Tag Archives: democracy

Empodérate Vecino-a: The Youth Spark Defying Peru’s Democratic Crisis, by Andrea Viviana Araujo Muñoa

20 Aug

Editor’s Note:  Andrea was recommended to us by a close friend and colleague, Dr. Toh Swee-Hin, who had her as a student in an online course he was teaching through UNESCO.  After several conversations and a review of her CV, it was clear that Andrea has special gifts which she liberally shares with people – especially women from more marginal communities – in her native Peru. It was not possible to bring her to New York for a UN internship this summer, but we hope to try again soon.  In the meantime, and with a generous gift from our friend Lois Whitman, we were happily able to send funds to Lima to supplement support Andrea already receives from Global Changemakers. 

Amid citizen distrust, political fragmentation, and the violence affecting Lima’s neighborhoods, a grassroots youth organization is proving that democracy can be reinvented from the ground up. Empodérate Vecino-a empowers excluded women and has become a beacon of resilience and innovation at one of the most critical moments for Peru’s democracy.

In the hills of southern Lima, where poverty, exclusion, and distrust in politics shape daily life, a youth organization is rewriting the rules of civic participation. Founded in 2022, Empodérate Vecino-a promotes women’s leadership at the margins of democracy and has become a benchmark of civic innovation in one of the most fragile times in Peru’s political history.

With the support of Global Changemakers, the organization is currently implementing the Qhapaq Ñan Cívico project in Villa María del Triunfo. The initiative focuses on 100 women who face triple exclusion due to their gender, age, and migrant status. Through participatory workshops, intergenerational mentorship, and culturally inclusive content, the program seeks to strengthen their political leadership and civic voice.

In an innovative twist, the project integrates a unique cultural component: an animated mascot inspired by the Andean cock-of-the-rock, Peru’s national bird. Its name is Chasqui, a tribute to the Inca messengers who traveled the Qhapaq Ñan to connect distant communities. With humor and wisdom, Chasqui accompanies the participants, weaving together knowledge, stories, and experiences along the democratic journey.

Beyond its local impact, the initiative takes a “glocal” perspective, linking the challenges of exclusion and political disaffection in Lima to global debates on democracy, justice, and sustainability. In the organization’s own words: “transformative education can be a bridge between local realities and global aspirations.”

Recognition from Global Changemakers is highly competitive: thousands of young people from around the world apply each year, and only a few projects are selected after a rigorous three-stage process. In 2025, Empodérate Vecino-a became the only self-managed youth organization in Peru to secure this $1,000 grant to implement Qhapaq Ñan Cívico—formerly known as Voces Migrantes—with an electoral focus.

The project arrives at a decisive moment. Peru is preparing for the 2026 general elections, which will feature more than 43 registered political parties—an unprecedented figure at this complex moment in the country’s democratic history, according to the National Office of Electoral Processes (ONPE). The situation is unprecedented in other ways: just months before the elections, no candidate surpasses 10% approval in the polls, while confidence in the electoral system has dropped to a staggering 8%, according to the Institute of Peruvian Studies (IEP).

Meanwhile, citizens live in a climate of insecurity marked by corruption and extortion including in public transport and schools, fueling political disaffection. In this context, Empodérate Vecino-a stands as a beacon of resilience and innovation, proving that even from the most vulnerable neighborhoods, youth can reinvent democracy, helping it become more participatory, inclusive, and alive.

Today more than ever, initiatives like Qhapaq Ñan Cívico are urgent. In the face of government inaction and institutional weakening, Peruvian youth remind the country and the world of a simple but powerful truth: if not now, when? Democracy cannot be taken for granted; it must be defended, nurtured, and reinvented. In fragile societies like Peru, young people associated with  Empodérate Vecino-a are rising up to keep democracy alive.

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Reconciliation Nation: A January 6th Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

5 Jan
See the source image

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Voltaire

How all my brain was in tumult, and all my heart in insurrection! Yet in what darkness, what dense ignorance, was the mental battle fought!  Charlotte Brontë

Liberty or death!’ A rebel, armed with a blood-stained pitchfork, shouted over-and-over. David Cook

Hard towards himself, he must be hard to others, and in his heart there must be no place for love, friendship, gratitude or even honor.  Mikhail Bakunin

The only thing we knew for certain was the American Civil War was not a prelude to a kiss. Aberjhani

Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.  Elie Wiesel

The world needs people who have survived mistakes, tragedies, and trials to help the rest of us through. Kimberly Giles

I feel somewhat sheepish bothering you with yet another post so soon after the previous two, but this is an anniversary that I could not bear to let pass by.

