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Reviving Respect for Nurses and their Caregiving Colleagues, Sarah Sicari

Editor’s Note: Psychiatric Nurse Sarah Sicari was a former intern in our joint office and was a keen observer of both UN policy and of who and how respect is conveyed for contributions and sacrifices made for others. In this short piece, she calls attention to an important truth about the women and men who continue to serve on the frontlines of medical care, including caring for many thousands still getting COVID-19, still dying alone, in some cases still angry that a disease they might have once dismissed is now calling for their lives. We aren’t banging pots and pans any longer, but the nurses who attend to our fragile health and crumbling sanity still deserve our highest respect. The pandemic may be “over” for some of us, but not for nurses. Their skills and energies are as essential as ever and, in too many instances, continue to be stretched to their breaking point.

This past week was nurse’s week, and there has barely been a whimper of acknowledgement, especially considering the trauma we have faced during the pandemic. Nurses are interesting characters to be sure. I personally have felt a love-hate relationship with the profession since I started, and I started officially on March 2020 as a new graduate nurse. We are either ignored or hailed as angels who are subservient to everyone including our patients; or sometimes we are even seen as fascists who like to have control over our patients (check out any out-of-touch youtuber these days and their opinions on nurses). The thing with nursing is, it is a mixed bag. We are humans who have all experienced immense trauma with COVID 19. It is still hard to say to this day what it was like in March of 2020 and then the following winter wave and then delta and then omicron. It felt like punch after punch after punch with no relief in sight. One article I came across mentioned a nurse who left during the middle of his shift and never came back and was never seen again- perhaps he committed suicide. No one wants to talk about our trauma, and I often wonder why that is? Is it because we are your moms, your sisters, your neighbors, your brothers and fathers? Is it because no one really care what nurses have to say or what we have been through?

During the first wave of COVID the only person who stood with your dying family member was the nurse. Doctors would come in but then were able to quickly leave the room, barking orders at nurses who inevitably stayed at the patient’s bedside for nearly 12 hours straight. As I reflect on nurse’s week, I believe that what I would like to hear and my fellow oddball nurses, would be one of appreciation on a universal and grander scale, from the president to my neighbors. The best way to show appreciation is for all nurse’s student loans to be cancelled. Some of us may have questionable views but that is not all nurses and despite the difference from person and person and the politics, nurses went through an immense trauma that only other nurses can fully appreciate and understand. I stand by my colleagues, and I hope that during this nurse’s week others will stand by them along with me.

Tags: COVID-19, nurses, Trauma

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Brave Heart: A Mindset for Sustainable Development, Dr. Robert Zuber

11 Jul

Solidarity isn’t merely a task, it is a pleasure and the best assurance of security. Erich Fromm

Sometimes it is nothing more than gritting your teeth through pain, and the work of every day, the slow walk toward a better life. Veronica Roth

For if they come for you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night. James Baldwin

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare. Mark Twain

Our minds must be as ready to move as capital is, to trace its paths and to imagine alternative destinations. Chandra Talpade Mohanty

The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls. Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. Richard Rorty

In a week that witnessed renewals of armed violence, assassination attempts and successes, and heat excesses oozing from virtually every pore of the earth’s membrane, the UN met in the context of the High Level Political Forum (HLPF) to consider a way forward on our lagging sustainable development (SDG) commitments.

In largely virtual formats, figures of global prominence from government, private investment houses, universities and a bevy of civil society organizations shared their sense of what was possible to achieve now given a world still struggling with COVID-19 variants and vaccine inequities. Despite the constraints imposed by time and (occasionally) technology, several plenary discussions and (especially) side events made substantial contributions to our search for a common, viable way forward on issues from poverty and governance to food security and climate change, reminding us of the struggles of the moment but also summoning us to take bolder steps, to embrace bolder measures, to build a healthier, more sustainable world while the opportunity to do so still presents itself.

As one might imagine, the pandemic occupied center-stage, with the Foreign Minister of Barbados reminding the opening session of the HLPF that vaccine access (the “what”) is key to allowing tourism-based economies in the Caribbean and elsewhere to at least begin to recover. But in a theme recurring throughout the week, the “how” of equitable vaccine distribution and access remained elusive. As that same session, the World Health Organization’s Dr. Tedros chimed in that in the absence of “local health security,” global health security and other SDG commitments will surely remain “off track.” But Tedros also highlighted “profound gaps of sharing” in our world and urged efforts towards a “pandemic treaty” to identify and address new pathogens before they are allowed to replicate the current levels of social and economic ruin to which many government officials this week consistently pointed.

As others also reminded the digital UN audience, the current pandemic might be the most recent, major impediment to SDG implementation, but it is hardly the only one. Indeed, as OXFAM’s director and others made clear, the tendency to “privilege private wealth over the public good” was in force well before the pandemic. COVID-19 did not create the food insecurity that ravages millions under threat from climate change and armed violence. It did not invent what was noted throughout the week as the “shrinking civic space” which endangers journalists and civil society leaders alike and allows disinformation to flourish. It did not create pervasive discriminations of race and culture which Costa Rica’s Ambassador Chan noted perpetuates the existence of “second class citizens” and impedes progress towards equality, let alone genuine “equity.” And it certainly did not invent the gross inequalities of power and income which have only grown more grotesque during the pandemic. As noted by the World Food Program’s David Beasley, as many as 41 million people in our world are now facing grave food insecurity which could be alleviated if we could only find the $6 billion dollars to do so, a mere 0.2% of the $28.7 trillion dollars in global wealth generated last year despite pandemic limitations.

The pandemic, as many have noted this week, has also become a “cover” of sorts for steps that we know we need to take but now have an “excuse” not to do so. Many during the HLPF, including VP of the Economic and Social Council, Mexico’s Ambassador Sandoval, called again for urgent action on matters from “decent work” to “full digital connectivity” which have long been on the UN agenda. Beyond the HLPF, a discussion this week, in the General Assembly on the UN’s global counter-terror strategy yielded insights from many, including from the Malaysian representative who advocated for the creation of “mental firewalls” against the growing (and equally well-known) ability of extremists to radicalize its youth. Terrorists have not taken time off during this pandemic, as many delegations noted, but our responses to these threats, as Afghanistan warned, have largely remained “static.”

So what do we do now? How do we move from the “what” that we well know to the “how” which continues to elude us in more than a few key areas of sustainable development and which is more urgent with each passing day, let alone with each passing HLPF? What is missing in our individual and collective approaches? To reiterate, we know that we have agendas of longstanding, some of which have become more severe during the pandemic, and which require urgent and practical attention. We know that we must do more to eliminate corruption and illicit financial flows. We also know that we must do more to open avenues of concessional finance and relieve the debt burdens of the small island and least developed states, to respond to the call of Seychelles president RamKalawan for assistance on problems that “everyone knows exist” and for which “we should not have to beg on our knees.” We know that we need to push back harder on violence against children and schools, on our stubborn digital divides, on disinformation by climate and COVID deniers, on threats to progress on rights for women, persons with disabilities and cultural minorities, on the seductive messaging of terror groups, on trade-related and other regulations that continue to privilege the privileged. And we know, as Italy’s Minister intoned, that we have an obligation to “rethink” governance and public institutions at all levels, ensuring that we can sustain peacebuilding in conflict and climate-affected states and create “people-centered justice systems” which have a real chance to ensure accountability for the grave crimes which we continue to perpetuate against one another.

