Tag Archives: children

Manger Motivation: A Christmas Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

21 Dec

To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart. Eleanor Roosevelt

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Keep your fears to yourself but share your courage with others. Robert Louis Stevenson

You will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think. Joseph Campbell

Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.  Albert Schweitzer

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader. John Quincy Adams

Leadership is not about a title or a designation. It’s about impact, influence, and inspiration. Robin Sharma.

Last week under the presidency of Slovenia, the UN Security Council held a debate on the topic “Leadership for Peace.” 

Needless to say I was intrigued though recognizing that these terms connected by “and” are not straightforward; indeed they often cover up more light than they reveal.

Peace is ostensibly what Global Action was created to promote and inspire.  Our track record over 20+ years is mixed to be sure.  We haven’t sufficiently inspired people to transcend their own anger and grievance, nor governments to honor their political agreements and commitments; nor groups like ours to self-reflect on how endless fundraising compromises integrity and effectiveness.  Peace, after all, is something we do as much as something we promote.  As Albert Schweitzer intimated above, we have done a better job of advocating for peace than setting a peaceful example, forgetting at times that any success in our chosen  realm requires an intentional, thoughtful blending of both.

And what of leadership?  For many of the delegations present in the Council chamber, the issues which consumed their interest were related to whom the next Secretary-General might be after Antonio Guterres’ two terms in office.  This is not an irrelevant consideration given the current state of the UN and given the complex role that the SG plays in that space; a role as many others have noted, more “secretary” than “general, more implementer of the wishes of the large and powerful states than enforcer of the UN Charter and international law.  The current SG has a bit of “chicken little” in him, constantly pointing out the ways in which international law and the basic rights of civilians have been trampled, climate change threats have  largely been ignored, and conflicts continue to rage under the umbrella of large power interests and in clear violation of the UN Charter. He has surely been in a tough spot. Nevertheless, pleading for change and constructing a system which can inspire, make and sustain change are not synonymous. The next SG must do some of both but the latter tasks constitute a higher bar.

I am in the process of writing a longer piece on leadership as a contribution to a project which we will help unveil in Kosice, Slovakia in February, a project tentatively entitled the Carpathian Leadership Fellows Program and currently being facilitated by our board members Dr. Robert Thomas.  The project will focus on various aspects and incarnations of leadership pertinent to Ukraine and surrounding areas, organized around key questions including, What does leadership entail for post-conflict Ukraine?  What does it require for the various stakeholders – teachers, engineers, clergy, architects, police, merchants, artists, farmers, health workers and more – who will be asked to play prominent roles in helping Ukraine and the region recover from damaged and aging infrastructure, from young people whose education and hope for the future have both been compromised, from people internally and externally displaced by violence waiting more and less patiently to return to their communities?

I will briefly share aspects of this project (and this season) which are of particular importance to me – some relevant to the UN and others more directly relevant to the baby in the manger which is our one and only Christmas point of origin.

On leadership, what the UN cannot easily accommodate, indeed most bureaucracies cannot, is leadership’s organic nature.  Quotation after quotation at this stage of my investigation highlights this aspect of leadership, organic in the sense that it is intimately related to the active consent of those being led and is entirely related to context and condition, requiring administrative skill but also the inspiration that comes from the heart and connects to the heart.  The testimony I have found reflects leadership which inspires us to jump over chasms which seem too daunting; leadership which insists that there is a better part of ourselves yet to be revealed to self and others;  leadership which not only knows what needs to be done but also who needs to do it and how to inspire the energy, trust  and perseverance to rebuild schools and communities, hospitals and transportation; leadership which makes hope more tangible especially for people whose need to believe again in the hope of a better world, hope which has too long been buried under rubble of various forms and not of their own making. 

At the UN, leadership claimed is undermined by several factors including the machinations of the large global powers, the disconnect between policymakers and constituencies, but especially by  the promises which we make through that policy, promises which elevate many more expectations than they satisfy, promises unkept which damage the trust needed for our leadership, such as it is, to inspire broader-based action for the more peaceful, just and prosperous world we claim to want, for our children and grandchildren if not for ourselves.

And this leads me back to the Christmas manger and the inspiration of a child.  There is a lovely and oft-quoted passage from the Talmud, shared by sages as remarkable as Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel, that with the birth of each child, “the world begins anew.”  Indeed, with each child the hope of the world is restored in measures small and large.  Leadership of course should also be about instilling and growing that hope, helping people find a reason to believe that their lives and labors matter beyond fiscal outcomes.  In this way, leadership can reinforce what I understand to be a Christmas call to reach beyond the confines of what we imagine ourselves to be, to demonstrate skill and courage in larger measure in whatever contexts and conditions we find ourselves. 

For me and for many others, it is the child in the manger, the child of meager circumstance and divine significance, who remains my foundational source of hope especially through what for us has been a long season dark and cold in aspects far beyond climate.  For me, this incarnation of hopefulness lies well beyond the province of officialdom and bureaucracy. It points us towards what we often long for but also find elusive, the power and grace to be more than we are now for the people who need our example as they seek to call out more from themselves as well. These bonds of influence and inspiration now seem to be in serious need of repair. The promise and power of Christmas make such repair well within our remit.

Blessings to all in this season,

Bob

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

23 Dec

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The (In)Decencies of Work: A Labor Day Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

4 Sep

Courtesy of Hope Hanafin

Without a constant livelihood, there will be no constant heart.  Ueda Akinari

There are things that keep us alive, there are things we stay alive for.  Abhijit Naskar

Poverty is terror. Having your Social Security threatened is terror. Having your livelihood as an elderly person slowly disappearing with no replenishment is terror. Harry Belafonte

All across this world, especially within the African diaspora, we feel like there is a constant devaluing of our culture and our livelihood. Jidenna

Inequality is a poison that is destroying livelihoods, stripping families of dignity, and splitting communities. Sharan Burrow

The curse of our time, perhaps soon a fatal one, is not idleness, but work not worth doing, done by people who hate it, who do it only because they fear that if they do not they will have no ‘job’, no livelihood, and worse than that, no sense of being useful or needed or worthy.  John Holt

Do your work and I shall know you; do your work and you shall reinforce yourself.   Ralph Waldo Emerson

This is Labor Day Weekend in the US, a time for some at least to honor and assess the conditions of those among us who keep us fed and clothed, who respond to us during health or other crises, who keep our infrastructure repaired and transportation safe allowing some of us at least to experience one final weekend delicacy of these summer months.

