Kamand Kojouri

We are the other of the other. Marco Aurelio

Our biases against the other are empowered less by our assumptions of their otherness and more by our assumptions about our own normality. Jamie Arpin-Ricci

They think they are sweet reasonableness, and it’s you that’s in the wrong, just by being, and not being like them, or looking like them, or wanting their kind of life. Margaret Laurence

One of the joys of life is to have friends who know you well enough suggest things for you to read that both confirm and stretch your deepest assumptions.  Such happened to me in Georgia a few days ago complements of Dr. Robert Thomas, a friend and Board member of Global Action.

The book he suggested  is entitled “The Other” from the prolific, Polish author Ryszard Kapuściński. Quoting philosophers familiar to me in other contexts, including Gabriel Marcel and Emmanuel Lévinas, Kapuściński urges us to embrace diversity and otherness as a “constituent feature” of the human condition.  Moreover, he accepts the view (as I do as well) that our contemporary predispositions to conquest, to master, to create both abstractions and dependencies are all contrary to some core human aspirations, specifically to see others clearly and compassionately and to be seen by others similarly; to practice a curiosity about the world and each other which is more than meeting, conversing and accepting but which also involves “taking responsibility” for the other, for his/her dignity and well-being as a contribution both to them but also to ourselves. 

Kapuściński warns that much in our current cultural configuration is focused on establishing dichotomies than in affirming the continuum on which all our humanity rests.  Despite our western access to education and technology, we are much too willing to embrace groupthink which can, as he reflects, turn the friendliest of humans into “devils.”  We have demonstrated, over the over, our preference for owning a neighbor’s farm rather than having neighbors.  We defer to anonymous stereotyping even when it is directly contradicted by our own experience.  We continue to assess our own “normalcy” too highly and the “normalcy” of others too dismissively.  We maintain “unfortunate balances” with the Other when a more mutually dignified balance lies well within reach. We have misplaced our “will to become acquainted” and thus undermined the genuine dialogue he posits as the “main goal of encounter.”

Ironically, I was devouring this short text as the UN, our primary and sometimes  frustrating cover, was in the midst of some important policy deliberations, one of which was the first formal review of the Global Compact on Migration adopted in Marrakesh four years ago.

Together with Economic and Social Council deliberations on “operational activities” for sustainable development and Security Council discussions on the relationship between conflict and food insecurity, this review of migration policy in the General Assembly was timely and for the most part hopeful as it alternately recognized and enabled the wide range of persons and professions with a valid stake in both the drivers of displacement and in the care and reintegration of migrants and other displaced persons.  Speaker after speaker reminded the audience of the many contributions that migrants can and do make to recipient communities, but also the many impediments – from racism and barbed wire to trafficking and the denial of vaccines and access to provisions – which mark so many treacherous migrant journeys.  Some of the civil society speakers highlighted the remaining gaps between the aspirations of the Global Compact and our current, collective practices.  As I understood it, this was less about scolding diplomats than about a reminder that the essentials of migrants’ lives, including the basic recognition of their dignity and humanity, remain painfully elusive.  The President of the General Assembly echoed this theme, lamenting the “lost dreams” of children and families which occur when we fail our responsibilities to the Compact, including the responsibility to see with eyes of humanity as much as of policy.

I was in Marrakesh for that GCM adoption though mostly hanging out on the margins with NGOs whose first-hand testimony of migrant’s needs was mostly deemed marginal itself.  However, as it turns out, I was able to spend some good time speaking with a few of the people who were in the city for another reason — to escape some harsh conditions, many of which were conflict related, far to the south across the Atlas Mountains and a vast swath of desert and savannah beyond.  To my surprise, a number of those displaced persons had made their way from the Anglophone region of Cameroon beset by open, ethnic-based conflict over several years. I had previously traveled widely in that region, and it was quite an experience to be able to share stories of life in towns from which they had come and to which I had on more of one occasion made my visits.

I did nothing tangible for these people, of course, nothing at all except to confirm that they came from somewhere; that they had homes and families “back there;” that they missed much about a culture and an ecology far different than the one to which they had temporarily transitioned.  They had come to believe that a future in Europe would offer more stability and opportunity for themselves and their families, and yet the borders of Europe were far from reach.  Indeed, as it was explained to me, the chances of them reaching Europe were more remote than the chances that the local police would apprehend them and drop them on the other side of the Atlas Mountains, leaving them essentially to recalibrate plans and otherwise fend for themselves in the desert heat, surely another blow to both their residual resilience and their confidence in the compassion of others.  

There are so many occasions and interactions in our work which cause us (or should) to question ourselves, our commitment to the well-being of the vulnerable and, even more directly, our connections to those we purport to serve.  Those of us who occupy policy spaces can, if we are not really careful, get away with opinions about ourselves which appear more noble (or as we say at the UN “distinguished) than would likely be confirmed by outsiders.  Indeed, one of the changes we have witnessed at the UN over the years is the presence of more voices from the field – albeit often for short interventions – voices expressly less interested in the “excellence” of our policy community and more concerned with commitments deferred, promises broken, even a failure to see deeply enough to realize that we in the policy community can occasionally enable change but should surely be more careful about directing it. 

This “seeing” which in our case is often more attuned to bureaucratic processes relevant to the Other than to the task of overcoming our reserve, restraint and even mistrust of the Other; such “seeing” must be transformed through what Kapuściński called “the will to become acquainted.”   Simply put, we must not allow the “mass” of media voices or economic ambitions to sideline or even overcome the personal.   If we learned anything during this GCM review week it is that dignity is as important to the Other as provisions.  It is mostly when migrants are invisible to the rest of us, even at times to erstwhile caregivers, that the pain of displacement is felt most acutely.  It needn’t take so long, be so difficult, to see each other in a different, more attentive, more comprehensive way.

For Kapuściński, for us as well, policy which does not promote the dignity of other cultures and languages, which does not intend to exchange barbed wire for welcome signs, which does not encourage lines of sight which are clear and compassionate, is ultimately “a road to nowhere.”  He believes that a rising tide of displacement and our treatment of persons on the move will, indeed, determine the kind of world we are likely to live in going forward. With threats from violence, climate change and the loss of biodiversity and agricultural land; with racist rhetoric, women’s rights rollbacks and violent extremism all on the increase; the challenges associated with overcoming what has become a contemporary cocktail of bias and indifference – in our world and in ourselves — are formidable. 

We need good policy to help mitigate the many disincentives in our world which keep our hearts harder than they need to be and makes mere eye-contact with the Other a largely forsaken act. But more than policy, we need to prepare ourselves at individual and community level for what may turn out to be the greatest of all our contemporary human tests, the recovery of our long-compromised, long-trammeled ability to see each other with clarity, compassion and care.

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