It is a large agenda, as large as the SDGs themselves, a test for the global community unlike any we have taken on in our history. And it will continue to require more from each of us, including the will to renounce what Pakistan’s Ambassador Akram (ECOSOC president) referred to as “wishful thinking,” the belief that these problems will somehow resolve themselves without deep and effective partnership-based policies. A similar theme was invoked by South African during the HLPF side event on racial discrimination, reminding us that laws “can only go so far” towards the eradication of racism in the absence of complementary, supportive social structures.

And complementary, supportive peoples. Those of you who still read these posts surely know where this is going – a plea for bravery and solidarity to embrace the challenges of the moment, challenges that will do us in unless we find in ourselves and each other the energies and capacities needed to reverse a bevy of current, worrying trends.

Fortunately, the HLPF seems to have embraced this need as well. This week, Under-Secretary Liu advocated a “global response plan” for the pandemic. UNICEF’s director Fore urged a “shared purpose” to enhance the welfare of children now suffering in multiple ways. The IMF’s Managing Director Georgieva invoked the need for “bravery to move towards the light” and stay focused in our pursuit of sustainable development. Dr. Tedros and many others called for a narrowing of our “sharing gaps.” Costa Rica’s Chan highlighted the benefits of pluralism, noting that “each new culture introduced, each new language spoken, makes us richer.” Tunisia expressed the hope that a recent Security Council agreement on Syria humanitarian assistance reflects a fresh and “common will” to resolve conflict and related political impasses. And Mexico’s Sandoval aptly summarized a trend across this HLPF, noting that there is “big hope for the world if human solidarity prevails!”

One could well ask, What is going on here? It seems that the mindset much conducive to multilateralism is coming out of a bit of hibernation in helpful and productive ways. Yes, there is hope for the world if solidarity prevails. Yes, there is hope for the world if we all take responsibility for fixing what we can, healing who we can, and doing both by reaching out to others for whom the “essential blocks of social protection” are blocks we largely have in common. Beyond resolutions and legal frameworks, beyond the stale rhetoric sometimes characteristic of UN spaces, virtual and otherwise, such hopeful solidarity requires a different type of bravery, a different breed of investment, a commitment to hearts and minds more open, honest and engaged than we have allowed them to be in quite some time; a commitment as well to pick up the pace of our often “slow walk” towards a better life, to address challenges at the speed and in the multiplicity of forms in which they now appear to us.

Let’s run with this one before we change our minds, before we return to that space where physical courage is abundant but moral courage is rare, before we frighten ourselves into inertia by the energy and “grit” needed to generate “alternative destinations,” create greater solidarity with the entire natural order, and dare speak the truths we know to speak. As Fromm suggests, solidarity may well be a pleasure, but it is also key to our security in a world where security for many millions is clearly at a premium. To grasp it, we must dare to grasp each other, to brave the holding of hands and affirm in practical terms the interconnectivity which lies at the heart of all life, including our own.

Tags: COVID-19, HLPF, SDGs, solidarity

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Mash Unit: Treating our Multiple Health Emergencies, Dr. Robert Zuber

2 May

Funeral homes struggle to keep up with rising deaths | Hindustan Times — Hindustan Times

What happens when people open their hearts? They get better. Haruki Murakami

I think that little by little I’ll be able to solve my problems and survive. Frida Kahlo

The question is not how to get cured, but how to live. Joseph Conrad

As soon as healing takes place, go out and heal somebody else. Maya Angelou

I think I have served people perfectly with parts of myself I used to be ashamed of. Rachel Naomi Remen

And here you are living despite it all. Rupi Kaur

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. Novalis

Inside and outside the UN, health-related matters continue to occupy center stage in our collective consciousness. Some good medical news related to infection levels in the US and remarkable progress reported from Oxford (UK) on a potential malaria vaccine was more than offset by news of devastating health emergencies in countries from Brazil to India – overwhelming existing health infrastructure and sending front-line health care workers in these and other countries to their emotional breaking point. It was unnerving to read of doctors in India describing the “mental torture” they now experience from treating what even they depict as India’s “hopeless” COVID crisis.

This “torture” is reminiscent of what medical personnel have experienced over this past year in community after community, country after country, places where political leaders have routinely bungled pandemic responses both within and across borders. Their not-infrequent politicizing of a public health menace has left medical workers with little option but to pick up the pieces from infected persons who, in many instances, refused to adhere to public health warnings and protocols. Such workers have been left to cope with waves of variants that are sure to multiply as cases explode in areas of the world largely (and sometimes willfully) excluded from adequate vaccine coverage, areas which in some instances are also coping with water shortages, limited sanitation and health access limitations which compromised local health outcomes long before the onset of COVID-19.

This pandemic isn’t over. Through our science-suspicion, our short-sighted policy choices, and our lack of solidarity across borders and regions, we have seen to that. And this is clearly not the only health-related threat to which we should now be paying attention.

The UN system has done some robust and cross-cutting policy work on matters of disease control, health access and the protection of health infrastructure. This past week alone, the outlines of a comprehensive response to the current health crisis facing our planet once again came into focus. For instance, in the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the outcome document referenced the grave health disparities which indigenous communities face worldwide, noting both the diminishing health infrastructure in more remote rural areas and the important work done by rural caretakers to protect the forests and other natural resources that remain under severe threat, protection which is indispensable to biodiversity preservation and might even help us avoid future pandemics.

And in the General Assembly, the GA president hosted a high-level dialogue on Antimicrobial Resistance, a challenge to what the PGA called “our over-dependence and over-use” of antibiotics which have in many instances compromised our ability to stem infections and prevent the evolution and spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. As speakers noted from across the UN system, the combination of threats including substandard sanitation systems, lack of access to potable water, and high levels of antibiotics in the meat some of us routinely ingest are enabling preventable outcomes, including making people with under-treatable bacterial infections more susceptible to COVID-19 threats.

What was particularly hopeful about this GA discussion is the degree to which it enabled an assessment of other health-related concerns to which states and the rest of us should be more mindful. The GA president, for instance, used the opportunity to call once again for states to commit to “universal health access.” The Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed used her speaking time to call for “alternatives to antibiotics” and increased investment in health infrastructure as one means of “getting our commitments to sustainable development back on track.” Dr. Tedros of WHO reminded delegations of the primary health-related responsibility of states to ensure fresh water and sanitation access, while the director of FAO noted the importance of ensuring food security and related measures we can and must take to improve public health instead of simply “waiting around for new medicines” to be developed.

And in the Security Council, a session on the “protection of indispensable civilian objects” hosted by Vietnam’s president highlighted the extent to which, as Ireland’s Foreign Minister noted, “war is the enemy,” the enemy of trust and confidence, the enemy of person-centered funding priorities, the enemy of stable and effective health infrastructure, the enemy of brave doctors and nurses forced to “work from caves” in a herculean (and often futile) effort to heal wounds of war in settings far less conducive to caregiving than the now hollowed-out hospitals where they used to work. The makeshift mash units to which some transitioned have too often become targets of armed violence as well, causing many medical personnel to once again and quite literally flee for their lives.

And it isn’t just hospitals. As noted by the Foreign Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines – a country now coping with health consequences from a major volcanic eruption — attacks on civilian objects by parties to conflict now directly target water and other infrastructure with growing frequency, leading inexorably to the spread of otherwise preventable diseases, including cholera. Such infrastructure looting and outright destruction endangers both short and longer-term health care access, gravely imperils the growth and development of children, skews our funding priorities towards more military hardware and away from health facilities, and exacerbates displacement-related miseries that most of the rest of us can scarcely imagine. War, indeed, is the enemy of healthy societies in multiple ways.