But even those of us who are reasonably well maintained in this world, who have enough to eat, dependable shelter, a viable social network and work that has at least some meaning attached to it know that things are not well with labor. In our time.  As social inequalities rise, the gap between those who “work for a living” and those who decide the too-often dehumanizing conditions under which that work happens continues to expand.  More and more people, especially agricultural workers and others in the so-called “service industry,” work at jobs over which they have little or no control and which ensure that workers and their families do no better than “scrape by” from one minimum-wage paycheck to the next, many wondering if their children will be able to break the cycle of what are essentially “fixed income” jobs with little input, limited satisfaction, and with few or no clear pathways to progress.

The UN speaks much of “decent work,” which rightly attempts to identify impediments to labor which is “dignified” in all aspects – dignified in the sense that the conditions under which that labor occurs are safety and participation-oriented, that exploitation of those seeking opportunities including as migrants (forced or voluntary) is duly highlighted and eliminated, that child labor on and off the streets is replaced by educational and health care access, that those who toil in mines and fields have access to the fruits of their own labor, and that dependents are able to reap at least some benefit from the absence (and often bone-weariness as well) of their working parents. 

“Decent” by UN standards is intended as a floor not a ceiling, as well it should.   

As the UN itself is well aware, impediments to decent work are not limited to gaps in our labor laws and immigration policies, as unforgiving as these often can be.  Across the world, more and more people have been forced to abandon homes and local livelihoods, victims of one or more of armed violence, persecution and other human rights abuses, and climate change impacts running the gamut of drought, severe flooding and biodiversity loss. This is “terror” of a sort that most of us who can read and digest posts such as this one can scarcely imagine, the terror of poverty compounded by the loss of livelihoods and community, the loss of much of what keeps people sustained in body and spirit, the loss of that which keeps us alive and that we “stay alive for.”

For all its good efforts towards “decent work” for all, what the UN cannot do, cannot ensure, is labor which is honored and respected by others. The UN (or any other institution of its ilk) cannot ensure that we who are “well off” are willing to recognize in ways concrete the degree to which our own affluence is a product of the labor of others, those often toiling under conditions that might well break most of the rest of us. The UN cannot ensure that we have the courage to look into the eyes of children flooding the streets and markets, children often left to wonder if the grueling uncertainty of lives as vendors or cleaners will ever end.  And in turn, wondering if the worry and fatigue in the eyes of the parents of these children will ever be allowed to transition into lives characterized by more security, more dignity, even more time away from labor to pursue other ends.

I can almost hear the voices chanting that “this is capitalism,” that people have a right to get what they can get for themselves, that people who “made it” are under no obligation to embrace even the most modest principles of fairness and equity.  I’ve heard this many times, often accompanied by expletives which I myself use but would never subject you to in this space.  But let’s also be clear: capitalism does not require disrespect of those who harvest our crops, deliver food or packages in the midst of a pandemic, or leave their warm beds at 3AM to fix problems with water, power or transportation which they did not cause.   It does not require our indifference to those who teach otherwise ignored children or care for the frail and elderly as they approach their own worldly ends.  It does not require us to centralize money as the sole measure of “success” to the exclusion of identity, community and self-worth.  It does not require our ignorance of the needs of people involuntarily on the move, often with children who cannot fathom why parents decided  to leave the “security” of home for the hardship which is now their constant companion.  It does not require the invalidation of the “constant heart” which beats in response to what once was and could still be our “constant livelihoods.”

And as the anxiety around artificial intelligence reaches a fever pitch in our time, including some urgent norm development through the UN, we would do well on this day to consider the degree to which we have dehumanized so much of our labor force aside from the wealthy decisionmakers who have, creatively or nefariously, pushed their way to the top. We are currently in the midst of an avalanche of technological advance, much of it unrequested at community level and most all of it to the benefit of a few. It is disconcerting to me, rightly or otherwise, that we are on the verge of magnifying the impact of non-human intelligence as our own capacity for sound and attentive judgment continues to wane, as more and more of us, as noted recently by Jared Holt, choose to “glue our eyelids shut.”  Equally disconcerting to me is that we threaten livelihoods with technology with only scant effort to accommodate the “terror” of livelihood loss, the consequences from which cannot be alleviated through money alone.

Of my many oft-quotations of Wendell Berry, the one I utilize most often is that we have become cultures full of people “who would rather own a neighbor’s farm than have a neighbor.”  This fools errand lies at the heart of why we need to take this day more seriously, why the reconciliation of our peoples which is more and more up for grabs requires us to better validate both the labor and the laborer. This day and every day, we can and must do more to ensure that our still-serially disrespected workers have options for decency and dignity that they, like the rest of us, need in order to feel “useful and worthy,” including options of greater honor accorded to the work they do that the rest of us, at least in this time, simply cannot do without.

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Death Dancing: Choreographing a Mutually-Assured Future, Dr. Robert Zuber

14 Mar
See the source image
Fritz Eichenberg

If we didn’t move on, who could move in? William Sloane Coffin

Monsters don’t exist. It’s men you should be afraid of.  Niccolò Ammaniti

This is the stuff we’re made of, half indifference and half malice. José Saramago

And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?  Iris Murdoch

 All that could be seen in him was the urge to hurt, and it was, as it always will be, the most dreadful sight in the world.  Susan Cooper

One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient. Charles M. Blow

There is a reprint of the Eichenberg engraving posted above which has been pinned on a bulletin board in my messy home office for over a quarter of a century.

