Tag Archives: COVID-19

On Pandemics, Plagues and Security, by Professor Hussein Solomon

26 May

Editor’s Note:  We are grateful to be able to post these latest reflections on human security by Hussein Solomon.  Of particular interest to us is how his ideas on security have evolved over time, from weapons and big-power politics to the diverse and still-unaddressed challenges facing so many global constituents. We share his view that our lens on human security must continue to expand, integrating threats to communities not only to war rooms and board rooms. 

As a young political science undergraduate student phrases like “national security” made sense. It was the 1980s and the machinations of the Cold War rivals fascinated me. In the national context of apartheid South Africa, the National Security Management System of former President PW Botha drew my attention. The realpolitik of the time, both global and national, resulted in my avidly reading countless tomes of first-strike capabilities of the nuclear powers and regional destabilization strategies of the apartheid pariah. With the passing of time, I grew increasingly disillusioned with national security as a suitable fit for contemporary times on account of two reasons.

First, national security considerations were far removed from the lived experiences of ordinary people. A US factory worker in Michigan is more concerned with the closure of his local automotive plant than the machinations of Beijing in the South China Sea. National security always reflected the concerns of the elites of their respective society as opposed to the bread and butter considerations of the vast majority of humanity. In the African context, such elite-driven state security was often purchased at the expense of human security of ordinary citizens. Here the guns of the military were often directed at marginalized and hapless citizens as opposed to directed at keeping borders safe from a possible foreign invading force. National security thus needs to be expanded to incorporate the concerns and well-being of ordinary citizens.

Second, in this rapidly globalizing world, insecurity anywhere is a threat to security everywhere. The Covid-19 pandemic illustrates the point well whether one resides in Wuhan, Milan, Moscow, New York, São Paulo or Cape Town. The world is one and national security needs to be jettisoned in favour of more integrated conceptions of security.

The current locust plague sweeping across East Africa vividly highlights the need for more expansive definitions of security. This locust plague has been labeled by the UN as an “extremely alarming and unprecedented threat”. Currently, Sudan and South Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda are all affected by swarms of locusts travelling at 90 miles per day and eating their own body weight in crops. To put matters into perspective, a swarm of locusts only one-third of a square mile can eat the same amount of food as 35,000 adults. This undermines food security across the region. To exacerbate matters, the lockdowns as a result of the corona virus has hampered efforts to eradicate the swarms. Regional governments are overwhelmed, as Helen Adoa, Uganda’s Minister of Agriculture has admitted.

This admission highlights the fallacy of national security in a globalizing world. Regional governments need effective regional organizations to support their efforts and need to partner with international organizations including the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, civil society and business to holistically respond to the threat posed. I write this paper on Africa Day, 25 May, a day celebrating African solidarity. This African solidarity stands in sharp contrast to the realpolitik and insular politics embraced by the concept of national security and its corollary, national interest. Sovereignty in defined areas needs to be ceded to regional organizations and global institutions in an effort to craft truly regional and global solutions. No one country can deal with either Covid-19 or swarms of marauding locusts.

The origins of the current locust infestation currently overwhelming East Africa also points to the imperative of integrated understandings of security. Climate change created the ideal breeding grounds for the locust population in the Arabian Peninsula to increase by 8000 percent. A phenomenon known as the Indian Ocean Dipole created unusually dry weather in the east which resulted in wildfires which so ravaged Australia. The same phenomenon, however, also created cyclones and flooding in parts of the Arabian Peninsula and Somalia. The resultant moist sand and vegetation proved the ideal conditions in which desert locusts could thrive. Aiding the burgeoning locust populations is the collapsed state authorities in both Yemen and Somalia ravaged by civil war and fighting Al Shabaab insurgents. As the writ of the “governments” in both Sanaa and Mogadishu hardly goes beyond the capital, neither country can craft even a national response to the locust plague. The origins of the swarms of locusts devastating east Africa link climate change, civil war, state authority and capacity and the Covid-19 pandemic. This stresses the need for holistic solutions which are rooted in expanded and integrated conceptions of security. We cannot afford to work in silos at national, regional or international level.

Extraordinary times call for more holistic conceptions of security. The Cold War is over and thus my undergraduate lectures on security are a poor fit to today’s realities. The world stands at a pivotal point much as it stood following the Thirty Years War in Europe and the resultant 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, the 1815 Congress of Vienna following the Napoleonic Wars and in the aftermath of the Second World War. We need to be brave and refashion our security architecture to reflect integrated, global and human security considerations.

 

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Bubble Wrap: Unpacking our Digitalized Enclosures, Dr. Robert Zuber

24 May

Bubbles

For a bubble, even the gentlest touch is fatal.  Mehmet Murat ildan

The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.  Nadine Gordimer

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.  Oscar Wilde

What fools we mortals are to think that the plans we make are anything more than a soap bubble blown against a hurricane, a frail and fleeting wish destined to burst. Barbara Nickless

The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.  Joe Klaas

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.  Flannery O’Connor

On a weekend when we celebrate the end of Ramadan and mourn the loss of the fallen on our various battlefields, I have spent much of the time cleaning out file cabinets filled with old letters.  Some of these letters were angry, some grateful, some filled with insight about the writer, the intended audience, the world at large.  But what was most revealing is the amount of care that went into them, page after page in longhand, people often younger than me committed to disclose and share, to make sense of a world which was often making none, to decipher and embrace the core of their being amidst a cacophony of conflicting and competing messaging, to transcend fleeting joys and hurts and find the north star within themselves to guide what would hopefully be a long life of care for self and service to others.