The question now for UN stakeholders is whether or not we have the collective will to hear and heed the advice from this week of policy discussions, to internalize and respond in kind to the mental burdens of front line workers and the misery and insecurity of those suffering under what one health aide this week referred to as a “genocide” of pandemic and other disease-related casualties. Such a “genocide” affects all sectors of society, but especially those persons with disabilities, the economically marginalized, the aged and those in relative rural isolation. It is obviously that much harder to appreciate sunsets and spring flowers or the wonders of poetry and art while carrying around wounds that won’t heal or dealing with sickness that drains away energy while children cry out for a proper meal.

The remedial blueprint is clear but it will require much from us. Tangible commitments of persons, priorities and treasures are required if we are fix currently-grave health disparities given, as this pandemic has reminded us, that an out-of-control virus in one part of the world affects health outcomes in every corner of the world. We must make forest protection (and its protectors) a priority. We must demonstrate levels of solidarity required to distribute vaccines and health resources fairly and evenly across all areas of need. We must do more to counter health disinformation and, while doing so, help to restore public confidence in both science and governance. If we insist on eating meat, we must also insist on options for more humanely-treated and less antibiotic-infested animals. We must invest more in community health with a focus on prevention, nutrition and alternatives to the medicines which once reliably saved lives (including twice my own) but which our overuses have made increasingly unreliable. We must cease our relentless dismantling of health infrastructure, especially in rural areas, due in part to our skewed funding priorities and tax policies which have put money into dubious outcomes such as nuclear weapons modernization while also lining the pockets of those whose investment accounts are already filled to overflow.

And we must protect the infrastructure we already have, ensuring that “indispensable civilian objects” and those brave souls determined to provide the essential services within them are spared the horrific impacts of armed conflict, impacts from indiscriminate air raids and explosive weapons which must be removed in practice as their legitimacy has long been “removed” under international law. War, indeed, “has rules” as many noted this week in various UN digital “conference rooms,” but those rules are increasingly disregarded. The Security Council must do more to enforce them. And war as an alleged enabler of anything remotely constructive for civilians in either the short or long term must be thoroughly debunked.

We are now facing a health crisis with multiple dimensions and causes highlighted and exacerbated by the current pandemic. As someone who is serially blessed by vaccinations and adequate health care access, I fear for those increasingly desperate for the portion of health care that should rightly be theirs, persons perpetually shouting (or praying) away the wolves of disease and violence baying outside their dwellings on a daily basis.

Unless we take the recommendations from this week seriously, unless we step up regarding practical manifestations of genuine solidarity, my fear is that their desperation will eventually become our common franchise, their misery will spread as quickly and defiantly as our own self-interestedness. Then, the stench from so many burning bodies will fill our nasal cavities as thoroughly as those who manage the fires of India’s now-overloaded funeral pyres. I was stunned this week by a 1961 photo of a Russian doctor preforming a self-appendectomy while stranded on a base in Antarctica. How many in this world are forced into similarly desperate measures to treat personal and family health emergencies without access to any of the technical skills and training possessed by that doctor?

For their sake, for our own as well, we simply cannot allow this desperation to persist any longer. Our hearts need to open wider, our blessings shared more liberally. We know what needs to be done to enable healthier outcomes for all. We are collectively, undoubtedly, urgently on the clock.

Tags: COVID-19, General Assembly, health access, infrastructure

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Perseverance: Reaching the Bars We Set for Ourselves, Dr. Robert Zuber

21 Feb

Members of NASA's Perseverance rover team react in mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, after receiving confirmation the spacecraft successfully touched down on Mars on Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021. — (Bill Ingalls/NASA)

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. Maya Angelou

Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Samuel Beckett

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. Thomas A. Edison

A bend in the road is not the end of the road. Helen Keller

Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries. James A. Michener

I like the scientific spirit—the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them. Walt Whitman

The seeker after truth should be humbler than the dust. Mahatma Gandhi

This was one of those weeks which stretched our recognition of human capacity and human ineptitude both in the wider world and within our bubbles of global policy.

In the US alone, emotions were yet again stirred as the Perseverance Rover managed a damage-free landing on the surface of Mars and Special Envoy John Kerry announced (with what might be considered excessive fanfare) a “humble” but determined return by the US to the Paris Climate agreement. The Rover’s mission, no doubt watched with interest by other orbiting probes from China and the United Arab Emirates, demonstrated the technology and tenacity over a decade + that we would do well to see more of in these precarious times, a combination that will eventually result in a joint US-European Union effort to bring samples of the Martian surface back to earth by 2031. And while perhaps not as dramatic or romantic as previous successes placing humans on the lunar surface, some viewing the remarkable images now emanating from Mars gleaned similar lessons to place our earthbound follies in context. Indeed, as one commentator on a relevant Washington Post report stated, “It makes all these earthly fights and wars over politics, power and property seem pretty primitive and clueless.”

Beyond the justifiable cheers from the Perseverance control room, there was plenty else happening this week for which “primitive and clueless” might also be appropriate. Despite the fact that the US is one of the ten countries worldwide at this moment with access to 75% of the world’s COVID-19 vaccine supplies, production and supply chain issues continue to impede vaccine delivery with direct implications for the health and safety of the elderly, store clerks and a bevy of other front-line workers – often people of color and those of limited financial means. Such supply issues and parallel wasting of precious vaccine stocks has been exacerbated by a massive winter storm which both affected vaccine delivery and left millions (especially in Texas) without heat or potable water for days. The storm provided a different sort of optic – not of sophisticated technology on the Martian surface but of long lines of people standing in the cold hoping to return home with a bit of food or water to keep their families afloat until their own damaged infrastructure can be successfully repaired.

This is where we are now, or so it seems: Mind-boggling technology that with the right levels of tenacity and perseverance can accomplish miracles, from soft landings on other planets to effective vaccines developed in record time. But alongside this are horrific images of children in Yemen dying of famine; children in Texas dying of hypothermia, children being denied educational opportunity due to a combination of pandemic and armed violence, children whose vaccinations for the diseases which predate COVID-19 are being interrupted by security deficits and the often-related damage to health infrastructure.

It is, indeed, a measure of our sometimes “primitive and clueless” selves that we are unable or unwilling to deploy that combination of ingenuity and tenacity which clearly lies at our disposal to address some of the other, looming global threats, to do more than talk about the urgency of things, the unfairness of things but rather to sustain levels of commitment and skill commensurate with current challenges here on the only planet we have. We are still, as noted this week by the World Health Organization’s Dr. Mike Ryan, “writing checks that we will be unable to cash,” unable because we continue to talk a better game than we play. Our power (and often petty) politics at national and global levels are too-often “in the way” of goals that would otherwise be well within our grasp – including to rebuild our frayed infrastructure, eliminate digital divides, and ensure greater equity in the distribution of health-related and other resources.

As our partners on sustainable development are fond of reminding us, we know what needs to be done and largely have the tools with which to do so. What is lacking is the will to persevere, the will to employ the best of our minds and character, the will to push through failure until we can grasp the success that might actually be closer than we allow ourselves to believe.

If only we had fewer deficits to overcome. At the UN this week, we witnessed a dazzling, bewildering array of events and report launches, including on peacekeeping reform, on “making peace with nature” (report here), on “digital inclusion for all,” on efforts to stabilize states such as Iraq and Libya, and on the annual Munich Security Conference which brought together UN officials and others (including heads of state of the US, Germany and France) to discuss how to revitalize our fraying trans-Atlantic alliances as well as how we can better collaborate on climate threats, what SG Guterres rightly characterized as “the race of our lifetime.”

