Tag Archives: accompaniment

King Maker:  A Reflection on Heroes and Heroism, Dr. Robert Zuber

17 Jan

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. Martin Luther King Jr.

Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world. Desmond Tutu

Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that such knowledge will help set you free. Assata Shakur

I am of certain convinced that the greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel.  Florence Nightingale

Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces “nice” people, not heroes.  Peter Kreeft

Heroes aren’t heroes because they worship the light, but because they know the darkness all too well to stand down and live with it.  Ninya Tippett

I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not. Philip K. Dick

Perseverance is the act of true role models and heroes.  Liza Wiemer

I don’t often remember where I was as key events in our world unfolded, but I do remember what I was feeling on the day that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. 

I grew up with guns in the home, but also in a home which valued gun safety, which would go to great lengths to ensure that guns were always managed responsibly, were never used in anger or to settle scores.  The thought that someone would use weapons to “hunt” other humans, let alone a human of King’s stature and hopeful values was almost unfathomable.

Moreover, the killing underscored what for me was a common emotional dimension – a feeling that the world was spinning out of control and that I was impotent in the face of its challenges.  It was clear that some people were finding their “refusals,” both quiet and loud – the march across the Selma bridge, the encampments outside courts of law if not justice, the determination to sit in any open seat on public transit and not only those which local legislation had assigned.  But such refusals were then beyond my remit.  I was a spectator to the upheaval but not in any way a participant in its resolution.  I was despondent, angry, unsure of most things, and with so much more to learn than I ever recognized.

On this annual King Day, alongside the recent sad death of Desmond Tutu and the ageing out of some of my most important life guides inside and outside the UN, it seems to be a propitious moment to revisit the entire concept of heroism and heroic acts.  Who are our heroes?  Why do we have them or need them?   What role do they serve in our lives and how are their words and images manipulated and often “domesticated” by others to serve interests inconsistent with their values and efforts to persevere in their commitment to justice through challenge and even threat?

At their best, our heroes provide a modicum of inspiration to those who would deign to follow in their more “famous” and widely-honored footsteps.  To insist on a life full of meaning as well as data.   To develop and use our voices to keep alive the many and diverse things that matter to ourselves and others.   To pay attention and contribute to the local contexts and dimensions of social change. To make a better effort to ensure that those who have been culturally marginalized are brought closer to the center.  To counter the darkness which stubbornly resides both in the hearts of ourselves and amidst our communities as one of many contributions to the unfolding of the light.

But there are dangers lurking here as well, the vicarious dimensions of the ways in which we “honor” heroes that serve to impede as much as inspire. Our heroes, in this scenario, are akin to celebrities who do something real (as a schoolchild allegedly confessed to a teacher).   But the “real” that they do often falls into the category of things we would not risk doing ourselves – jeopardizing personal and family security to call out injustice, driving into danger to rescue civilians under attack or to feed those at the very edge of starvation, acquiring positions of power and then actually using them to advance the full human condition rather than satisfying personal or even national ambitions, abandoning socially prescribed expectations to serve those who might then serve others, paying forward what has been given to those who need it still.

I have had the life privilege of engaging with several notable figures, including the Reverend William Sloane Coffin Jr., who struggled routinely with an often-thoughtless vicariousness, finding themselves often out on a proverbial limb to cheers from an audience that wouldn’t think of joining them there.   I am anything but a hero, but I have also been told by others how reassuring it is to know that there is “someone out there doing these things.”  As though it is possible to “do these things,” indeed to do much of anything of value at all, without the active engagement, energy, wisdom, even love of so many others.  As though the heroic acts of heroic individuals can ever compensate for a dearth of hopeful activity at personal and community level, activity that can transform “the daily grind of domestic affairs” into viable and actionable linkages with so others in familiar and unfamiliar circumstances, including our heroes-turned-celebrities living lives (past or present) which too many of us have sadly become accustomed to assuming have little or nothing to do with our own.

One of the terms which has found growing resonance around the UN community, and which I believe was introduced to me and my office colleagues by Marta Benavides of El Salvador, is that of “accompaniment.” The skills which are conveyed through this term are not in opposition to heroism but are sustainably complementary. Walking alongside rather than in front of. Ensuring a reliable presence beyond one-off events or interventions.  Making promises to which we are personally accountable.  Remaining attentive to the creeping darkness in our midst and then enacting those “quiet refusals” which standing-down such darkness requires. Setting better examples ourselves rather than pointing to examples of heroes whose often-exemplary lives we might well honor but remain largely out of reach.