We rarely communicate like this anymore.   Our introspective longhand has become digital shorthand.   We have trouble sustaining attention of any sort let alone sustaining a train of thought that promises genuine insight, even possible breakthrough.   Our messaging is ubiquitous but thin; we “stay in touch” by dropping in and out of lives from which we extract highly-branded versions of key “incidents” but with less and less of the backstory that explains why such incidents actually matter and what longings might yet exist between what are often lengthening cracks revealing our obsessive efforts to convince others we’re OK when we may only be partially so.

As is often the case with these posts, I am preaching to the choir; but also to myself.

This week, for me, was immersed in communications-related issues.  It began with a “new” campaign-related initiative by the US Republican party and ended with what will hopefully be an important opening gambit in the UN Security Council examining how the cyberspace we are now reliant on to almost desperate degrees is digressing into “bubbles” of self-referential propaganda and even hate speech that directly threaten international peace and security.

The aforementioned campaign initiative was given a most interesting name:  The Truth over Facts Investigative Website which is designed primarily to highlight the gaffes of the US president’s political opponent, but which neither interrogates the president’s own slippery relationship to facts of any stripe nor breaks any new ground regarding our general confusion regarding how “facts” are and are not constitutive of a fuller “knowing” of the world and our own relationship to it, how “facts” divorced from context can just as easily reinforce our various cognitive bubbles as puncture them.

As someone whose long-ago graduate school experience was literally drowning in epistemological considerations related our diverse “ways of knowing” the world, I have long been a believer that data and truth are kissing cousins but not quite marriage partners.   I won’t waste your weekend on a protracted diatribe about the ways in which we misuse data by failing to properly contextualize it, or about the ways in which we use “facts” to place people in boxes that we don’t want them to escape or even use “facts” to justify an end to exploration rather than as the engine of its continued evolution.

But I will communicate this.  In my erstwhile-jaundiced view, the behavior of several leaders of major power governments during this pandemic has been nothing short of criminal, principally in its lack of humility, its unwillingness to consult and abide by those of greater knowledge, and its utter lack of urgency regarding the preservation of life.   It is certainly the case that scientists are learning more and more each day about the pandemic, its modes of transmission, effective treatment options, even the consequences of infection – from kidney failure in the sick to psychic depression in those merely fearful of sickness, but also with sustained periods of loneliness and of protracted economic uncertainty.

But the certainties that many seem to be looking for in this time of pandemic remain elusive. Yes, we have vaccine trials with results that are sometimes encouraging and we can generally ascertain when the viral “curve is flattening” and where relapses are most likely.  But do GDP or official unemployment statistics really communicate the “truth” about our collapsing and vastly unequal economies? Is “official” data on COVID-related deaths and infections the “truth” about our viral circumstances, or might matters actually be more dire due to people dying in places other than hospitals and tests yielding untrustworthy results?

It is alternately intellectually interesting and emotionally unsettling for me to watch public officials struggle with their COVID messaging in an environment where trust in officials is low across the board, where the “facts” of infection change regularly as we learn more about what works and what doesn’t, and when national political leadership seems more inclined to stoke anger and anxiety than coach it away.   As a result, too many people of all ideological persuasions feel abandoned to cope with the current uncertainty largely on their own, to pull the metaphorical blinds and double-down on the “bubbles” with which are most reassuring, even if those bubbles are riddled with half-truths, even if those bubbles only offer equally false choices between hard certainty on the one hand and conspiratorial make-believe on the other.

Our remaining confidence in authorities and experts seems now less about the credentials behind what we are being told and more about who is telling us, who we choose to believe, who is able and willing to confirm what it is that we have more or less already concluded about the world and what in it truly threatens us.

This week, the UN launched what it calls Verify, a useful initiative to combat the growing scourge of COVID-19 misinformation “by increasing the volume and reach of trusted, accurate information.”  Of course the test for Verify will be less about the accuracy and trustworthiness of the data it scrutinizes and more about the trust that the UN and its World Health Organization can garner as a responsible arbiter of the “truths” of COVID – what we know, what we don’t know, and why some of the rumors and conspiracies floating around the planet (and especially in the digital universe) do not pass the test either of facts or context.

Does the UN retain the capacity to do more than offer its version of competing narratives about the pandemic or, for that matter, the many other, science-relevant, global challenges also on its policy agenda?  Sadly for me, this is unclear.  As much of a proponent of science (and of the UN) as I have been all my life, I lament that we have misplaced so much of our capacity to educate people about what it is that scientific and medical experts can and cannot (yet) accomplish, to have an honest conversation with people about the nature and limits of scientific inquiry, the findings of science that might well eventually set us free but, in the short term, are almost as likely to “piss us off.”

We need to have those conversations in our schools, our communities and especially in bastions of social and political authority such as the UN.  No, our data is not static.  No, all of our facts are not situated in proper contexts.  No, our “authorities” are not always authoritative. Sometimes authorities do what we now mostly all do and much too often – re-purpose “truths” espoused as a manipulative pathway to get what we want rather than as a means of enriching our connections and the quality of our common life.

In reading this over, I recognize how naïve and old school it must seem to some readers, especially those who have given in to the modernist assumption that we can be expected to do no better than to encase ourselves in our bubbles of choice and then pray to whatever powers we might still acknowledge to preserve our bubble from puncture.  But puncture is inevitable.   Our bubbles might be lovely to behold but as even the reference dictionaries acknowledge, they are also fragile, temporary, fleeting, insubstantial, unable to withstand much in the way of the winds of change and the challenges of new lenses on truth that now buffer them routinely.

When those bubbles do finally burst, when disenchantment towards our governments and official expertise has been set loose, when the convenient untruths communicated by our digital media preferences start to unravel, when our resentments (and the entitlements to which they are often tethered) are allowed to overwhelm our collective solidarity even more than they already do now, then we have set the stage for fresh ugliness that even the excellent Security Council discussion on Friday on “digital threats” to peace and security could barely discern.  We have shaken and awakened our hunger, not so much for truth and the data to which it must remain attached, but for grievance-based vengeance, for our petty cancel culture and its righteous minions, for a “rules based order” created by powerful states and individuals who don’t play by the rules they advocate. And this is encouraged by a media and “information system” that often seems relentless in its attempts to manipulate emotions not help them reach maturity.