And for us these weren’t even the most important discussions of the week. That designation went to a Security Council meeting this past Wednesday on COVID-19 and conflict and a Thursday discussion hosted by the president of the Economic and Social Council on “Reimagining Equality.” These two discussions had more points of convergence than might otherwise meet the eye. For as important as it would be to successful vaccination efforts to adopt and sustain a global cease fire, our current patterns of what Niger described as “vaccine hegemony,” patterns which persist amidst the rhetoric of “global public goods,” have clear discriminatory overtones. Indeed, we heard during this Council session that as many as 130 countries have yet to see a single vaccine shipment; we heard the warnings from Mexico that some countries might not even see vaccines before 2023; we heard frustration about vaccine hoarding and a reminder from UNICEF Director Fore that violence in many forms continues to destroy health infrastructure, continues to complicate efforts to vaccinate in the global south even where the resolve to do so exists.

We know that “vaccine nationalism” persists. We know that we have often “dropped the ball” regarding funding for health infrastructure, even by some of the wealthiest countries on the planet. We know that we remain woefully unprepared for the next iteration of pandemic. And we know that our current failures on vaccine distribution endanger many lives, not only within the countries of greatest need but globally as new variants evolve and spread, complicating the resolve to rebuild economies in a more climate-friendly manner and overcome what one diplomat this week deftly referred to as our “baggage of biases,” the ones which trick our minds into thinking we’re being equitable and inclusive when the data suggests otherwise.

As the Perseverance Rover captures informative and inspiring images from the Martian surface, it transmits them home to a planet still reeling from, as one speaker noted during the “Reimagining Equality” event, our “tsunami’s of hate,” our inattentiveness to the pervasiveness of racism and other forms of discrimination as well as to the specific communities which bear that brunt year after year, the communities still on the outside of access to education, to economic opportunity, to adequate climate adaptation, to the vaccines which represent an investment in the lives of all of us.

Amidst this current swirl of global need, of articulated commitments often masking their practical neglect, we must find and sustain that tenacity to navigate the many bends in the roads we have chosen to travel, to learn how to “fail better,” to keep consulting all relevant evidence and not give up until we succeed in the tasks that we have collectively set out for ourselves – a world free of famine, free of discriminatory practices, free of neglected and traumatized children, free of governance more corrupt than responsive, free of biological extinctions, free of armed violence and mass atrocities.

The human community that can set a rover safely on Martian soil can figure out how to distribute the vaccines that our science raced to provide, can find the means to ensure access to education and technology for all, can silence the guns that kill and traumatize millions, can make a more convincing case for human solidarity over human discrimination. We have established diverse and daunting policy bars for ourselves. But as several speakers noted during this busy week, we are running out of time to demonstrate the tenacity and perseverance needed to reach them.

Tags: COVID-19, health care, Racism, technology

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Capacity Control: Managing Personal and Collective Discontent, Dr. Robert Zuber

7 Feb

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

The world had scarcely become known as round and complete in itself when it was asked to waive the tremendous privilege of being the center of the universe. David Eagleman

That was the thing about the world: it wasn’t that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn’t expect. Lev Grossman

As gloom and doom have been creeping into their lives, many can’t feel anymore the freshness of their emotions that withered alongside the wearisome path of their expectations. Erik Pevernagie

I am either lacerated or ill at ease and occasionally subject to gusts of life. Roland Barthes

People never expect silence. They expect words, motion, defense, offense, back and forth. They expect to leap into the fray. They are ready, fists up, words hanging leaping from their mouths. Silence? No. Alison McGhee

Expectations were like fine pottery. The harder you held them, the more likely they were to crack. Brandon Sanderson

I and others in our small team spent much time this week zooming in to virtual UN meetings on topics from security deficits in Yemen and humanitarian crises in Ukraine and Afghanistan to global peacebuilding initiatives, narrowing the digital divide, and solidifying a political breakthrough in the long Libya conflict.

In the background of all these discussions, almost like some nefarious wallpaper, was the COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis which has unfolded as some experts and officials had long feared, with more infectious variants, a wave of fresh economic and food security challenges, and a mad scramble for vaccines which is leaving behind people of color in the “developed” world not to mention the vast swaths of the global south which are only now seeing their first of what are likely to be sporadic shipments.

This was the context swirling in my head on Tuesday as I approached a large parking lot in a working class neighborhood for my first COVID shot complements of Pfizer, a clever family member who found an appointment that I could not seem to find for myself, and a bevy of medical workers who were young, cheerful and diverse.

They also weren’t very busy. In fact, I was one of the only candidates for vaccination in a lot which could easily have accommodated hundreds of vaccine seekers, a lot surrounded by neighborhoods which surely contained thousands of people at least as deserving as I to be given this pandemic protection, people with family members who likely have to leave the home to go to work, who may have no health insurance attached to such employment, and on whom others depend more than anyone currently depends on me. I wondered how many of the relatives of those dutifully checking me in had managed to find the protection that my bare arm now beckoned?

Seriously, how could this lot be so empty? How is it that people like me get to jump what was in this instance a non-existent queue without any clear protocols for determining who are most deserving of protection in this health emergency, a crisis characterized in part by lost and wasted vaccine doses, mixed (and often defensive) messaging on protection, and other grave mis-steps, including with regard to the vaccines we pledged to share but decided instead to horde? How does this happen and how do we allow it to happen still?

Those of you who know me personally (and are willing to acknowledge as much) know that this “looking a gift horse in the mouth” scenario has long been an unfortunate part of my DNA. So too is what Sigmund Freud (and his less gender-biased successors) described as the guilt that I have tried to explain by reference to my privilege, but which is more aptly characterized by a deeper and incompletely examined unease, a discontent with too many “things as they are” which has led on my part to a fair amount of brooding but also occasionally manifests itself in positive efforts to ensure full parking lots with people from all walks of life getting protection for themselves, a desire to share instead of horde, a desire to harness my own contributing energies rather than being ensnared by the perceived limitations and inequities around me.

Indeed, to invoke one of Freud’s more compelling descriptors, I have been and remain one of those “discontents,” someone who has likely spent too much of my cumulative life energy cursing the darkness more than organizing and contributing to a world of greater equity and justice, a world featuring institutions that are both competent and trustworthy, a world where solidary is in evidence more than selfish interest and where cynicism is in abeyance as more of us demonstrate that we are able not only do the right thing, but to do it for the right reasons.

Thankfully my own “discontent” has undergone an evolution over the years, from a focus on the failure of the world to meet my self-derived (and often petty and self-serving) expectations to the weightier matters of capacity and its deficits; our wasting of resources and opportunities; our sometimes relentless clutching to power and institutional mandates rather than to ensuring inclusive delivery; our inability to plan for generations to come and not only to fulfill the desires of the present; indeed the refusal of human civilization to become genuinely civilized across all borders and amongst all peoples and the other life forms with whom we share this fragile planet.

After a lifetime of trial and error, it is now possible for me to distinguish more clearly and fairly between the good and the not-yet-good enough, to focus more attentively on the “tricks” that we often inadvertently play on ourselves and others, tricks which prompt others to anticipate the arrival of the metaphorical cavalry to help set things right when its horses are still back in the barn, waiting for water and saddles.

With respect to COVID, entire dissertations will be written on our many mistakes on policy, capacity and humanity which have undermined confidence in government and medical authorities and which continue to lead to staggering death and infection totals in most corners of the world. Sadly, we have conspired to make an already hard thing that much harder, in part due to our inability to get on the same page regarding our messaging about the evolving pandemic science and in part due to our failure to provide adequate access and capacity support for testing and tracing, and now for vaccinations, those tools that remain the scientifically acknowledged pathway to less crowded Intensive Care units, schools with live children in them, and businesses that can reopen without the risk of becoming an accessory to mass infection.