At the end of the day, heroism for most of us is not an office to hold or specific actions to honor so much as an opportunity to express our full humanity, a chance to grow beyond our limited contexts, a chance to help incarnate values in the world that we care about but don’t experience sufficiently, a chance to push ourselves further out of the realm of the safe and comfortable into the ever-whirling, ever-maddening, ever-threatened world.  Indeed, it is often an important dimension of heroism to focus less on the length of our lives and more on their quality – who they touch, what they stand for, what we can help others to accomplish or, in the case of children, prepare to accomplish.

On this M.L. King Day as on every day, let us pledge to do all the good that we are able, to identify and cast aside the darkness around and within us, to affirm more of life tomorrow than yesterday, and to insist on linking our own accompaniments and other manifestations of justice and service to those of others. These are aspects of heroism, of a life mindfully lived, that do not require celebrity but only a reaffirmation of the fully human, the willingness of all to contribute the good as they are able, goodness which, in tandem, retains the welcome and transformational capacity to “overwhelm the world.”

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Mentoring Protection: A Caregivers’ Role, Dr. Robert Zuber

30 May

“Survivor” by Bisa Butler

We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond. Gwendolyn Brooks

It is today that our best work can be done.  W. E. B. Du Bois

Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can’t figure out what from.  Mae West

Don’t let the rain drive you to the wrong shelter.  Michael Bassey Johnson

As time went on, we learned to arm ourselves in our different ways. Some of us with real guns, some of us with more ephemeral weapons, an idea or improbable plan or some sort of formulation about how best to move through the world. Colson Whitehead

Life is so complete that even when we are knocked on our backs, we have the best view of the stars. Laura Teresa Marquez

Yeah, exactly where a dad should be. Holding a firearm and warding off potential suitors until that daughter is of consenting age, he said. “Which in my book is about forty-six.  Mary H.K. Choi

This was “protection of civilians week” at the UN, an annual event when we examine our commitments to protect the vulnerable and threatened, but also to honor those whose skills and instincts for protecting others put their lives at risk and much-too-often end them entirely. 

We at the UN normally associate our protection commitments with peacekeeping operations, the soldiers, police and civilian components, most often seconded from UN member states, who are tasked with protecting civilians in some of the most demanding conflict environments on earth.  Through ever-more sophisticated intelligence gathering, logistical support, threat assessment and (in the best of circumstance) adequate ground and air assets, peacekeepers are increasingly able to stay a step ahead of armed groups and other “spoilers” while providing gender and culturally-sensitive assistance to communities and host states through what seems to be an ever-widening range of mandated duties from election monitoring and vaccination assistance to “quick impact projects” designed to build both trust and capacity in host communities.

In a series of UN discussions over this past week, including in the Security Council, the UN and its partners both honored sacrifices made and assessed the current state of play in what is an increasingly complex tapestry of both protection responsibilities and threats to protectors.  Among the former are efforts to address deficits related to food insecurity and health-related access as climate change and armed conflict disrupt agricultural cycles and vaccine “hoarding” leaves many millions vulnerable to a deadly virus and its seemingly unrelenting variants.  Among the latter are threats from formally-designated terrorists and other armed groups increasingly able to incite violence through digital means with seemingly unfettered access to trafficked weapons and the capacity to construct and deploy improvised explosive devices which constitute perhaps the greatest, current, operational threat to peacekeeper safety.

To my mind, amidst the many helpful protection-related discussions at the UN this week, two in particular stood out.  The first of these was an event entitled “Local Perspectives on the Protection of Civilians: The Impact of Conflict and Hunger,” which shifted vantage points on protection towards the most fundamental of needs – for nutrition, for access to water, for livelihoods that can sustain families and communities.  A South Sudanese advocate spoke of the “dream” of many women in her country for “livelihood options” in a country still wrestling with corruption and insurgency, weapons trafficking (despite an arms embargo) and diverse impediments to agricultural sufficiency.  The Afghanistan director of the UN’s World Food Programme put the local protection crisis in sharper (and somewhat shocking) relief, citing vast, conflict-induced nutritional deficits that raise the prospect, based on her long experience in conflict zones, of generations literally “being wiped out.” One speaker after another reinforced what has now and sadly become commonplace, the degree to which the impacts of conflict in this time of asymmetrical threats, now complicated by a pandemic, bear protection implications far beyond conventional fields and/or modalities of struggle.