This is a larger problem even than the virus, even than the digital culture on which we increasingly rely and which now seems to offer many more opportunities to reinforce prejudice and distance than wisdom and connection.   We are being pushed into bubbles from many angles, but we often now offer little resistance and even less inclination to abandon their false security.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple as Oscar Wilde noted.  The question now is whether we have the “stomach” to pursue — with humility and even in longhand — the truths of our time along their winding, rocky path; and then create a post-COVID world of security, health, equity and beauty once we are fortunate enough to catch them.

 

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Repentance: An Earth Day Imperative, Dr. Robert Zuber

26 Apr

Sun Stroke

Earth Day, a useful idea that could only occur to a civilization estranged from Earth. Hugh Roberts

In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. Carl Sagan

I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.  Pearl S. Buck

But for us there was no wilderness, nature was not dangerous but hospitable, not forbidding but friendly.  Chief Luther Standing Bear

It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility.  Rachel Carson

In this state of total consumerism – which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves – all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. Wendell Berry

It was inevitable. This week, as states in the US controversially prepared to “open” sectors of their economies, a spate of articles has appeared proclaiming what would otherwise appear to be obvious: that many of us here in the privileged west have had just about enough of confinement, enough of economic uncertainty, enough of a contact-free life.

And perhaps most importantly, enough of cycles of news and “information” that offer too-little in the way of guidance or comfort, that fail to reassure us that our leadership is listening to the right people, making the right connections, demonstrating that they are as concerned with the loss of lives as with the loss of elections. It is this dissonance that, more than anything, piles frustration on top of loss, that makes us wonder if anyone is telling the truth about the values and habits we still need to adjust, the planetary matters to which we still need to pay attention, let alone for how long our “lives in limbo” are destined to remain in that state.

For all of its warts — and we have called attention to many over the years — the UN in the midst of its own forced isolation has been trying hard to keep our collective attention focused on the big picture –on science more than politics; on fairness and solidarity with states unprepared for viral threats still to materialize; on support needed to soften the blows of the devastating economic fallout that SG Guterres referenced this week in a virtual meeting on development finance, fallout that might well push states on the margins of viability into deeper holes of inequality and decimated livelihoods despite the global community’s best preventive efforts.

And as highlighted during two valuable Security Council meetings this week, we were all reminded that many of our global ills, while “reinforced” by COVID infections (as noted by Fiji), were not “invented” as the virus washed up on our collective shores. On Tuesday, under leadership from April’s president The Dominican Republic, briefers from the main UN agencies tasked with enhancing food security for millions painted a most disturbing picture. None was more devastating than the World Food Programme’s David Beasley who used his video time to “raise the alarm” regarding the current “hunger pandemic” that exists alongside the COVID pandemic, hunger which has multiple causes beyond COVID including armed violence, locust plagues, economic collapse and a spate of climate-related natural disasters. “We need peace,” he pleaded, in order that we might more successfully address both a looming famine for millions and still-growing COVID infections in all their causes and manifestations.

And then there is the proverbial elephant in the contemporary policy room, a threat which looms large in our panoply of challenges and which affects all others, and that is the climate threat. Despite the welcome improvements in air quality and emboldened wildlife that have resulted from our current social isolation, our ice caps continue to melt, our oceans continue to warm, species of all sorts still face immanent extinction, and calls in many parts of the world to “return to normal” raise the specter of new waves of pollution, extraction, warming and even violence once this initial stage of the current viral threat has run its course.

I am reminded in this context by a cartoon which appeared recently in the Economist depicting the human race slugging it out with COVID while a much larger opponent, that of climate change, looms in the background, egging on COVID to land a few good punches to make we humans even less able, willing and focused to engage our larger and even more formidable foe.

While there is still some debate among Security Council members regarding the specific impacts of climate change on conflict, a Wednesday (Earth Day) Arria Formula discussion organized by France and others focused on precisely this linkage. The briefers, including USG DiCarlo, insisted that climate threats will surely outlast the current COVID pandemic and that such threats tend to multiply occasions for conflict in much the same way, as Niger opined this week, that COVID has multiplied misery for populations already impacted by climate-affected flooding and drought.

The takeaway’s from this Arria meeting included a call from Crisis Group’s Malley to “shorten the timeline” on how we both prevent conflict and prepare states to respond more rapidly and effectively to a range of climate-affected threats.  It also featured a reminder from the ever-thoughtful Ambassador of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Rhonda King, that “our darkest hours” require more constructive forms of engagement that can yield people-centered solutions.

But how are such solutions to be pursued? During the Arria, the Stockholm Peace Research Institute’s Smith called for a “larger knowledge community” to engage these difficult relationships.   And there is surely good value to be had in bringing together policymakers, academics, scientists and other “experts” to examine challenges in earnest and suggest pathways forward.

But my own preference is for “learning communities” that can integrate but move beyond expertise to help those of us now tethered to our television sets and I Pads examine our relationship to a world in which some have taken far more than their share while others have yet to find their portion; persons who can’t bring themselves to pay sufficient attention to their own “helpless dependence” on economic interests that create material addictions and anxieties that we can now scarcely manage, that place endless consumer distractions in the way of a deeper sense of humility and wonder, indeed of repentance itself.

It may seem like an odd segue from COVID and climate impacts to personal repentance, but I am convinced that solutions to our multiple challenges will simply require more from us than isolation and social distancing: more than policy and expertise; more than a mere “pause” in our often-stubborn me-first-ness; more than simple apologies and facile commitments to “do better;” more than expressions of anxiety that get us no closer to personal growth; more than an annual day of appreciation for a planet which we then collectively desecrate the remainder of the year.