There are, indeed, lessons to be learned here, ones which are applicable well beyond the current pandemic, lessons about fidelity to the tasks deemed most urgent, about the need to “put our money where our mouth is,” about promising less and delivering more, about not allowing our mandates to impede our performance, about escaping that trap characteristic of some institutions that who gets to respond is somehow more important than ensuring capable, timely, competent response in the first instance. Lessons such as these are surely relevant within the peace and security realm as well, where the UN Security Council remains both bogged down in its own institutional limitations and uncertain about levels of collaboration it is willing to tolerate with respect to other diplomatic chambers and initiatives. This is especially apparent with respect to the Peacebuilding Commission which has done much in its relatively short lifespan to fill policy voids and establish viable policy connections, attract the best diplomatic talent from across the UN system, offer guidance to states at earlier stages of conflict threat, and free up resources to address peacebuilding deficits in real time and in diverse communities of need. As last year’s PBC Chair (Canada) noted this week, the world is “one or two shocks” from falling into deep crisis, and the PBC is well positioned to “anticipate such shocks and promote inclusive responses,” including, as Japan noted, building institutional capacity and genuinely “listening to the people,” talking with them and not at them.

This blend of institutional strengthening and dialogical engagement remans fully relevant to a host of pandemic and non-pandemic threats. There are many urgent needs in this world that we must address with greater care and competence if we are to have a world that can continue to provide a base for our own survival. Such response must do better at enlisting and enabling the most diversely effective actors and capacities that we have at our disposal, both legacy and innovative, if we are to pull ourselves and others back from the brink of so many contemporary shocks.

And at more a personal level, we must ensure that our “discontent,” my discontent, continues to evolve beyond its often petty and self-referential grievances; that in so doing we become better able to seek out and identify the good in our world that is not yet good enough. And so we can better highlight and expand access to those “gusts of life” that enable and empower individual and institutional capacity for change; gusts that help some to see beyond the gloom and others to experience stability beyond the threat; gusts that fortify our determination to see what is really going on in the world beyond our expectations of it; and gusts to help us identify which personal and collective capacities — which tools and traits of character — are best suited now to take us to more peaceful, healthier and sustainable places.

Tags: capacity building, COVID-19, discontent, peacebuilding

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Unity State: Replenishing our Thirst for Reconciliation, Dr. Robert Zuber

31 Jan

While you see it your way there’s a chance that we may fall apart before too long. The Beatles

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

I’ve learned that reconciliation has to occur between the parts of ourselves that are fragmented and wounded. Parker Hurley

The nation as it is currently constituted has never dealt with a yesterday or tomorrow where we were radically honest, generous, and tender with each other. Kiese Laymon

The simple, mutual recognition that mistakes were made is in itself a closing of the divide. Steven Erikson

Statements often bring controversy. Questions often bring unity. Emilyann Allen

No us. No them. Just we. Steve Goodier

Earlier this week, a good colleague of ours called to discuss a new project designed to help promote reconciliation in our highly polarized country, reconciliation which might help unify factions across the US which have stopped listening to each other, stopped trusting each other’s motives, stopped looking for entry points thorough which we might promote each other’s goodness rather than assuming that every pronouncement, every statement, every mis-step, is some manifestation of evil intent.

I share her concern for reconciliation but wondered then as now to what extend there is truly a thirst for it or at least enough of a thirst to make reconciliation efforts viable. For like the many other mountains of psychology and policy which we are now seeking to climb, reconciliation is also a hard slog, requiring substantial levels of honesty, attentiveness and staying-power, not only to address the excesses and insanity of our adversaries, but our own as well; not only to demand apologies but to offer them as well; not only to answer the questions posed by others but to pose questions that allow for our own spaces of ignorance to be filled with something other than malice and prejudice.

This “will-to-reconcile” is impeded by so many factors, and at so many levels. The “bubbles” in which so many of us are content (or resigned) to reside – our own bubbles and not simply the ones we identify in our adversaries – can lead us to the mistaken notion that reconciliation is easier to achieve than could possibly be the case in our current circumstances. If only others could accept the erstwhile “truths” that “we” represent, the “wisdom” of policies and structures that are assumed to be in the best interests of others, the “good intentions” of narratives about the world that seek to silence the guns of others while burying our own hostilities deep within the forms and structures of polite, “liberal” culture. If only people could cross back over the line into “my” zones of affective and epistemic comfort, if only they could see the fundamental worthiness of my “propensities and principles,” maybe then we could find a common way forward.

It seems more complex than that doesn’t it? Current divisions seem larger and more intractable to me. My priorities of policy and practice seem generally “right” to my mind, seem to be on a track that promises some pathway beyond climate ruin and the divides of technology, economics, social development, and even COVID vaccine distribution that threaten to expose existing wounds even further. But I also recognize that others see it differently; others see the edifices and rules of mortar and ideas that people like me have constructed as the means for some to further their own interests at the expense of others. Indeed, as we have noted often this space, we who are properly horrified at the growing threat from conspirators and their weapons have also to acknowledge that “they” didn’t by their own force of policy and practice create our plastic-filled oceans and staggering economic divides; they are not primarily responsible for our current climate emergency nor the “vaccine nationalism” that might well become the latest stake through the heart of our globalist pretentions. “They” did not invent our longstanding embrace of racism nor the corruption at the highest levels of governance which takes multiple forms and damages us all. Mistakes were made, even grave ones, but they have been made by many of us, mistakes compounded by the failure to “see” them clearly let alone to acknowledge or (God forbid) apologize for consequences unintended and otherwise.

While global leaders, including the current US president, are right to call for “unity,” the many steps needed to accomplish this seem only partially grasped. Some of these steps were on display during an extraordinarily busy January week in and around the United Nations, a week punctuated by an alternately sobering and hopeful “state of the union” address by the UN Secretary-General, a strong endorsement of science-based policymaking by the Deputy Secretary-General, and a useful joint session convened by the presidents of the General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council to sort out impediments both to development finance and sustainable development support for the Least Developed States; all of this in the shadow of the World Economic Forum annual event at Davos, a star-studded gathering to assess global trends that seems once again this year to be as much of a confirmation of existing inequities than a sincere effort to eliminate them.

That said there were two UN events which offered some good guidance how we might attend to our current, multi-layered fragmentation. On Monday, the Security Council held a discussion that highlighted the ways in which conflict prevention and COVID response are mutually reinforcing, with most speakers affirming what Ireland referred to as our current “dark times” brought about by a combination of inadequate COVID preparations and cease fire arrangements which, if they exist at all, are held together by fragile threads. It was up to UN USG Lowcock to highlight, in keeping with statements made by SG Guterres, that the pandemic is the crisis that we must find a way to solve together, noting that compromised health capacity, inadequate testing and other preparations and (now) predatory vaccine access have merely allowed fragilities of communities and states to grow, inflaming prospects for armed violence between and (especially) within states, and damaging economies and livelihoods in ways that could easily cost trillions of US dollars to repair. The “common goals” which are so often a prerequisite for achieving greater unity, the goals of ending the pandemic and silencing the guns, are still there, still beckoning, still awaiting a determined and humble response from states and stakeholders now one year on since the World Health Organization issued its initial warnings about the pandemic gloom we have still not unified sufficiently to dispel.

In addition to this, on Wednesday the UN convened a panel on “Holocaust Denial and Distortion,” which highlighted efforts to posit alternate realities which both deny the genocide and pry open rationales for the repetition of mass atrocity violence. Much attention was rightly paid to Holocaust victims, including some extraordinary prayers and musical tributes and a mournful German Chancellor Merkel who expressed “shame” for the horrors unleashed by Germany but also shared a warning about how quickly our “cherished values can be cast aside.” But for me at least, one core virtue of this event was not only its “calling to mind” the grave horrors of our not-so-distant past, but the extent to which “denial and distortion” characterize our present circumstances as well, the dual arrogances of unhinged conspiracy and unexamined convention that turn up the heat for all of us and make unity a more elusive goal than might otherwise be the case.