I have it there not because I entirely resonate with Eichenberg’s sometimes jarringly dark worldview but because I do embrace what I understand to be his core message. For much of our history, indeed for too much of our present, a perverse message of “child care” which the engraving seeks to parody has held sway. In this piece, we see a group of older men of grisly countenance joined by children whom they are purported to protect surrounded by the weapons we who work in the security space know all too well — the missiles and tanks, the war planes, the automatic rifles — that have long been used to threaten and intimidate, an expensive blanket of weaponized “protection” more likely to raise anxiety through the metaphorical roof than offer reassurance.

The children in the engraving are not being comforted so much as being egged on by grotesque caricatures of “caring” adults. One child is getting a ride in a tank; another is fondling a missile; a third is taking target practice on a hanging human figure cheered on by one of the adults. Others are merely seen pointing guns at others in the room, each with an older “mentor” ensuring proper technique, reinforcing the notion that the activities in this room are “normal,” that the children should become as comfortable, even reassured, around this arsenal of death as the determined and mostly uniformed adults have come to be.

Of course, this “comfort,” passed on from generation to generation has a price. Indeed, at times a very high price. I was intrigued and saddened this week by a story I was tipped off to about the F-35 fighter jet program in the US, a program that, according to The Hill, is likely to fully cost out at $1.7 Trillion. Yes, with a T. It is a dangerous world indeed and military planners are surely losing sleep trying to manage conflict threats that our skilled negotiators and mediators have not yet figured out how to mitigate, let alone resolve. But this weapon with its record-setting price tag and uncertain strategic value represents flawed decision-making that might even give the Eichenberg figures pause.

At a time when a pandemic has stripped local economies of trillions of dollars; at at time when a warming climate threatens both our biodiversity and our agriculture; at a time when trust among peoples in each other and in their institutions of governance is waning; at a time when a bevy of new security threats and conflict triggers cannot be solved through conventional military applications no matter the cost or technological sophistication; there is an urgency — especially in these moments — to rethink our security investments, to do more than merely pass on our weapons-related addictions to another generation as we might pass on an old vehicle or pocket watch.

The UN is figuring out the multiple ways in which armed conflict and its weapons are both a cause and consequence of so much misery in our world. Thanks in part to the persistence of a string of smart, vocal, elected Security Council members, the implications for security from still-insufficiently addressed climate change have become more and more apparent. And in the week just passed, a US-organized debate on famine and food security in the Security Council as will as a Swiss-chaired report launch from the Open Ended Working Group on “developments in the field of information and telecommunications in the context of international security” reminded us once again of the multiplying dangers we now face — dangers for which our omnipresent weapons are still in some quarters, by some flawed logic, seen as a solution.

There was much good discussion in the food security debate, including from both India’s Ambassador and the World Food Programme’s ED David Beasley, who reminded delegations that humanitarian assistance, while essential, is not a solution to grave food insecurity; rather it is the resolution of armed conflict. This point was taken up as well by Council members such as Niger and Mexico which are particularly vulnerable to the effects of the trafficking in and the still-under-regulated trading in weapons. Moreover, all members seemed in sync with the simple point made by SG Guterres that “if you don’t feed people, you feed conflict.”  

In another UN chamber, the cyber-report (and accompanying discussion) made several important points, including that “increasing connectivity and reliance on ICTs without accompanying measures to ensure ICT security can bring unintended risks, making societies more vulnerable to malicious ICT activities. While not named as such in the report, activities that should be mentioned under this rubric include the increasing ability of hackers to disrupt the functioning of all manner of civilian and military infrastructure including, as we saw earlier this year in the US, the safety and security of our most dangerous weapons.

Lamentably, some of the member states that ostensibly carry the flag for a more human security-centered approach, that are the most rhetorically engaged regarding our ever-evolving security responsibilities, continue to fuel conflict back-door through their abundant arms sales, their disproportionate emissions, their self-serving trade agreements, their reluctance to commit fully to multilateral agreements until it has been clearly determined that national interests are also served. Or at least those “national interests” as determined exclusively by national leadership. In this regard, we were sad to note, with OXFAM executive director Bucher, the number of states which mourn food insecurity but also make it more likely through their incessant acquisition of weapons. In this same vein, it was a bit jarring to hear the UK minister reject those states that, in his view, tend to see other human beings as “insignificant” while his government continues to sell weapons to most all who seek them, including to conflict-compromised Saudi Arabia.

While monitoring these discussion on the impacts of famine and malicious cyber actors on peace and security, we were reminded that one of the challenges that has eluded successful resolution for many years and which continues into the present is related to establishing the full costs of armed conflict. How do we “price out” misery in places like Yemen and South Sudan? How do we factor in costs related to trafficked and traded weapons let alone the damage they inflict on local education and agriculture? How do we calculate the costs of the fear that keeps people prisoners in their own homes or on the move in search of safer domiciles? How do we assess the costs from generations whose learning has been jeopardized or whose food and health deprivations are almost certain to require long-term care assuming their survival in the first place? And how do we factor the costs associated with depleted fish stocks and bee populations, of conflict-inducing discriminations of the basis of race, gender or culture, or of the increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity malfeasance that puts all of our civilian and military infrastructure at direct risk?

These are not hypothetical accounting issues. We are now modernizing nuclear weapons and planning to put some of our most deadly armaments in space under “dual use” cover, all at great expense in resources no longer available to to support vaccinations or habitat restoration, small farmers or safer, healthier schools. We are willing to spend trillions on a fighter plane with no obvious strategic advantage but balk at providing livable wages for workers or taking better care of the immigrant communities without which most “developed” economies would collapse. We want children in school but then tolerate the disincentives that lead many to leave school behind for dangerous jobs, for forced marriage, even for recruitment into armed groups.