One year after many of us within the US were transfixed with a brazen act of insurgency that we in the US should probably have seen coming, and as many outside the US were left to wonder if we had firmly entered “failed state” territory, there is little confidence in many quarters that the violence which was allowed to take root at the US Capitol has been sufficiently weeded from our national life.

If anything, the lines of ideology, even of reality, are increasingly sharp.  As I wrote last week, we have become quite comfortable taking shots at each other across a bow of willful misunderstanding and even enmity.  There are few voices now willing to stand apart from the chasms which define our culture, our values, our politics, stand apart not to remain aloof in its own right but to try and make space for choices beyond following an increasingly angry and stiff-necked herd.

This stiffness has taken many forms and is not confined to any one of the herds which now occupy and relentlessly defend their own pastures.

On the political right, we have seen and heard many insurgent voices, including ostensibly “religious ones” parroting conspiracies which could easily be debunked if folks were only willing to trust their senses more than the angry, victimized language communicated to them and from which some never seem to be satiated.  We have seen the spike in gun sales, we have heard the voices from radios and pulpits calling for “patriotic” violence, we have recoiled from the “lone ranger” fanatics willing to shoot up schools and shopping malls in some instances as their last gasp attempts to gain some measure of “patriotic” infamy before departing this life for whatever might come next.

What is most chilling about some of these incidents is the levels of financial and even political support which perpetrators of this violence receive from those in their herd.  Some of this support takes the form of vitriolic rhetoric, but also of silence, an approach which, even more than malicious or conspiratorial words, suggests that what happened last year on this date was “no big deal,” even as we now recognize that this hand of insurgency was being dealt from the highest levels of the US government.

It is hard for the rest of us at times to remember that this form of insurgent outrage is not new to this country; indeed our history would suggest that the current cultural configuration – love your country and distrust its inhabitants — has more or less been stitched into our national fabric.   We have long taken each other for granted if not altogether exploited one another; we have long  stoked culture wars, not only between believers and unbelievers, but among believers themselves; we have long proclaimed our cherished values and peaceful dispositions while arming ourselves to the teeth and using our power to unfair advantage over diverse races and cultures; we have long packed ourselves into cities and then denigrated those who still work the fields and mines essential to our urban lifestyles; we have long extolled those who “win” at money and power as though that game is not also rigged in favor of those who already control institutions and define pathways of access.

In the tribes which I more regularly frequent, we who mostly never fought in wars or saw fit to engage in other forms of national service seem to feel quite satisfied with our university educations, our jobs with health insurance and other social benefits, and our access to power and to those who hold it.  We, too, look after our own interests as though there was something vaguely sacred about them, as though these interests were somehow also baked into the rules of a game that has long been tilted in our favor.

One of the frustrating aspects of this year for me and many has been the slow pace of justice, including justice for those who fanned flames that erupted last January 6 after what had been a long and steady burn.  We in my tribe generally stand fast in our defense of the “rule of law.”  But where has this “rule” been hiding?  Indeed, as I have maintained in other contexts, one now presumably faces more severe legal jeopardy for stealing a Red Bull out of a convenience store than for launching an assault on the US Capitol. 

Clearly, we in our liberal bubbles also have things to answer for: Have we done much of anything over this past year to remedy this legal travesty?  And while we are at it, have we done enough over this past year to heal our broken politics, to eliminate gross inequalities of access to income and education, power and influence, to put the corks of discipline and service back in the bottles of military and police command, to promote notions of “freedom” which apply to all and not just to some and which are more textured and communally-binding than merely “doing what I want?”

I don’t think it can be considered in any way conspiratorial to conclude that I and others are collectively failing to meet the moment.  We have allowed deficits of justice and kindness to fester while increasing hostile divides and giving unearned comfort to those content enough to face additional “wrist slaps” in order to continue their assault on democracy.  And those wrist slaps, by the way, pertain to those well beyond the January insurgents themselves, those with plenty of money and the will to buy whatever and whomever can be bought — which appears to be most anyone now in government or contemplating a run for elected office. January 6 did not announce threats to democracy but did pull back the veil on how that threat has evolved and been duly monetized over time.