While rightly underscoring some of the specific and horrific consequences of Holocaust denial — including the attempted “rehabilitation” of those in more recent times who have yet to be held to account for the hatred they have espoused and the violence which such espousals have engendered –much of this event focused on the need for a common base of knowledge and understanding from which we can iron out our disagreements and move forward to heal the fragmentation within and outside ourselves, creating what one panelist called a “healthy relationship” with our often “inconvenient” past that allows us to “own our behavior, past and present, and not simply cast it aside or as another panelist put it, bury it under “lies and silence.”

Such ownership in our time would be warmly welcomed. Indeed, as our ideological and lifestyle bubbles continue to thicken, as the “ways and means to share forbidden fruit” only grow in volume and access, and as frustrations over pandemic and equity mis-steps rationalize new expressions of conspiratorial violence, our reconciliation challenges only continue to grow. We seem to lack viable strategies to restore a reality-based platform on which we can all debate, declare and then build, a reality that now seems to require higher levels of competence and rigor, justice and accountability, but also levels of “honesty and generosity” that are virtually endangered species in our policy and public spaces.

Though many are now in despair about our growing, seemingly intractable divides, there simply must be a viable third rail beyond “my way” and “your way,” beyond my version of reality and yours. Before we come fully unglued as a species, before our guns settle what our humanity has failed to reconcile, we need to do more than talk about unity, more than encourage unity. We must find the means to replenish our thirst for unity based on genuinely common purposes, common visions, common goals and common benefits; we must also locate and apply that third rail which can power and sustain reconciliation efforts; and we must do so without delay for our very future depends on it.

Tags: COVID-19, reconciliation, United Nations, unity

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Class Act: Transition Time for Some Special Council Members, Dr. Robert Zuber

27 Dec

Mural in United Nations Security Council

Security Council Chamber Mural from Norway

What Modest Dreamers We Have Become. Zadie Smith

Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door. Coco Chanel

I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Viktor E. Frankl

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things. Leonardo da Vinci

Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it. Dalai Lama XIV

Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter. Francis Chan

Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better. Flannery O’Connor

It is common to this specific weekly resource that, while its origins are squarely within the framework of multilateral policy engagement in general and the UN in particular, posts about the UN are always among the least read of all our contributions.

Some of this resistance is understandable. The UN has issued many resolutions, made many promises, that are candidates for “effort” awards more than achievement awards. We “try” our best to mobilize governments on climate change, but global temperatures have actually risen since the signing of the Paris accords. We “try” to get governments to honor their groundbreaking commitments to the sustainable development goals, but a combination of spreading COVID-19 infections and lukewarm intent to change what needs to be changed — and not just what we are “willing” to change — has set some of goals and targets back in ways we might not have anticipated. And on COVID itself, we are almost a year into a pandemic that has killed people on a scale that is generally reserved for our World Wars, a staggering total despite daily briefings and admonitions from UN agencies to better align our behavior on infections and vaccines with existing risks.

And this recitation does not even count the UN’s attempts to promote democracy and human rights in a world increasing seduced by authoritarians and their ethno-centric lenses, nor by the conflicts that continue to rage, year after year, resolution after resolution, tarnishing the Security Council’s reputation and creating humanitarian emergencies from Myanmar to Cameroon which drain massive amounts of member state resources and push the formidable skills and bravery of UN humanitarian personnel (and their NGO counterparts) to the breaking point.

Despite its many tentative-only successes and resolutions more ignored than embraced, the Security Council remains the focus of a UN system still struggling to convince its own members to abide by the values and obligations which underpin membership. Council meetings and press briefings deliver routinely higher levels of press and NGO interest. Council failures and successes are more likely to make front-page news than anything else that the UN does or tries to do (at least until the current pandemic exploded on to the scene). Council reform –whether related to its member-state composition or the use of the veto by its permanent five members – is always a “hot” topic among the general UN membership, most of whom feel, not without reason, that the Council represents the dynamics of a world long-gone and is simply no longer representative of current geo-political realities let alone of the security needs and interests of UN states.

And yet, despite disconnects within the Council itself and with the general membership, despite a legacy of half-successes which impacts virtually every aspect of the UN’s work –personnel and states largely without a voice regarding how the Council does its business — states frequently do not hesitant to campaign for an elected, two-year Council tenure. Part of the motivation for this is clearly tied to national prestige and the right to chime in on security policy on a regular basis (either as individual states or as part of a group such as the African (A3+1), the “1” for this cycle being St. Vincent and the Grenadines). But it is also a lot of work, especially in chairing “subsidiary organs” and especially for small missions such as the soon-to-depart Dominican Republic which managed to “punch well above its weight” but still had to work much-too hard to keep up with the other, larger members of their “class,” let alone with the likes of the US, China and Russia.

Complicating matters is the fact that the Council itself is currently lacking leadership commensurate with its lofty status. This is not a high-water mark for representation from the Permanent Five members, a situation which has created openings for elected members, especially so for the five members of this current, soon-to-depart class. But it also has exacerbated tensions as elected members attempted to steer the Council into more productive if not calmer waters, to help move the world (as the Council chamber mural suggests we should) from greater conflict to a greater peace. In this class, Germany was the core provocateur, publicly chiding (mostly) Russia and China for ignoring the human rights dimensions of conflict and for enabling rights abuses on a virtually unprecedented scale in places like Syria. However, the fact that Germany was perceived as stepping beyond protocol while largely ignoring abuses by other permanent and elected members was not lost on the Chinese whose final retort to the German Ambassador upon completion of his tenure was “good riddance,” a phrase which the Chinese might want to hold at the ready as a new group of feisty (we hope) elected members joins the Council on January 1: India, Ireland, Kenya, Mexico and Norway.

This incoming group might do well to study the class they are replacing which, to my view at least, ticked off the boxes that make elected members key to Council effectiveness and, we can only hope, eventual Council reform. Of these boxes, a couple stand out: First, elected members must be willing to expose willful limitations in the Council’s ability to fully grasp and address the manifold causes and implications of global conflict. From Belgium’s extraordinary advocacy for children’s rights and welfare and Germany’s insistence on climate change and gender dimensions in all conflict analysis, to Indonesia’s constant reminder that the Council’s job is ultimately to “save lives” and that “neighbors know best” how to achieve peace in local and regional contexts, this group was not shy about the “thematic obligations” which can broaden and enliven the traditional security formulations which have defined the Council “bubble” for far too long. Add to this South Africa’s leadership on strengthening (and properly funding) African peace operations and the compassionate but insistent interventions by the Dominican Republic, including on the security challenges of Caribbean and other small island states, and this class was clearly prepared to expand security dynamics to embrace all that we need to address and not simply those that the permanent Council members are willing to address.

In addition, this class perhaps as much as any others, clearly understood its responsibility to the rest of the UN membership, indeed to the global community, to ensure that a range of current security threats remain in focus. This group understands as well that its individual and collective responsibility for peace and security does not end when this calendar year does, but can be engaged in other multilateral forums, including the UN’s own General Assembly and Peacebuilding Commission. And by working with the new class of elected members as well as the class which rolls over into 2021, they can help keep pressure on the Council to end its sometimes petty bickering cloaked in national interest and demand successes in areas that really matter, especially areas of conflict prevention and resolution that can spare the people of this planet famine and displacement, trafficking and discrimination in multiple forms.