And still our oceans fill with plastic, our children face depression from a loss of childhood, our communities live in fear of those who brandish trafficked weapons, our civilian and military infrastructure remains vulnerable to malicious attack, our children living in conflict zones face starvation, the consequences of which will linger even if food provisions ultimately arrive in time to keep their frail bodies alive.

This and more constitutes our own “dance of death,” movements (and choices) more complex than those engaged around Eichenberg’s militarized table, but which are more clearly recognizable in our own time. We know that weapons are not the solution to our endless political disagreements, our climate crisis, our biodiversity loss, our mass displacements, our pandemics now and to come, our increasingly vulnerable infrastructure. And yet we continue to make weapons of increasing sophistication, make them for recipients that don’t need them and probably shouldn’t have them, weapons that promise much more ruin than security, weapons which drain our national accounts for no clear human purpose. Our dance card continues to call for weapons. And so we build, and then build some more.

In this season of Lent for those of Christian persuasion, the stark rhythms of betrayal and loyalty, death and rebirth, are just some of the themes in play. Especially for those of us for whom the end is much closer than the beginning, death in this life is simply part of the deal, a deal which requires all of us to eventually “move on” such that others can “move in,,” such that others can take the lead and share their most creative impulses, can try their hand at solving the problems which generations before them left sitting on the table, can change the program such that we spend more time dancing for health and life and less time dancing for malice and indifference.

But their own dance card might well be too difficult to pull off unless we who are still here can choreograph the world as it is now to become less weaponized and intimidating, to abate our “urge to hurt” and demonstrate more empathy and understanding beyond our now pandemic-challenged rhetoric. The question for the international community is not whether we die, but whether or not we kill ourselves off through malfeasance or indifference, through grossly misplaced spending priorities and the failure to relinquish significant portions of national interest to solve life-or-death problems which, as the UN rightly notes on a regular basis, cannot be solved by any state alone.

Death may be inevitable. This current, complex iteration of our “deadly dance” need not be.

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Attitude Adjustment: A Thanksgiving Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

22 Nov
Manage Risk to Stay Safe for COVID Thanksgiving

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Generation C: Minding the Catastrophes Encircling our Children’s Lives, Dr. Robert Zuber

9 Aug

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It was like we had known all along that the sky was going to fall and then it fell and we pretended to be surprised. Elin Hilderbrand

Sometimes catastrophes split you in half and even if all the pieces are there, they might not ever fit back together.  Julie Murphy

Sooner or later the world comes to its senses, but oh the damage that has been done.  John Kramer

Some days punch us in the gut so hard it seems we can feel the whole universe gasp with despair.  Curtis Tyrone Jones

It’s a catastrophe to be without a voice.  E.B. White

The mind couldn’t think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial.  Neal Stephenson

One of the pitfalls of this policy business is that we are now drowning in the “crises” that we are tasked to identify.  Everywhere you turn, there is one more manifestation of our lack of solidarity with each other, another blow to the views maintained by some (us included) that human beings are still capable of choosing life over death, growth over destruction, cooperation over nationalism and unchecked narcissism.  And yet there are those times when we simply do not treat our crises with sufficient urgency, seemingly more worried about our talking points or funding streams than actually solving the problems most directly relevant to our roles and mandates.

Regardless, it was difficult for any of us to miss the urgency embedded in this week of many catastrophes just ended.  For the past few days, we have been beset by some stark and painful images, some a clear consequence of human neglect but also a harbinger of a future that we are collectively not approaching well at present, one that cannot offer much comfort either to children or to those tasked with guiding and educating them.

In case you were taking a vacation this week from the news to concentrate on family or “romp through the trivial,” allow me to remind you of some of what we have done to ourselves in this most recent time.   We have now reached an ominous threshold of 20 million known COVID infections worldwide – 5 million in the US alone – with most medical experts fearing that the number of actual cases (and spreaders) is considerably larger than reported.  At the same time, a large oil tanker leak off the coast of Mauritius continues to directly threaten both the complex biodiversity of the country and the livelihoods of its people.  In addition, many of you have surely seen images of the Beirut port blast that brought devastation to an entire city, worsening an already tenuous economic situation and calling thousands into the streets to both mourn their losses and seek explanation and accountability from and for those whose negligence allowed this to happen. There was also some sad reporting about the collapse of the ice shelf on Canada’s Ellesmere Island, a collapse larger in area than the island of Manhattan and yet another blow to, among other things, the stability of the Arctic and its multiple inhabitants. And then there were the ubiquitous images of nuclear fireballs both from the testing we now seem determined to resume and from the highly-dubious uses of these weapons75 years ago on residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, weapons which our currently (and foolishly) modernizing arsenals dwarf by comparison.

The lessons that we can take from this week’s gallery of disturbing images are ones we have mostly learned already and then blithely discarded.   That our sky in some sense is falling is not news to most.  That we continue to accept these “punches in the gut,” that we continue to allow crises to break us apart with little or no strategy for putting the pieces back together again, this is symptomatic of something insidious inside ourselves. This goes beyond a failure of technique to a failure of stewardship; the courage to ensure that, at a most fundamental level, we are determined to bequeath to our children a planet that can sustain life, ensure equitable access to water and other essential resources, and provide opportunity for creative livelihoods that are less about destroying competitors and more about contributing as we are able to the well-being of the global commons.

Even before COVID, we have collectively been losing ground on sustainable development goals from food security to climate health.  But COVID has pushed even our development successes to the margins, including our goals for education.  Indeed, one of the more disquieting statements of the week was issued by UN Secretary-General Guterres, who noted that 90% of the world’s school-aged children have had their education disrupted by COVID, a catastrophe for a generation that will need all their wits about them if they are to manage, let alone thrive, in the (needlessly) melting, food insecure, hostile environment we are in danger of leaving to them.