Within the confines of our COVID-restricted private spaces, while we impatiently await official permission to resume larger portions of our lives, please give a bit of thought to the ways in which those lives have interacted to the detriment of our neighbors, our communities and indeed the planet itself.  Repentance for such interactions requires much of those who choose that route – the acknowledgement of mistaken ways, the firm resolve to amend those ways, and the attentiveness and perseverance needed to turn verbal commitments into life-affirming habits, to trade away vestiges of anxiety and indifference for greater portions of humility and wonder. In these and other instances, repentance is a practice well-suited to the times.

Whether we accept it or not, whether we like it or not, we are not going to easily be rescued from our folly; not by experts or governments alone, certainly not by beings visiting from other celestial realms. The rescue we now require will only be secured if it includes ample portions of a more attentive, humble and resolute version of ourselves, indeed, all of ourselves.

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A Catch-22: Unpacking South Africa’s socio-economic plan amidst the global Corona-pandemic, by Sanet Madonsela

22 Apr

Editor’s Note:  Earlier today, the UN Security Council discussed the impact of COVID-19 on security and development options in the Great Lakes Region.  Here, Sanet Madonsela assesses her country’s current economic-health tradeoffs that, if not properly handled, will merely exacerbate misery in a country already experiencing deep economic uncertainties, instances of institutional corruption, and uneven access to health and other services. 

On the 21st of April 2020, South Africa’s President, Cyril Ramaphosa announced the country’s plan to inject a staggering R500 billion into the country’s social and economic support package amidst the global Corona-pandemic. This support package makes up 10% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). It is said to be the country’s biggest one-time fiscal outlay. While some economists believe the stimulus package to be well targeted, questions have arisen regarding how it will be funded. Of the amount announced by the President, only a mere R130 billion will be reprioritized from the country’s existing budget. Ramaphosa stated that the rest would be sourced internally as well as from international finance institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, BRICS New Development Bank, and the African Development Bank. Financial support from the IMF and the World Bank for Covid-19 is said to not come with the usual calls for structural adjustment. However, the political left, in South Africa remains skeptical of receiving funds from these institutions.

It is important to note that South Africa’s economy was bleak before the outbreak of the global pandemic. The country was experiencing a technical recession, credit rating downgrades, rotational power outages, and high unemployment levels. This has resulted in business groups and economists requesting the reopening of the economy. The President has experienced increased pressure due to the economic impact of the current national lockdown. He has responded stating that the country would take a risk-adjusted approach to dealing with this challenge. While opening the economy could ease the economic burden on the country, it could result in a massive outbreak of the virus. Instead, the country has implemented measures to cushion the blow of the pandemic. Amongst these are: subsidies for businesses and wages, social grants catering to the poor and vulnerable and the prioritization of the health sector’s budget. While the health budget will be boosted, details regarding how the health system will be capacitated have not been provided. While these measures could assist in closing the inequality gap in the country, they can create further opportunities for looting given the endemic corruption existing in the country.

The global Corona-virus pandemic has managed to expose the many internal challenges the country is faced with. It has highlighted the shocking levels of poverty, unemployment and inequality in the country. While some citizens have eased into the nationwide lockdown, others are unable to do so as they are confronted with overcrowding, poor sanitation and food insecurity. They face greater nutritional and hunger challenges. Some even fear dying of hunger more than they fear dying from the virus.

It is worth noting that that the lockdown of schools means that the 9-million children who normally benefit from school nutritional programmes will not have access to food. While government has implemented the provision of food parcels to impoverished communities, its’ efforts have been countered by officials allegedly hoarding and selling food parcels. This means that resources allocated to assist the most vulnerable, including vulnerable children, are now being redirected to opportunistic government officials and their supporters. They do this through exploiting the government’s now-relaxed procurements system in the midst of this global crisis.

While the government’s immediate social grant increase is welcome, it should be noted that it would be insufficient as social grants tend to be redirected towards household expenses of adults who are usually employed. The Minister of Labour and Employment, Thulas Nxesi, confirmed that the country’s 3-million informal sector workers would not be covered by the department’s measures to lessen the impact of the national lockdown, as they are not registered for the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF). Government however, has now introduced a temporary distress unemployment grant to assist those who are not currently receiving any other grants or UIF. It is estimated that over a million people will lose their jobs as a result of the pandemic. The question now is “Where to from here?”

Like most countries, South Africa is faced with a catch 22 situation. Should they open up the economy to reduce the economic impact? Alternatively, should they extend the lockdown to ease the burden on a health system seeking to flatten the curve? Any viable solution would have to take into consideration the vulnerable health system, the high levels of unemployment, low economic growth, and the reduced income per capita. While some trade-off may seem sensible, it should be noted that an extended lockdown could undermine health services such as the immunization of children; while the blow to the economy could be fatal. Instead, a good mitigation strategy should be put in place to deal with the virus until a vaccine is available. It should be stressed that the immediate removal of the lockdown without a clear health and economic plan could result in both high levels of mortality and economic downfall.

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Dream Catcher: Perseverance in the Business of Change, Dr. Robert Zuber

19 Apr

See the source image

It’s strange how dreams get under your skin and give your heart a test for what’s real and what’s imaginary.  Jason Mraz

Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.  Louisa May Alcott

Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon.  Gustave Flaubert

I turned my nightmares into fireflies and caught them in a jar. Laini Taylor

Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.  Arthur Golden

I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight.  Charles Dickens

In my dreams, I never have an age.  Madeleine L’Engle

As affirmed by numerous medical professionals, among the more unsettling dynamics of the current COVID pandemic is its impact on our interior life. The dreams of many of us, myself included, are becoming more intense, more graphic, in some instances more frightening, dredging up experiences and reactions we’ve long forgotten (or in some cases merely wished to forget).