One of the fears coming out of the current pandemic and accompanying global insecurity is that we have collectively become “modest dreamers,” content to slog along in our own lives and excuse our institutions for doing likewise. We have willingly lowered our own sights and simultaneously lowered the bar for places, like the UN Security Council, for which “success” is now too-often measured in small, tepid increments rather than in grander insistences. For those who still care about such matters, and I think we all should, thanks must be extended to this outgoing class of elected Council members for reminding us that our bar for peace must always be set high, that the pandemic is not an excuse for failing to make and keep promises that matter to the world, that the Council can and must set a better example for others rather than wallowing, session after session, issue after issue, in the self-generated muck of its own politicized limitations, and that the values of the UN Charter are for the permanent members to aspire to as well — to improve their own performance — and not merely to serve as one more threat to hold over the heads of other states.

I didn’t always agree with the priorities and statements of this class of elected members. But they were on the right track most of the time and, more than that, they cared about what the Council was doing and why, the messages that were being sent out from this chamber to those millions of women, men and children whose lives has been ravaged by the conflicts the Council was unable or unwilling to stop. This was a group that wanted to “happen to things,” happen through their thoughtful clarifications but also through their willingness to make the necessary sacrifices, open every accessible door, and use all the tools in the toolbox – not only the coercive or threatening ones – to ensure both the well-being of global constituents and a UN community more compliant with the values which bound the community together in the first place.

We urge the new class of elected members to take up their responsibilities with that same sense of determination, to help prevent conflict whenever humanly possible but also to restore the full functionality of Council processes and insist on successes that are worthy of what might be still – and must become again – the world’s single most important chamber.

And to those of you who care enough about the UN and its role in global security to wade through this post, our heartfelt gratitude is extended to you with best wishes for a healthier and more peaceful new year.

Tags: COVID-19, elected Council members, peace, United Nations Security Council

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

6 Dec

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More than many recognize, they do.

Tags: Climate Health, COVID-19, disabilities

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Mail Merge: Electoral Integrity as Peacebuilding Responsibility, Dr. Robert Zuber

16 Aug

See the source image

Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily. Lemony Snicket

If it takes the entire army and navy to deliver a postal card in Chicago, that card will be delivered. Grover Cleveland

But as soon as it is in back of this partition, or in a mail box, a magical transformation occurs; and anybody who now should willfully purloin it, or obstruct its trip in any way, will find prison doors awaiting him. Ernest Vincent Wright

I do not follow politicians on Twitter; if they want to lie to me, it will cost them a stamp. Carmine Savastano

I’ve always felt there is something sacred in a piece of paper that travels the earth from hand to hand, head to head, heart to heart. Robert Michael Pyle

You got to stick to the bridge that carries you across. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

It was a relatively quiet week at the UN though not within some UN member states where an increasingly anxious global public could be seen on the streets in large numbers demanding leadership change in Belarus, political reform in Thailand, and upcoming elections in the US and other countries that can pass basic tenets of fairness and integrity.

Life inside the UN bubble this week was punctuated by a preventable controversy over a potential extension by the UN Security Council of the arms embargo against Iran. A resolution circulated by the US, which received little support from other Council members during a Friday afternoon vote, was essentially an energy-wasting effort to manipulate the terms of an agreement (JCPOA) with Iran which most Council members sought to preserve and which the US had already renounced.

There was also an important Security Council discussion, hosted by Indonesia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, on the various ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted peacebuilding efforts by the UN and a range of other actors, people who are active at all stages of the conflict cycle, who are concerned both to prevent conflict and minimize its often-devastating consequences, and whose multiple activities — including efforts to preserve electoral integrity — have been complicated by a pandemic which has added layers of response complexity, extended the miseries of the most vulnerable, and provided cover for governments which would roll-back social progress and civil rights or (in the case of certain non-state actors) step up assaults on communities and authorities.

For those unfamiliar with (or put-off by) UN nomenclature, it is important to state why we have long encouraged holistic conflict responses under a peacebuilding banner. Part of this commitment has been purely practical. As the Security Council has been unable to adequately address conflict threats or sufficiently broaden the range of its attentions to the many causes and consequences of global violence, it has been the UN’s peacebuilding apparatus – primarily the Peacebuilding Commission – which has steadily left the post-conflict “ghetto” to which it had once been confined to now provide important and meaningful counsel to the Security Council itself but also to UN member states facing security threats of a complexity they simply cannot resolve alone.

But beyond the ability to improve the UN’s lagging capacity for meaningful conflict response, the UN’s peacebuilding architecture has broadened our understanding of the many causes and manifestations of conflict threat; but also of the diverse actors — including so many persons in our communities and civil society organizations — who have a clear and direct stake in policies and practices that can both silence the guns and ensure conditions conducive to sustainable peace such that communities will have no compelling rationale for resorting to weapons in the future.

Implementing commitments to examine the diverse causes and consequences of conflict as well as to promote inclusive participation by all with the skills to contribute to sustainable peace represents a tall task under the best of circumstances. The “accompaniment” of states under a conflict cloud urged on Wednesday by SG Guterres is not a simple matter nor is it one (as Germany noted) that is currently being guided by thorough and honest assessments of our responses to the current pandemic and related challenges. The Council has not yet, as underscored by the Dominican Republic, enabled a peacebuilding architecture fully inclusive of the skills and aspirations of women, youth and cultural minorities. The Council has not yet, as noted by Vietnam, extended accompaniment sufficiently to persons with disabilities or to refugees displaced by famine, climate change, political disenfranchisement or armed conflict. The Council has not yet, as was noted at this session by former SG Ban ki-Moon, done enough to resolve our massive digital divide or promote a global cease fire that could make our pandemic and peacebuilding responses more effective.

We are not, as warned by Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, keeping a sufficiently “watchful eye” on how global challenges in this time are both interconnected and often accelerating. And while numerous Council members rightfully expressed concerns that terrorist and criminal elements are taking advantage of our current pandemic-stoked confusion to incite violence and sow hatred, there was little discussion of how otherwise “legitimate” governments are using what Belgium referred to as the “soaring” personal and institutional consequences of COVID as cover for security measures and policy changes that are anti-democratic at best and outright authoritarian at worst.

We certainly are feeling that negative energy here in the “host state.” Threats to our enfranchisement as citizens – including the basic integrity of our elections – are well underway as the domestic iteration of our global pandemic shows no signs of slowing or even embracing the best, if evolving, scientific and medical expertise. In a few short days this week, we have been more efficient in hauling away postal boxes and disabling mail sorting machines than in ensuring timely COVID test results or civil rights for protesters, “efficient” moves intended to manipulate election results in broad daylight.

Much has been written recently about the dismantling of a once-proud service that is particularly essential for rural residents and those dependent on the mail for medicines and other essential supplies; a service which also has long been symbolic of a government that knew it had to earn public trust. Part of that “earning” took the form of what has become “old school” reliability, the insistence that what was entrusted to agencies such as the postal service represented an almost sacred commitment duly upheld by those tasked with delivery (including by me in two earlier years) and which was not ever to be misrepresented as the province of any singular political interest.

These days, it seems, everything in our lives has been claimed –and often defaced — by one political interest or another. Thus it seemed a bit ironic that as the post office is being cut off at the knees, it has issued a stamp (see above) to commemorate 100 years of US women’s suffrage, a reminder of what has been a long and often painful journey to enfranchise women not only as voters but as leaders and policymakers, and not only in the US but in too many other UN member states. As the postal infrastructure of this country continues to unravel and even as more women (and women of color) struggle to grasp their rightful places in public policy, it remains crystal clear that the struggle for enfranchisement has not ended, that we remain buffeted by threats to civic dignity and civil peace perhaps even more grotesque than the pandemic itself.