In his statement (click here) the SG makes an urgent plea for governments to do what they can and all that they can to get children back in school and to properly fund their educational infrastructure.   But he also recognizes, as do many in the US (such as my longtime friend and colleague Dr. John Thompson) now weighing in on how to reopen schools in the midst of a pandemic, that to some considerable degree the still-potent virus — and what Thompson describes as our struggle to put “public health over ideology” — are now dictating educational outcomes for many millions of children. A frightening percentage of such children now run the risk of permanent exclusion from formal schooling and other educational opportunity.  Such exclusion will only increase inequalities and ensure that the skills and voices of millions needed to bring this stubbornly self-destructive world to heel will remain missing in action.

If this is not a catastrophe in early formation, I don’t know what is.

There are so many dimensions to this educational threat that require attention now:  parents desperate to find work and who cannot adequately attend to their jobs and the safety of children marooned from classrooms; curricula which increasingly exposes both infrastructure disparities and the still-large swaths of our digital divide;  children who we are learning now can both spread COVID and become victim to some of its most serious health consequences; teachers who (much like our front-line health care workers) are somehow expected to “take one for the team” as ideological divides harden and classrooms (like most every other public space) become petri dishes for evolving manifestations of pandemic threat; students who desperately need in-person peer interaction as they begin the long, complex psychological separation from their parents; children whose shelter-in-place attentions are now directed largely towards the screens that already play an outsized role in value and worldview formation.

Guterres sees within the confines of this pandemic an opportunity to “reimagine education” and we welcome that call so long as the fruits of reimagining don’t themselves widen gaps between children with access options and children without.  If indeed education is to remain viable as a “great equalizer,” we do need to reach more children with formal and informal opportunity, including access to digital resources.  We do need to prioritize educational funding as we consider how best to mitigate an otherwise crisis-riddled future.  And we do need to take better care of our educators, primarily but not exclusively in the formal sector, remembering that it is not the task of teachers to solve in any isolation the vast social problems which they confront daily but did not themselves create.   It is their task, at least in our view, to do what they can to instill hope in the future and to impart and nurture the skills that have the best chance of making that hope sustainable.

And while we are at this reimagining business, we should take a hard look at what we teach not only how we teach.  In this aggrieved and distracted time, when kids are increasingly more comfortable in cyber realities than out in the crisis-driven mess we have made for ourselves, it is important that teachers take a stand against both stifling cynicism and blinding ideology.  The world is still worth knowing; is still receptive to possibility and positive change; still harbors hope of greater fairness and solidarity between cultures and among diverse life forms, still has beauty to convey around nearly every bend. We need the eyes of children to remain open to wonder and possibility especially at times like these when both seem to be at a premium.

And we need to help students cultivate what the psychologist Erich Fromm called a “scientific attitude,” not so much a reverence for the “techniques” of science but a mindset that refuses to accept on faith conclusions for which there is clear conflicting evidence; a mindset that prioritizes a larger role for objectivity and realism; one that requires us to see the world as it is as the precondition for any life-enhancing modifications; one that cultivates what Fromm saw as the healthiest formula going forward – humility towards the facts of the world and a renunciation of “all hopes of omnipotence and omniscience.”

As hard as it sometimes is to imagine, our damage-ravaged societies will eventually come to their senses. The question is how much catastrophic damage we are willing to inflict on the aspirations of and prospects for “Generation C” until that blessed day finally arrives?

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Charter School: Recovering the UN’s Larger Purpose, Dr. Robert Zuber

28 Jun

Eliasson and WHD

Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. Abraham Joshua Heschel

We all marvel at headlines and highlight reels. But we rarely discuss the marks and scars and bruises that come with breaking through glass ceilings. Elaine Welteroth

It’s easy to get discouraged about the marathon that you are only a fifth of the way through. Josh Hatcher

Tradition is a good gift intended to guard the best gifts. Edith Schaeffer

Today, we are divorcing the past and marrying the present. Today, we are divorcing resentment and marrying forgiveness. Today, we are divorcing indifference and marrying love.   Kamand Kojouri

As we fail our children, we fail our future. Henrietta Fore

Earlier this week, a European journalist whose work I greatly respect and who covers the United Nations as a regular part of his beat, wrote me to ask about how I was reacting to the UN’s COVID-restricted 75th Charter anniversary commemorations.

His own view, which I am mostly paraphrasing, is that multilateralism is in grave danger, that the UN now matters to fewer people than the UN itself imagines, and that the current round of introspective celebrations are unlikely to change much in the world at large.  There is reason to take these laments seriously beyond the fact that seasoned journalists have heard enough “spin” in their professional careers to render them suspicious of any claims of progress or reform, either at individual or institutional level.

The UN on VTC did in fact have a busy though not altogether reassuring week, culminating in Friday’s commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the signing of the UN Charter, a document more referenced than read; one which lays out normative and procedural guidelines for the international community despite the fact that too-many members of that community, including at times its most powerful members, have treated the Charter with more indifference than reverence. Such indifference was manifest in two of the most challenging discussions of the UN week, both in the Security Council, one on the Middle East and the other on Children in Armed Conflict.

The first of these focused on the imminent threat by Israel to annex portions of what are widely recognized as Palestinian lands in the West Bank, a move sure to increase regional instability, a move roundly criticized by Council members (other than the US), Arab states and UN Special Coordinator Mladenov and which was justified by Israel based on “biblical claims” rather than on Charter values. Indeed, this move towards annexation was described by South Africa as simply the logical next step in a long sequence of illegal settlement activity which the Security Council has resolved to end but has taken few concrete steps to do so. As the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Palestine noted at this same meeting, if the Council had been responsible all along in implementing its own resolutions, peace in the region would likely “already be a reality.”