Part of this, of course, is the unconscious recovery of negative impacts from those other times in our lives when we felt a bit “shipwrecked,” when we could do little more than metaphorically turn our despairing eyes towards a horizon that seemed to offer some respite from our loneliness, isolation, currently taking the forms of being physically distanced from those we care about but also at some distance from what has given at least some of us a sense of identity and belonging in the world.

These are not trifling matters.  While most of us understand that our primary task at this moment is to keep ourselves and others out of intensive care, and to do what we can to ensure that children and the most vulnerable can find sufficient resources and medical attention amidst the current deprivations and restrictions of movement, we also recognize that, just a few short weeks ago, many of our lives were defined by a different set of routines, indeed in more than a few instances a different set of dreams.

Some of those routines and dreams had probably outlived their useful lives, were bringing us more anxiety than fulfillment; indeed were often residing in some realm beyond the reach of conscious choice and which in too many instances no longer approximated what we claimed to be our “highest aspirations” for ourselves or others.

But whether fulfilling to us or not, whether good for the planet or not, it is no easy matter to scrutinize and revise years of personal and professional habit, to let our best dreams “get under our skin” once again and help us to define what is both possible and preferable, to enable us to “strive afresh” in a world that, for now at least, doesn’t seem to be encouraging striving in any form.

Of all the reading I did this week, I was most impressed by an article suggested by a longtime friend and colleague, Lester Ruiz. The piece called “Beyond the Blizzard” (click here) raises the possibility that, in some fundamental sense, the “businesses” we have been associated with “no longer exist.” They (including Global Action) no longer exist because this pandemic is NOT like a blizzard, not like that scenario where we hunker down for a few days, shovel the sidewalks and driveways as best we can, wait for the sun to effect a bit of melting, and slowly get back to our normal ways.

So what is our normal now? How do we move forward with the most essential of our tasks and commitments? How do we overcome the anxieties that now dominate so many of our sleeping hours? How do we connect our deepest dreams to which, in some instances, we have only recently become reacquainted, with our current, indeterminate, shelter-in-place realities?

Most everyone has a story to tell in this context, some more harrowing than others, some indeed harrowing beyond the imagination of most of us.   Our story is not that at all, but is certainly a confirmation of the claim that the business we have been in for 20 years, the business for which we are known and have been funded generously by others – that business in some sense no longer exists. We cannot mentor young people at the UN because neither they nor we have access to headquarters and may not for some time. We are permitted to follow only the smallest portion of what diplomats are discussing now by video teleconference. And while the UN continues to make selective progress on conflicts such as in Yemen and seeks to protect its World Health Organization from unscrupulous attacks, it is the pandemic that dominates every aspect of policy as it dominates media coverage across the board. It is the pandemic that calls our priorities and commitments to account, even as it restricts options for keeping those that survive scrutiny in the public eye.

Like many others, we have to figure out the “business” that we are in now.   Perhaps it is, after all is said and done, the business of dreams, those dreams of fairness and equity, of access to clean water and unpolluted air, of leadership that actually inspires our better selves, of learning that both fulfills our obligations to the young and helps us to uphold and extend the best of the human spirit, of peoples that have cause to fear less and trust more, of weapons that are far less accessible that medical gear.

The dramatic image at the top of this post is of a “dream catcher.” I have several hanging throughout my New York apartment courtesy of Mac Legerton, the late Linda Bull and other friends. These symbols of indigenous wisdom act in my home as a “filter” of sorts, catching the most debilitating nightmares (as though they were fireflies destined for a jar) and allowing the best of dreams to pass.

This world needs the best of our dreams to pass, and not only to pass but to find their full expression on a planet now reeling from the “adversity” of viruses in our midst and others yet to come. Those “ageless” dreams that we claim to have inspired our own work and that of so many others – including dreams we have misplaced or failed to follow over the years – we can here acknowledge that the nurturing and sharing of such dreams may now indeed be our work in the world, the best contribution we can make to healing our planet and each other amidst the current viral adversity.

If so, we can only hope and pray that we are up to the challenge.

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Dark Cover: A Plea for Greater Policy Vigilance, Dr. Robert Zuber

5 Apr

From:  University of Oregon

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. Carl Jung

So many distractions, when all she wanted was silence, so she could understand what was going on. Rehan Khan

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me; all day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. Sylvia Plath

Father McKenzie, writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear. No one comes near. The Beatles

The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow. Carson McCullers

So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak to one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Yes, we may be in the midst of some great existential crisis, but we’re simply too busy to notice. Douglas Rushkoff

God’s creatures who cried themselves to sleep stirred to cry again. Thomas Harris

This was another of those weeks where the profundity of the quotations above is likely to overwhelm the wisdom of the prose below.

There were indeed some items of hopeful policy significance this week beyond the medical madness.  At the UN, the General Assembly a resolution was tabled that affirmed the critical importance of multilateral cooperation necessary (in the words of Mexico) to ensure global access to medicines, vaccines and medical equipment to fight COVID-19. The announcement of the resolution was followed by pleas (from ourselves and others) that this resolution be swiftly actionable within and between member states.

Also this week, the Security Council presidency turned over to the Dominican Republic for April, a move which not only signaled a month of kind and competent leadership, but which virtually guaranteed that the Council would take up the peace and security implications of COVID-19, which to our mind and those of many others, are implications overdue for consideration.  Indeed, a briefing by the Secretary-General provisionally scheduled for this coming week will likely touch both on COVID-19 response and his related call for a global cease fire to ensure response effectiveness.