It is a small symbol in the grand scheme of things, to be sure, but after a good conversation yesterday with our colleague, Lisa Berkeley, I think we can use the suffrage stamp to help reinforce a peacebuilding-relevant linkage between electoral protection and women’s enfranchisement. As such I would urge anyone who can do so to visit your Post Office, buy as many of these particular stamps as you are able, and then use them liberally on post office services, including letters and bills, that you still feel comfortable entrusting to our nefariously-disabled and reliability-impeded postal infrastructure.

In addition, having once engaged that culture first hand, I can thankfully attest that the US postal service remains a responsibility of government filled with people committed to crossing bridges of reliability, people who still believe in the sacredness of the documents that travel the world and bind its inhabitants; people who understand (even viscerally) that a pandemic (or other crisis) must never become an excuse for disenfranchised citizens, politicized public services and abuses of fundamental rights. Until our leaders get this message, clearly and unequivocally, we would do well to exercise all remedial measures — symbolic, legal and legislative –still remaining at our common disposal.

Tags: COVID-19, enfranchisement, Security Council, voting

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Sea Sick: Moving Care Forward in our Stressed Out Planet, Dr. Robert Zuber

14 Jun

The sea is emotion incarnate. It loves, hates, and weeps. It defies all attempts to capture it with words and rejects all shackles. No matter what you say about it, there is always that which you can’t. Christopher Paolini

If the ocean can calm itself, so can you. We are both salt water mixed with air. Nayyirah Waheed

And the ocean, calling out to us both. A song of freedom and longing. Alexandra Christo

Then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago. Herman Melville

The ocean is a place of skin, rich outer membranes hiding thick juicy insides, laden with the soup of being. Vera Nazarian

Mist to mist, drops to drops. For water thou art, and unto water shalt thou return. Kamand Kojouri

This past week, in the video chat format which is likely to rule multilateral engagements until at least the end of July, the UN held discussions highlighting a series of global challenges, some of which have now come to dominate our collective consciousness while others have receded to the background, at least for a time.

At this week’s “Multilateralism in a Fragmented World” event, speakers highlighted the “universal aspirations” that the UN has had some success in both defining and meeting despite the fact, as noted by SG Guterres, that “we are not yet pulling in the same direction.” This view was reinforced by Mary Robinson, chair of the Group of Elders, who not only highlighted some of the existential threats that the COVID pandemic has rendered more serious – including global hunger, gender-based violence and armed conflict – but also underscored the tendency of some governments to use the pandemic as “cover” for efforts to restrict fundamental rights and freedoms, including those of the journalists who seek to “make sense of an anxious and dangerous world.”

For months, the virus has been the UN’s core policy obsession, in part because of challenges to the messaging emanating from its World Health Organization but mostly due to the fact that so much in global policy and practice has been negatively impacted by COVID threats. We have been forced to spend as much time adjusting to our new realities as we do addressing the large problems which confront us endlessly through our video screens. Indeed, the pandemic has thrown many of us back on needs and issues that are less structural and more personal in nature – the children whose education is on pause, the bills that can’t be paid on time, the physical distance that complicates emotional connection, the dreams and aspirations indefinitely put on hold.

It is harder to find energy for global issues when our private lives require so much vigilance, when the failure to wipe down a doorknob might provide a pathway to a deadly illness, when a child’s window for reading comprehension is slowly closing because of long breaks in schooling, when a dwindling bank balance foretells another round of unwelcome lifestyle adjustments.

And then there is the matter of racial justice, the chronic absence of which has filled streets in the US and around the world, calling attention to the numerous instances of excessive use of force by police against black and brown people (now including the killing of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta), patterns which merely exacerbate conditions of health and other inequalities and which only serve to widen chasms of mistrust between communities and the police forces which, in too many instances, have demonstrated an unjustifiably stubborn unwillingness to police themselves.

These two crises now dominate public consciousness and seem destined to do so for some time. The images that fill our screens – the elderly gasping for air as COVID ravages their lungs, the protesters gagging on pepper spray so that our political leadership can pose for the cameras, the men and women pleading for relief from choke holds and knees on their windpipes – such disturbing images as these are not easily dislodged. Indeed, these images and the crises which lie behind them are almost more than many people can take, creating waves that rock their metaphorical boats and promise considerably more nausea than calm

We who work in policy know that part of our “job,” however challenging, is to find the words to remind people of issues and images that also constitute genuine crises but at this moment seem just a bit less compelling. One of these is the declining health of our oceans, a topic which was featured last Monday during a large UN “World Oceans Day” event and a subsequent discussion later in the week on ocean governance. For us, this is a high-priority discussion as sea levels rise, fish stocks deplete, coral bleaches, plastics over-run ocean eco-systems – this and more highlights the ocean’s now-compromised ability to sustain coastal livelihoods and absorb the carbon that, even during a pandemic, we continue to produce in vast, climate-unhealthy measure.

The discussions this week highlighted the many technological innovations which allow us to, among other things, survey the vast unexplored expanses of our ocean floor and remove plastics from our rivers before they find their way into seas and sea creatures. Also highlighted were the evolving forms of ocean governance that are slowly expanding beyond areas of national jurisdiction with hopeful implications for marine protected areas, sea bed mining and the practices of shipping which has too often used the open sea as a surrogate dump.

While technology and governance are critically important matters to policy, for most people they simply do not sufficiently compel interest, certainly not in this time of viral spread and social unrest. Indeed, for all who are drawn to shorelines and their beach cultures, for all who fill boardwalks and fishing boats, most do not immediately connect their leisure with a responsibility to protect our planet’s most indispensable eco-system and the life and livelihoods which it sustains worldwide.

But there were other lessons from this week, other human reactions which oceans are still capable of invoking and which can help us see our way through crises both immediately compelling and looming at a distance. This was highlighted best during the World Oceans Day event by the Cousteau family, a name synonymous with the wonder, mystery and even “romance” of our ocean habitats, seas that were once a ubiquitous theme in our literary corpus with which we are now urged to reconnect. It was good to listen to esteemed ocean advocates talking about seeking out stories — focused on oceans but also on water and ecosystems more generally – that can help reconnect people and planet, recapture some of the “freedom and longing” that constitute much of human aspiration, and motivate a greater sense of care for the resources that are critical to our common survival and that we simply cannot under any circumstances replace.

This to my mind is “romance” in the best sense – not so much steeped in sentimentalism as in a deep, rich and practical engagement with what a Namibian Minister this week referred to as our “interconnected normal.” As the Cousteau family put it, “falling in love” again with the oceans (or for that matter our forests, deserts, rivers, wetlands and mountains) is worth the emotional investment, but it is also not enough. We must, they insisted, “move care forward.”

Yes, that is the lesson directly relevant to our now-sick oceans –our increasingly indigestible “soup of being” — but also to other aspects of our stressed and agitated planet. Move care forward such that access to food and health care is more abundant and equitable. Move care forward such that our tendencies to discriminate and punish based on race and ethnicity are finally overcome. Move care forward such that gross inequalities are narrowed and “protect and serve” becomes a mantra applicable equally to communities and its policing. Move care forward such that our collective disposition is to share more abundantly and horde less habitually.

And move care forward such that our planet, its oceans and other ecosystems, remain healthy enough to sustain the life that now appears to be more elusive than is actually the case, a life offering greater opportunity for justice, wonder and connection by all, and a life far less threatened than at present by bullets and bullies, by pandemics and pollution.

Tags: COVID-19, oceans, romance

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Sea Sick: Moving Care Forward in our Stressed Out Planet, Dr. Robert Zuber

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