And then there was the discussion on Children and Armed Conflict, a thematic obligation of the Council that has long-attracted considerable interest and resources from other parts of the UN system. And yet, as Belgium (a leader on this issue) lamented during this past week’s session, “we have little to celebrate.”   Despite what our often our best efforts, abuses committed against children continue to rise in number.  The “annex” to the Secretary-General’s annual report focused on states that commit or enable such abuses continues to face accusations (and not without merit) that its reporting is “politicized.”   And the ultimate solution to what UNICEF director Fore referred to as the vulnerabilities of children to conflicts “completely beyond their control” is (as also noted by Indonesia and others) the elimination of armed conflict itself.  That the Council cannot even agree to support the Secretary-General’s call for a “global cease fire” is cause for considerable consternation regarding its ability  (and that of the UN as a whole) to, as Fore put it, return to children “what has cruelly been taken from them by conflict.”

Neither impending annexation nor the pervasive assault on our common future represented by conflict-related abuses of children were directly mentioned during Friday’s commemoration of the signing of the UN Charter. But it was clear that speakers understood at some level that the UN system is suffering from wounds that are not all about COVID-19 or the unwillingness of the largest powers (and their allies) to subsume their national interest to the global interest.

Indeed, some of what ails the UN is both broad-based and self-inflicted, owing in part to the fact that, much like in our personal lives, strengths and weaknesses often emerge from a similar source. As the president of the General Assembly rightly noted on Friday, we must “bring into the UN the many voices previously excluded from global policy.” And indeed the UN’s 75th year has been characterized by “global conversations” orchestrated by the UN and designed to bring more of the aspirations and expectations of the global community to the attention of diplomats and UN officials. And yet, these “voices” are themselves not often sufficiently representative, voices that are linguistically-sophisticated, well-educated and often attached to large NGO interests, voices that make for good video but don’t necessarily seal the deal in terms of how the UN bubble takes stock of those persons most in danger of “being left behind.”

And then there was the typically excellent presentation by Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed who acknowledged that people often don’t understand what the UN does, the multiple ways in which it addresses human need and builds consensus for change.   But the flip side of this is that so much of the UN’s often-remarkable humanitarian activity is in response to armed violence which could have been but was not prevented, violence which the Security Council is mandated to address but which is dependent on political will and national priorities largely generated in national capitals rather than around the Council oval itself, priorities too often tone-deaf to the cries of the frightened and incapacitated.

Moreover, while an effective consensus on global policy can be the conduit to an equally effective implementation, such consensus can easily and often become an end in itself, a job half-finished that is treated as a completed product, as though resolution language alone can build political determination to address the multiple challenges that now literally threaten our common future, as though wanting change and making change are cut from the same cloth. As DSG Mohammed herself recognized during the Charter commemoration, we need to build consensus “but we need consensus with ambition,” consensus that leads to preventive or protective actions far beyond the mere acknowledgment of global problems which, in many instances are already inflaming unmanageable quantities of anxiety and discouragement.

We have long understood that assessments of persons and institutions are largely a function of the level of expectations we have of them. And it may be the case that in striving to “preserve multilateralism” we are in danger of raising expectations beyond capacity, that we now risk making more promises that we can likely keep and that are merely to be heaped on top of expectations already raised and then disappointed. Still it is right for the UN to seek to raise its levels of ambition, and there is evidence in areas from peacekeeping to food security that the UN is committed to doing just that, is determined to actively promote a human security framework that, as former DSG Jan Eliasson noted on Friday, is less about the endless acquisition of weapons and more about shrinking inequalities, increasing health care access and healing our climate.

This and more is surely worthy of celebration, an acknowledgement of progress made, problems fixed and lives extended. And indeed a case could be made — including in my own life — that we don’t actually celebrate enough. But a secure future for our children will require more than celebrations, more than resolutions, more than high sounding words and promises that appear emptier from the outside than those who make them imagine them to be. The key here, I am convinced, is less about infusions of resources (our current institutional obsession) and more about infusions of active reverence – reverence for the high calling we have chosen and assumed, a calling that stretches beyond the borders of state and NGO mandates, a calling which requires us to examine the ideas, structures, traditions and working methods to which we have long been betrothed and “divorce” those which are no longer worth “guarding,” those which impede and distract, which convert urgency into indifference and which allow us to believe that we have crossed the finish line of a marathon that in fact has many kilometers yet to go.

At this precarious moment with “scars and bruises” to spare and expectations running ahead of will and capacity, we would do well to recapture some of that “reverence and appreciation” which are the hallmark of genuine celebrations. These are the attributes – more than money, more than political resolutions, more than ageing multilateral structures, perhaps even as much as the grand Charter values and traditions still worthy of preservation and respect –which will allow us to push through this treacherous, angry, divided, skeptical moment in our history.

Moreover, the presence of such attributes may ultimately determine whether or not, at the end of this current bottleneck of human possibility, we will have failed our future.

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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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Scar Face:  Reconciling the Wounds we Barely Acknowledge, Dr. Robert Zuber

24 Nov

Stolen 2

I talk to my patients, to my neighbors and colleagues–Jews, Arabs–and I find out they feel as I do: we are more similar than we are different, and we are all fed up with the violence. Izzeldin Abuelaish

Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won’t be because of great statesmen or churches or organizations like this one. It’ll be because people have changed.  Kazuo Ishiguro

Propensities and principles must be reconciled by some means.  Charlotte Brontë

We must recognize before we can reconcile–especially in instances where we are too blinded by privilege, comfort, and tradition to even notice that reconciliation is needed.  Josh Larsen

I want to live in a neighborhood where people don’t shoot first, don’t sue first, where people are Storycatchers willing to discover in strangers the mirror of themselves. Christina Baldwin

Our week at the UN had more than its share of dramatic events, some of that courtesy of the decision by the US government to disengage the authority of international law and Security Council resolutions from Israel’s settlement expansion.   The long-term implications of this decision are unclear, especially given the high levels of political turmoil in Israel at present, but this represents another (by no means unique) “propensity” by large powers to distance themselves from the legal principles and obligations they seek to impose on others.