That said, there are still grave dangers lurking amidst the “corona darkness” that threaten many millions.   As we noted two weeks ago, and despite the SGs call for a global cease fire, conflict still ranges in Libya, killings still persist in the Anglophone regions of Cameroon, bombs keep falling on Yemen, homes continue to be demolished in the Occupied Territories, weapons access spreads unabated.  And while the current lull in human activity seems to have brought about a brief, welcome respite for parts of the natural world, too many of us seem poised to produce and consume with a vengeance once the “all clear” signal can be heard across the globe.

And the current danger runs deeper than merely taking our eyes off global situations that still require our active vigilance.   For the virus has inadvertently provided cover for political leaders to assume powers they shouldn’t, and make decisions they shouldn’t, on the assumption that our attention is fully distracted by mask making  and hand washing, by figuring out how to pay our bills and providing plausible explanations to our children for why their playgrounds have been closed, why their schools and daycare have been shut down, why they must now keep at least six feet distant from the people they have routinely run to hug.

Such distractions are legitimate and understandable. But they are also allowing our political leadership — swaths of which have proven themselves to be far more ambitious than competent – to make decisions “under cover” of the current viral darkness, often with implications which we are too distracted now to follow but that serve to double down on policies that are as likely to punish political adversaries as heal division; that are as likely to strip besieged families of their full complement of economic and health options as to help restore their dignity and ability to care for elders and children.

Historically speaking, it is not unusual for unscrupulous leadership to use crises (of which this is surely a major one) as an excuse to consolidate power, punish opposition, strip citizens of human rights and otherwise centralize authority. In the current virus crisis we see elements of all of these in societies as far-flung as Hungary, Brazil, the Philippines and the US. The power grabs; the misuses of funds; the consolidation of resources which are then parceled out based on loyalty rather than need; the daily attempts to manipulate information flows, putting out narratives which are almost completely self-serving rather than public-serving.

I am obviously more familiar with what is happening in the US though my eyes remain as attentive as I can keep them to stories from other regions written by journalists and others with contacts and perspective, often taking risks with their ears pinned to the ground.   And the pattern in my country is one that is steadily being mimicked in other parts of the world: the endless self-congratulations; the equally endless lying, or at least speaking without knowing; rhetorical “explanations” that scramble media outlets and sow public confusion; the shrinking of options for medical care and for exercising the right to vote; the repeated implication that the interests of leadership and their friends take precedence over the common interests.

One common thread in all of this is the assumption of these erstwhile leaders that we are simply too busy to notice – too distracted by the logistical and emotional burdens of coping with a crisis that (as one of my friends noted) we can’t see, can’t smell, can’t track its own stealth. It is enough just being ourselves now, tending to anxious children, navigating grocery stores and pharmacies, writing sermons (and other opinions) that “no one will hear,”caring for sick loved ones and, in the worst of scenarios, watching them die at a distance and then being buried with none coming near. God’s children (if you will) are too often crying themselves to sleep and then stirring to cry again.

And under cover of this “corona darkness,” the very leaders who ignored the threat whose impacts they could well have minimized – certainly prepared for with more integrity and resolve – the very leaders who allow their closest supporters to exploit the rules that others are struggling to follow; these people are, in more than a few instances, using the crisis as a back-door opportunity to push their own interests and agendas beyond where they could push them through any other door. All of this scheming is taking place while the discouragement descends on more and more people; while the distractions multiply and intensify; while the bonds of human connection become further frayed; while people remain legitimately consumed by the immediate, including the immediacy of family protection.

What Sylvia Plath referred to as “malignity,” is appropriate in this context. We know that temptations are ever-present for people in power (at whatever level of power) to take advantage of “opportunities” provided by crises to see what they can get away with, to fill the airways with silence-busting nonsense such that people are severely challenged just to figure out what is going on around them. This is nefarious business under the best of circumstances. But when those who dismissed and even mocked the warnings of the coming darkness then turn around and attempt to exploit its cover, one is challenged to find the most appropriate condemnation. It hasn’t come to me yet.

In our own smaller policy context, we were among the groups these past weeks calling for “media distancing” from the counter-scientific half-truths, utter manipulations of timelines and prior pronouncements, and other often-misleading proclamations coming from some of our political leadership.   We know — if we had ever forgotten — that we need better now from our media, from our civil society, from organizations such as ours. As the political elite cleans house of anyone deemed “disloyal,” even highly-respected Naval Commanders and those tasked with federal oversight, we need more people in that space of discernment and analysis, and we need to better honor those who have already risked much to keep that work alive.

In some instances we are now seeing the positive benefits of that “distancing” taking the form of more geographically and ethnically inclusive interviewing, more compassionate reporting, and more soliciting of expert opinion from the medical and scientific communities. This includes more space for the unique experiences and expertise of the women and men who risk their lives in intensive care units and makeshift clinics trying to keep as many of us alive as possible. As the current darkness motivates more and more to “shorten their thoughts,” there are thankfully still numerous people of integrity out there in a crowded media universe who can help keep those thoughts less distracted, better informed and more alert. Indeed, the families we now strive so hard to protect may ultimately depend as well on maintaining higher levels of vigilance.

People will, as Jung noted, do almost anything to avoid facing their own souls, to avoid looking at themselves through the same mirror that they so gleefully hold up to others.   In this time of viral darkness, there are precious few leaders who have demonstrated that they can truly face their own souls, owning the errors that have occurred on their watch and that — deviously or not — have endangered many lives.  Before this time of darkness runs its course and the next one prepares to descend, we must find the words and the energy to insist that they do so.