Another important protection event of the week was hosted by Ireland and devoted to “Improving the Protection of Civilians in UN Peacekeeping Transitions,” a discussion on how UN contingents can best honor responsibilities assumed and relationships forged once the decision has been made by the Security Council to draw down peacekeeping operations and transition responsibilities to other UN capacities and, especially, to national contingents.  Ireland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Simon Coveny made several helpful contributions to the broader discussion on protection, noting that peacekeeping transitions must be sensitive both to the situation on the ground and to the relationships which have been forged at local level, people who may now find themselves dependent for some aspects of protection on government forces who may have the capacity to protect but may also lack the will to do so.  The MFA noted that the “path to peace,” the path that could one day make peacekeeping obsolete, requires more of us in the interim, including greater sensitivity to the anxiety from security risks that withdrawal might engender.  At the very least, he noted, we must ensure that the pace of such withdrawals is determined by specific community concerns and security-related circumstances and not driven merely by “budgetary considerations.”

While protection mandates for peacekeepers continue to expand there is also the need to expand our assessment of what protection requires; certainly to those tasked with providing it but also to those living in that zone that most of us find ourselves in over the course of our lives – needing protection in some aspects but also offering it ourselves, offering it to children of course but also to neighbors, the elderly, those who have been through harrowing circumstances, those experiencing limited capacity to fend off threats to themselves in the short or long term.  

In this regard, an image was offered at the top of this post courtesy of Bisa Butler’s remarkable exhibit now at Chicago’s Art Institute. Among her stunningly colorful, woven portraits of African-American culture is this one depicting a woman in considerable distress being held up by two other women, neither of whom appear to be “protectors” in the professional sense, but both of whom were clearly in accompaniment to the suffering of the third, bearing at least some of her burdens and providing reassurance that the suffering she now experienced would not have to be experienced alone.

For many of us, this is the lens on protection that is most familiar, bearing the wounds of others in real time, caring for those close at hand, making hard decisions about when and how to assume risks, acting on our best assessments of the experiences that harm and those that traumatize, how to respond best to short and longer-term dangers to personal and and community well-being.

In a world awash in weapons often in the hands of unscrupulous actors, it is understandable to put protection from weapons in the hands of those also bearing weapons, those able to respond to threats of armed violence with coercive measures in kind. But this is not at all the end of the matter. For instance, Indonesia made a particularly good point this week in calling for “mentoring” of national contingents by peacekeeping forces, thereby helping to ensure that such contingents manifest both the capacity and the will to protect, and that such protection is undertaken with full regard for the dignity and rights of the protected. 

But there is another piece to this mentoring, the piece communicated by Butler’s woven portrait, the piece embodied by those with their fingers on the pulse of what protection is needed and what is merely intrusive, the protection that requires a blend of both outside assistance and community resolve, including the will to accompany and the creation of enabling environments to endure, to heal and to reintegrate.  The mentoring of these equally-essential skills and capacities, as some of the voices from diverse conflict zones made plain this week, must also be a part of our modalities of protection, must also and increasingly be part of how we help our professional protectors help the rest of us to be “each other’s magnitude and bond” when troubles loom.

In this time of multiple stressors, we find more and more people pulling inward, creating moats of sorts around their most intimate places, protecting with a vengeance from threats that seem largely assumed and at times even invented.   We must resist the tendency to allow the rain to drive us to the wrong shelter, a shelter that is either heavily weaponized or cut off from the world we should be prepared to re-enter once the rain passes. The “business” of protection is for all of us, not only in assessing threats but in holding each other up in times of crisis, in times of need, of being each other’s harvest, of ensuring that loss and pain will not be the final word.

As many who serve in peacekeeping operations know well, weapons and other coercive measures are only part of the solution to protection threats. The rest is a common responsibility grounded in our capacity to formulate and uphold, to assess and accompany, to assist those knocked on their backs to recognize that there are stars above, that there is, indeed, hope for peace and health, for sustenance and livelihood once the current misery has been dispelled.