Other events were more hopeful, including move-the-pile discussions on peacebuilding reform and a Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone for the Middle East, tentative progress on negotiated settlements for Syria and Yemen, and still-early efforts to hold Myanmar accountable in international courts for massive abuses perpetrated against the Rohingya.  There was even an event on the ways in which the stigma and lack of health-related resources for menstruation continue to negatively impact school attendance by girls in some global regions.

This last event was linked to a major celebration under the auspices of the General Assembly of the 30th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.  The Convention boasts the largest number of state ratifications of any UN agreement and, over two days, these same states were eager to share the ways in which they have worked to improve conditions for children and, with a bit less enthusiasm, the urgent commitments to children yet to be fulfilled.

Working on the Convention in its infancy, helping in my own small way to create a “world fit for children” was, for me and others, the “gateway” to a longer-term multilateral involvement.   The many children who graced us with their presence this week, some of whom represented their national governments at the podium, reminded us all of the road remaining to be traveled, the decisions and indecisions taking place inside institutions like the United Nations that are not as child-friendly as we might imagine, that are still too much about our own privileges and protocols and not enough about the precarious legacies we have bequeathed to so many young people. We still turn our gaze away from the scars children bear (as highlighted by Azerbaijan) that never should have been inflicted, the search for “peaceful environments” (as a child from Iraq shared) that too often come up empty, our oft-violent and melting planet which will likely occupy too much of their own creative bandwidth going forward.  We are simply too far still from what ought to be (as Portugal stated) something we should all be able to agree on, making a world of peace and justice for children “without tears.”

This 30th anniversary event (with a special appearance by David Beckham) followed by a day a debate on “reconciliation” in the Security Council organized by current president United Kingdom. This event called attention to what South Africa urged as “an enabling environment” for reconciliation that moves along the path between disclosure and punishment and that helps to ensure, as Belgium and others implored, as much of a guarantee as we can muster that conflict once halted will not be allowed to return.

The Secretary General was one of the briefers and was on point in his insistence that while there is no peace without justice, “there is no justice without truth.”  In this context, the SG highlighted the “truth” about the times we are living in and how we managed to collectively arrive at the places we now experience, places of dissonance and distrust, of compromised policy courtesy of both national interest and multilateral “consensus.”  Despite the tools which the SG has sought to improve or bring online, even in this precarious funding environment  — tools such as special political missions, mediation resources, a revamped resident coordinator system and increases in funding for peacebuilding activities – our ability to prevent conflict and to walk the fine line highlighted by South Africa and others linking truth-telling and accountability in situations where conflict prevention proved impossible is all still a work in progress.

Peru was among the Council members highlighting the potential, positive impact of preventive diplomacy on our collective reconciliation burdens, while Indonesia suggested that visible, concrete “peace dividends” could make post-conflict reconciliation more successful.  Beyond the Council members themselves, Kenya promoted the linkage between social and political inclusiveness and successful reconciliation, a theme also taken up by Switzerland which reminded delegates that “dialogue among political elites alone” cannot sustain peace or bring reconciliation.  One of the best lines that we heard all week was from Namibia, whose Ambassador suggested during Monday’s debate that “peace must be boring” given all of the unresolved violence that remains in the world, violence which this Council is mandated to address and towards such resolutions urgent reconciliation measures are called for.

All things considered, this debate was a good start on a subject that ultimately requires considerably more recognition and thoughtfulness.  As one of the civil society briefers noted, one of the requirements of reconciliation is the “re-humanizing” of former enemies.  But, to paraphrase the SG, the times we are living in are characterized by political polarization and massive trust deficits, people who are both “fed up” with the violence that surrounds them but also tired of the “blindness” of much privilege, including a “blindness” to the urgent need for “re-humanizing” in many social and political contexts well beyond the post-conflict dynamic.

Surely there is need for reconciliation in Yemen and Syria, in Myanmar and Cameroon, in South Sudan and Bolivia, in China and the UK.   But the demand for effective reconciliation cannot – must not – be confined to outsized conflicts and political divisions, gross abuses of human rights and existential threats to climate health.   The Security Council has its own internal reconciliation to effect as do many of its governments back in capital, the lack of which leads to conflicts unresolved or dragged through unseemly political deadlocks.  The UN writ large has its own reconciliation to effect in the form of promises made and not kept to constituents who lack viable alternatives for redress and relief.  Communities that are increasingly politically or ethnically polarized have their own reconciliation impediments; people just like us willing to believe, often without evidence, that we “know” the motives of our adversaries. People like us who resolutely fail to see the mirror images of our neighbors in ourselves. People like us who exist in social or policy bubbles that allow us to believe that reconciliation is the task of “someone else,” someone not us.  People like us who are too quick to jump to conclusions more than commitments, who listen too little and talk too much, who “write off” people who don’t toe our ideological lines.  All of this is understandable, but not to our credit and likely not of much value in achieving the future we say we want.

And what of the children who graced us this week let alone the children who endure “cold nights” and whose futures have already been compromised by factors such as unrelenting poverty, persistent conflict and tepid responses to climate threats?   How do we reconcile with these children?  How do we explain to them what we’ve done, how we’ve exercised our authority, and why they have so often been left to fend for themselves? How do we help heal their scars and then together with them build a future that is truly “fit” both for current generations and their progeny to come?

These are hard conversations, harder than we might acknowledge, harder than we might even have the stomach for.  But I’m convinced that if we can find the words and deeds to convince children that we have, in truth, amended our “adult” ways, we will be that much closer to helping the larger world reconcile its own disagreements, renounce its addictions to future-threatening items such as weapons and plastics, and plug the still-formidable gaps that separate our propensities from our principles.