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Denial Land: Resisting the Allure of the Normal, Dr. Robert Zuber

29 Mar

Emergency

Life went back to normal after that, as it will do if you’re not careful. Michael Montoure

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

Maybe everyone should talk to themselves. Maybe we’re all just afraid of what we’d say. Katie Kacvinsky

People have gotten used to living a botched-up life. Jaggi Vasudev

All of us prayed for normal. But so far, normal only meant more misery. Katie McGarry

Normal is the recession of our hopes and dreams. Natalie Gibson

Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone. Joni Mitchell

Sitting in my little room with my little red computer, I had a conversation recently with my longtime friend and downstairs (NY) neighbor about the need to use some of this “viral time” to think about the world that will emerge at some point or other, a time to prepare for decisions we have to make about the priorities of our institutions, the health of our agriculture and oceans, the transparency of our politics, the strength of our multilateral arrangements.

As I concluded my not-so-enlightened rant, she interrupted me with a reminder: that the reform of our politics and economics is largely predicated on the type of people we want to be, the inner reform that (as we at Global Action have actually maintained for some time) must accompany structural reform; structures that can otherwise offer only promises of relief from the burdens of misery and danger that so many in our world experience, the “recession” of the hopes and dreams that so many of us have simply forgotten how to realize.

This inner reform constitutes the basis for the talks that we need to have with ourselves about ourselves.

And we need to have them as a matter of urgency.   Five years ago the UN settled on a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as part of a 15 year commitment to create a world that was cleaner, healthier, fairer and less violent. Joining those many who cheered adoption of the goals and targets, we lamented only that there was so little in the agenda that was focused on ourselves, the erstwhile captains of the boats that we keep steering treacherously close to the rocks despite our lofty intentions to do otherwise.

Five years in, many of the SDGs are lagging significantly behind their promises. We have given precious more than lip service to ending food security, gender balancing our institutions, providing universal health care access, and fulfilling other core commitments.   We have continued to expend vast fortunes on military hardware, some of which ends up actively fomenting misery, fear, displacement and instability on virtually all continents. We have economies that have stretched the inequalities they could otherwise have narrowed, offering more and more to fewer and fewer, and draining funds for a wide range of essential public services in too many global societies. We have undermined inclusiveness in social and political life and used technology to compromise elections rather than ensure their integrity.

And this was all happening before the COVID-19 onslaught, the immediacy of which has positioned the full implementation of our various SDG commitments even further in the distance. Adding to the trillions we have spent on military hardware and tax breaks for the wealthy, we now must spend trillions more propping up economies whose vulnerabilities have been laid bare, with little left over to effectively tackle the problems that had already brought us to a collective tipping point.

Moreover, due to the spread of COVID-19, we can no longer gather in public places to demand better of our institutions, including relatively straightforward matters such as ensuring broader access to clean water for drinking and hand-washing, or a decent education for our children.   The hopes and dreams of many millions are clearly in “recession” as rarely before and it will take more – much more – than an “all clear” signal on the pandemic from our governments for us locate the track we should have been on in the first place.

If indeed we are to board the right train going forward, we will need more implementing wisdom from our now-stretched institutions, of course, but also more from ourselves. As frightening as the current pandemic can be, the greatest test of our mettle (not to mention our collective sanity) might well come at the end of this threat, when we must decide whether to truly “leave no-one behind,” or return to the faux-comforts of “normalcy” – the resurgence of old habits — some of which are related to faith, family and community, but also those related to economic predation and pollution, of political and climate instability, of xenophobia and discrimination, of armed conflict and the evermore sophisticated weaponry with which it is waged.

We know that, especially in the West, “normal” is one of those things against which we are “privileged” to rebel until we know longer have the things that normally fill up our zones of comfort. And as we sit in our places of quarantine struggling harder than usual (for us) to procure some of what we have become “accustomed to”, unable to socialize, or find toilet paper, or even to offer a hug, the allure of the “normal” is rearing its head once again. People ask “when can we get back” to that time when we now imagine that, for us at least, everything seemed to be just dandy; how can we reincarnate that selective memory of ourselves being more or less happy and content, a time when we could walk freely in our parks, sample copious amounts of restaurant food,  and expect reasonable levels of attentiveness from our doctors and grocery clerks, some of the very people whose lives are now literally on the line for the sake of the rest of us?

In this current, romantic longing  for a return to normalcy, we’ve forgotten how much we’ve accommodated often “botched up” lives; indeed how the choices we’ve made in the name of “normal” have created ripples of misery for others – those close at hand and others far away — that we have resolutely refused to acknowledge. Most of us don’t have the skill to rescue desperately sick virus victims or enjoy access to government officials with the power to free prisoners incarcerated for political reasons and now terrified of a viral death sentence. But we can begin that conversation with ourselves about what we truly care about, the deeper values often buried under superficial habits and self-delusional memories, and to consider seriously how we are able and willing to contribute to a more sustainable world once this current threat abates.

A primary attribute of “Denial Land” is the belief that “normal” was better than it actually was, that it is something to which we should now aspire rather than something to scrutinize and revise.  The suffering that we have too-often accommodated or explained away does not need to dominate our post-COVID reality. The decision about what that reality will look like lies largely with us, based in good measure on the conversations that we are now willing to have with ourselves.

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Priority Mail: Delivering on Multiple Global Threats, Dr. Robert Zuber

15 Mar

Priority

A crisis is the sum of intuition and blind spots, a blend of facts noted and facts ignored. Michael Crichton 

Truth is always a turning point. Sheila Walsh

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If we want to embrace life, we also have to embrace chaos. Susan Elizabeth Phillips

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. Antonio Gramsci

The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. Edward O. Wilson

The virus teaches us that security in the end is human security. Jan Eliasson

This is a week when the “embrace of chaos” took many forms, from people on the hunt for disinfectants and toilet paper to government officials ducking allegations of incompetence and reluctantly turning over control of COVID-19 response to medical professionals who actually know what they’re doing – even if much of the medical infrastructure needed to predict and prevent outbreaks has long been eviscerated.