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

10 May

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Accompanied Minors: The Gift of a Mother’s Presence, Dr. Robert Zuber

13 May

Africa

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

The human heart was not designed to beat outside the human body and yet, each child represented just that – a parent’s heart bared, beating forever outside its chest.  Debra Ginsberg

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

It’s not our job to toughen our children up to face a cruel and heartless world. It’s our job to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless.  L.R. Knost

There is much discussion at the UN on a regular basis focused on the horrible circumstances that some children in this world must endure because of the foolishness of older people much like me.  How do we rationalize, inside and outside of policy communities, the fears and abuses that inflict deep scars on the young and that threaten to make in their adult years people more dependent on care – and less able to give it – than could ever be in our best interest?  What should our response be to children when sometimes cruel and heartless life challenges throw a wet blanket over their capacity to alleviate cruelty for others in their latter parts of their life cycle?

But even more common –perhaps less heartless–circumstances also bring pain and uncertainty for the young – the scraped knees, the verbal intimidations at school, the agony of unrequited desire, the moves away from happy homes to cramped and unfamiliar quarters due to declining economic circumstances.   And then there are the children for whom serious disease or accident threatens to snuff out at least some of the potential of lives that have just barely gotten off the ground.

Some of this might sound a bit like “first world problems,” but it also points to a common experience of so many mothers in this world – to kneel at the foot of the metaphorical cross, as it were, able to accompany the pain of a child’s crucifixion but unable to significantly impact its circumstances.  This accompaniment can be both a great gift and an extraordinary act of courage –easing the necessary and often difficult transitions through the mere grace of presence.

We focus much attention – though probably not enough – on the physical pain and psychic disability that life’s conditions inflict on too many children.  But what of the ones who have committed to bear witness to those lives?  What of the mothers who must engage the eyes of children seeking relief from fear and pain that is beyond their singular capacity to deliver?   Indeed, what of the mothers who can do little but watch in sorrow as the world turns their babies into soldiers, or victims of abuse, or hustlers on unpredictable and even unforgiving streets?

These are the sorts of things I think about when sitting in meetings such as last week’s Security Council Arria Formula discussion intended to review policy progress on ending abuses against children in African states, including and especially their vulnerability to recruitment into such “adult” activities as armed conflict.  Such progress is welcome, of course, as we have clearly not done enough to reassure and protect children from powerful, if metaphorical earthquakes followed by what seem to be for too many, a series of connected aftershocks – the bombing that leads to displacement, that leads to food insecurity, that leads to border hostility and even family separation.

Of course these seismic shifts impact more than just children themselves. What toll do they also take on those parents who seek truly to accompany the lives of these children, who have hopes for their children as we have for ours; who have dreams for their children that they will do well to meet only by fraction?  How do we better support those parents – those mothers – whose hearts have been laid bare through their deep connection with those whom they have born, hearts which are so often in grave danger of being broken in two by the endless shaking of their fragile world?

During the Arria Formula discussion on “action plans” to prevent violence against children, the Netherlands smartly noted the growing disregard for international law that creates the backdrop for so many child abuses, which they then rightly identified as threats to international peace and security.  In the same vein, Sweden (which has been a leading member of the Security Council in calling attention to children’s issues) reminded other members that progress on children’s well-being now will significantly enhance our longer-term efforts to sustain the peace.

Fortunately, as Chad and a few other states noted, we have in fact made some progress on ending child recruitment into the “service” of armed violence, freeing more children from such “service” in both government and non-government forces.  We are also doing a better job at disarming children and reintegrating them into society, providing them with educational and psychological opportunities necessary to growth and healing.  This is all good and hopeful, and many parts of the UN system, including UNICEF, the office for Children and Armed Conflict, and the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, should rightly take a bow.

But the circumstances that cause children to plead for comfort and relief from their parents – their mothers – can run far deeper than recruitment.

The accompaniment chosen by so many mothers; a consistent presence through the various stages of child dependency and continuing past the time that we can still deliver those we love from life’s heartaches; this is the special gift and responsibility that we honor on this day.   A commitment by the rest of us to alleviate the miseries of children who must one day assume leadership for our threatened planet is essential for children themselves, but also for those parents– those mothers– who too often are left to suffer in silence the burdens that accrue from a fully exposed heart beholding the pain and longing of children that at times must simply seem too difficult to bear.

More than flowers and cards, more than running a load of laundry and emptying the sink of dishes, many mothers could use a hand – including by all who try to make good policy at places like the United Nations– to do more to calm the tremors that create so much fear and anxiety for so many children, quakes to which those who accompany their journey are compelled to respond but for which there is often no effective or satisfying answer. Today is a good time for all of us to pledge to make a world better fit for children, but especially to honor the mothers who skilfully accompany their young – in all of their joy, pain and anxiety — until that elusive calm is reached.

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