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Future Shock: Returning What We’ve Stolen from Children, Dr. Robert Zuber

2 Jun

Stolen 3

Misfortune threshes our souls as a flail threshes wheat, and the lightest parts of ourselves are scattered to the wind.  Danielle Teller

In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us, not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss. John Irving

He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.  Cormac McCarthy

I hate that I stopped believing in things I didn’t even know were matters of belief, like justice and fairness. Or honesty. Or the promises people make to each other. Sue Halpern

My hearts ached with a pain I could not describe. I wondered if I were dying. I felt not sadness. I felt pity. For myself. For us all. We were children no longer. And we never would be again.  K. A. Applegate

This past Friday near the UN, John Burroughs kindly lent us his office patio for what has in the past year become a bit of a custom for us – welcoming a gathering of interns from the organizations with whom we once shared office space and with whom we still work.

Amidst the refreshments in a welcoming space shrouded in green just a few minutes walk from the UN, this gathering is pitched as an opportunity to make some acquaintances and perhaps even friends, but also to ponder “what just happened” at a UN which doesn’t always make the best first impression (or second for that matter) but which challenges our minds, hearts and patience literally by the hour.

This week, various members of our patio group took on policy options in diverse UN conference rooms – from peacekeeping in Somalia and the impact of plundered natural resources on international peace and security to the endless challenge associate with financing for development and the ability of UN managers to take a firm stand on sexual exploitation and abuse. Some also attended an extraordinary event this week hosted by Norway and Jordan focused on violence from “right wing terrorism,” and the often-shocking levels of weaponry and internet space enabling this largely unchecked threat.

All of this is important at multiple policy levels and was occasionally quite eye-opening for the interns.  And some of these experiences were raised during our patio time.   But the interesting parts were less about what the UN was doing and more about how it was doing it, the impressions that these people, some of whom had been in the building less than a week, felt initially about their presence in this center of global governance. Was it different than they imagined?  And did this “difference” make them more or less hopeful for the future of the planet?

For many it WAS different than they imagined in several ways, small and large: being relegated to the far reaches of conference rooms; having to enter the main building with the tourists rather than with the officials; watching diplomats reading prepared statements that had most all passion and urgency wrung out of them; a lack of apologies for policy mis-steps or even acknowledgements of mistakes made or valid points made by others; long meetings that resulted neither in specific actions nor even in a consensus to act that would be more about the promise of change than the promise of lunch.

No, the UN does not seem to make these interns particularly more hopeful about their future, at least not at this early stage of their engagement. Of course, what they conclude now will modify over time. They will become better “adjusted” to the way the UN does its business, the subtleties of diplomacy and diplomatic language that often result in meaningful (if not always timely or sufficient) movement on pressing global issues.

Hopefully, they will also cultivate their own means of feed-back to the UN system of which they are now a part,  a system that continues to grant access and privilege, albeit at times grudgingly, to young people who have (like myself and most of the rest of us) not “earned” it in any substantive sense.  We are where we are, not because we are so intelligent, or brave, or wise, or determined, but because (as I like to say) we’ve collectively been around so long they’ve mostly forgotten we don’t completely belong.

But belong we still do and, like it or not, the system of which we are now a part has done little to confront state leadership that, as the remarkable youth “messenger” Greta Thunberg says often, has literally “stolen our childhood,”  has refused to make the changes drastically or quickly enough to stave off the longer-term prospect of a climate-related extinction, let along the poverty, discrimination and violence that jeopardize millions of children in the shorter term.  The faces of too many of today’s children – locked in cages, trapped under rubble, suffering in the harvest fields, at risk of violence while simply seeking water or firewood – are not the faces around our patio table.  Ours are the faces of privilege, faces with “adult” opportunities to add voice to policy at its global center, to insist (if only they will) that the damage done to those who will co-inherit a planet drowning in plastic and mistrust, melting away our ice caps and eroding our resolve to promote justice and honor our promises, can and must come to a stop.  We can’t afford to further jeopardize those who might well ascend to leadership in societies now pushing away from each other, erecting more barriers than we can dismantle and calling very much into question the cooperative spirit that is our best hope for change.

Of all the UN-related voices that come to us through twitter, email and other online sources, perhaps my favorite comes courtesy of Marta Santos Pais, the Special Representative on Violence against Children.  Despite the enormity of her assigned duties, despite the willingness of too much of the international community to use children’s lives as geo-political pawns which are then justified in the name of dubious ethnic “supremacies” or of erstwhile larger global visions that turn out to be merely mean and petty, Pais soldiers on.  And she does so while regularly sharing the most hopeful photos of children from diverse and often challenged backgrounds, children mostly seen smiling, holding hands and sharing portions of the “lighter side” of themselves, children waving their arms playfully from the classrooms that offer them another way forward, children peering longingly or quizzically into the camera lens as though ready to whisper to anyone close enough to hear, “we need a chance too.”

Indeed they do.  We live in a time which (wrongly in my view) seeks to extend childhood for the mostly-privileged almost into middle-age — putting off the “pity” associated with an inevitable and largely irreversible casting aside of childish ways — while our policies impose bewildering amounts of pain and deprivation on other children that they will do well to heal, even in part.   In looking around the patio table at the remarkable people assembled there, I recognize in them some of what I don’t recognize often enough in their peers (or my own for that matter) – the willingness to take a deep and hopeful breath, to accept the responsibility associated with their training and privilege, to renounce residual vestiges of cynicism even as unresolved shocks to our future multiply, and to find common cause with those (like Greta) younger than themselves who are (and not without cause) quickly losing patience with the rest of us.

It is past time to acknowledge what our greed and indifference have been stealing from our children and pledge to return to them what was implicitly promised when we brought them into this world.

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