Indeed, we are in a period where broad public confidence in our often–medieval institutions has taken a hit, as rumors are more readily available than truth, families struggle to reassure children whose lives have been upended through school closures and social distancing, and many millions who live paycheck to paycheck, if indeed they are fortunate enough to receive a paycheck, make gut-wrenching choices between attending to the threat of virus and providing a minimal sustenance for their families.

And as we now seek to “flatten the curve” on outbreaks, we know at some level that that there is more to come, more from this particular virus but also more from other viral threats lurking in our cities, in our melting ice, in our equatorial forests. At least in the US, we have yet to face the full force of social isolation, the degree to which “touching” has become both a social violation and a medical emergency, the distancing brought on by this virus that merely compounds that already solidified through our previous economic and political choices. And all of this is being reinforced by institutions that at times seem hell-bent on suppressing the expression of our better selves, institutions which act as though they have our confidence when they actually have little more than the wary resignation we now liberally bestow on all who are not in our own “tribe.”

There is something genuinely unsettling about the sight of people standing on two-hour lines just to get into supermarkets and then yanking virtually any cleaning agents or non-perishable foodstuffs off the shelves in a particularly frantic search for wipes and masks we collectively should have known we would need and which are now needed most by the various “first responders” who have to try to referee our newly-minted panic based on (in)decisions they had no hand in making. At the same time, a  Palestinian writer recently reminded western colleagues this week that the sight of empty shelves is a common one, not only in Gaza, but in many parts of the world where violence and displacement affect wider swaths of the population than this virus is likely to do, a reminder that this deprivation that rightly unsettles many in so-called developed countries is merely a taste of what many millions of families experience on a daily basis.

Indeed, one of the potential (if preventable) casualties of this current virus is a massive breakdown of what remains of our solidarity with the parts of the world (including in our own countries) where shelves are often bare, where health care and housing are always elusive, where children are perpetually in danger of a stolen childhood.

Like many institutions at present, the UN is flying at half-mast, trying to both protect staff from infection and find a way to keep our collective eye on issues that the virus might have made worse, but certainly didn’t make disappear. Families are still fleeing violence in Idlib and northern Yemen. Ice caps continue to melt into increasingly warming oceans. Migrants continue to face intimidation in multiple forms rather than welcome mats. Children are still being deprived of liberty or recruited into armed groups. So-called peace agreements continue to fail basic tenets of inclusiveness and transparency. Biodiversity remains under threat across the life spectrum. Governments and others continue to misuse resources, including their intentional mis-allocation, in ways that bolster some interests and devastate others.

But this virus is our preoccupation now, and not without reason. Indeed, it is almost shocking to hear conversations and broadcasts, about toilet paper to be sure but also about social policy, that do not in some fashion or other reference COVID-19.  And while we hold our collective breath in the US and await a peak in infections that is almost sure to come and which will likely be confirmed by even our barely-adequate testing regimes, there is plenty of incentive – driven in part by our stubbornly “paleolithic emotions” – to block out all but what we consider to be the most urgent of matters, allowing this virus to take up too much of our collective bandwidth, providing cover for our grabbing and hoarding, our suspicions and conspiracies, our distrust and indifference.

In this context, it was a bit comforting this week to see the UN take a longer if no less urgent view, one that focuses on remaking the institutions we need and don’t yet have, institutions that are able to both respond to crisis and, perhaps more importantly, anticipate crises yet to materialize.

During a debate on Wednesday on the “role and authority of the General Assembly” chaired by Ghana and Slovakia –this at a time when expectations of UN shutdown were rampant — delegates discussed ways to make the Assembly (the most representative of UN bodies) fit to address current and future threats in a manner that better integrates and energizes the priorities, energies, skills and initiatives of global constituents. A theme that resonated throughout the conference room was the importance of (as the European Union noted) setting sharper priorities for our work, eliminating the “noise” and “clutter” of the GA agenda such that it can become more than a “catch basin” of issues, more than a producer of resolutions that (as Costa Rica maintained) are often without clear implications for constituents.

At a moment in time consumed by a strange and unpredictable virus, it was refreshing to hear the UN vet its own limitations and “blind spots” in a manner that promised better communication, clearer priorities, greater policy effectiveness and (as the UK suggested) a firmer focus on “what is most relevant to others.” Mexico noted that “we know what we mean” in this chamber, but few beyond the chamber can decipher our methods and strategies aside perhaps from concluding that such methods are not yet up to the challenges and expectations that have long been mandated for this policy space.

In a moment when people are too often avoiding each other, strategizing around each other, grabbing from each other, it felt right to hear Malaysia challenge the Assembly to “get closer to the people.” The question now is how to get closer, how to engage people without “infecting” them, how to offer reassurance without subsequently engendering cynicism? Perhaps there is some policy version of the elbow greeting now used to maintain connection without handshakes! In any event, this is not the last of the health or other crises knocking at the door. We need institutions that can warn of what seem to be an ever-present laundry list of (mostly self-inflicted) dangers, but that can also demonstrate the will (with sufficient resources) to address threats (both on and off our collective radar) at their earliest possible stages, and that can facilitate the birth of structures and their policy prescriptions that we badly need but don’t yet  have.

We also need institutions that can encourage our better selves, the “selves” that enable community sing-alongs from otherwise isolated Italian balconies, or the sharing of health supplies with perfect strangers, or enduring the current “nightmare” of food shopping to make sure that the elderly and other vulnerable persons have what they need to survive the current threat, or advocating for prisoners and the homeless whose options for fending off sickness are limited at best.

If Wednesday’s discussion was any indication, the General Assembly seems determined to be one of those institutions, one of those that can predict more effectively, inspire attentive responses, set clearer priorities, and act with greater resolve alongside a wider range of skills and voices. We will help that process along in any way we can.

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