We are going to hear much over these days of political officials scared to death – as well they might have been — of the mob (and their enablers) who invaded the Capitol last January 6 and who have largely yet to face proper justice. But the storm that is coming and for which we remain ill prepared is one which promises more destruction, more enmity, more chaos.  We need voting rights, yes.  We need a revitalized response to the world’s “huddled masses” including those huddling due to our own economic and security policies.  At the same time, we need to fix what is wrong with ourselves, not just wrong with “them” but wrong with us, those of us locked away in blue state bubbles, those of us who make fortunes in our urban canyons and then place them beyond the reach of any public good, those of us who flaunt our degrees and other credentials as though they were primarily a sign of virtue rather than of privilege.

One year on, we must insist on accountability for the insurrectionists and their political enablers still prepared to do violence to uphold their own victimizations and conspiracies.  But we must also promote avenues of reconciliation with such people, people every bit as much citizens of this country and, if you will, children of god as we are, people who have reason to fear our largely-unaccountable political and economic hegemonies as much as we fear their weapons and reality-challenged leanings.  Simply put, our vaunted and oft-exported democracy does not work for everyone, if it ever did. We need to narrow those gaps before further eruptions of violence force us to shut down our democratic experiment altogether.  

One thing that seems to be clear as we approach this troubling anniversary – we and those we oppose on ideological grounds have something important in common – the deep trauma we feel courtesy of a global pandemic, climate and economic uncertainty, cultural upheaval and all else that has prompted many to retreat to our isolation chambers and hide under the metaphorical covers until it is time to lash out – with prejudice, with stereotypes, with conspiracies, with dismissiveness, with anger, even with guns.

The attack on the Capitol requires justice with urgency and determination, but it was also a symptom of national angst more than a cause, the flaring of a virus we have been carrying around long before COVID-19.  If we are to avoid the fascist-style outcomes some now predict for us, it is incumbent on we and our institutions – churches, schools, media and more – to help us find the language and actions which can soften hearts and stiffen resolve, the resolve not to give up on ourselves, on each other, nor on the democracy that so many of our ancestors gave their lives to preserve. We know more, it seems, about how to inflame emotions and harden opinions than to search for common ground and reconcile one to another.  And while we may well lament becoming a country allegedly “free” to choose its facts as well as its opinions, the “fact” also remains that we have much work to do – on our country and on ourselves – to fulfill the promise of our national creed.

As much as nationwide vaccination, the need for nationwide reconciliation remains acute. Time is running out for the people of this country to revisit and apply those skills. 

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Race Track: Driving Discrimination from our Ranks, Dr. Robert Zuber

8 Nov
Social diversity is initially threatening but people do adapt over time – new research

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men. Alice Walker

We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust.  Thurgood Marshall

My color is my joy and not my burden. Bebe Moore Campbell

Wherein is the cause for anger, envy or discrimination?  Mahatma Gandhi

But she knows where her ticket takes her. She will find her place in the sun. Tracy Chapman

The Black woman in the South who raises sons, grandsons and nephews had her heartstrings tied to a hanging noose.   Maya Angelou

Excessive praise arises from the same bigotry matrix as excessive criticism. Stefan Molyneux

It is a glorious November Sunday in New York, a day more like late September than the Sunday after a US presidential election.  I had vowed not to say much about the election results, though there is plenty to reflect on, plenty that elicits fair portions of both celebration and caution; with especially deep gratitude to the remarkable poll workers and vote tabulators who ignored and even at times defied a bevy of threats, including from the leadership of the US Postal Service, armed protestors and a spreading pandemic, to deliver what appears by all independent accounts to be free and fair voting for some 150 million US citizens.  

Despite this gift, we know that threats to this democracy, as to others worldwide, have not been laid to rest.  We know that there are tricks left to be played by those still in power (and those heaping “excessive praise” on them), people who understand full well the metaphorical knives that have been drawn by prosecutors and regulators once they leave the sanctuary of the White House.  Those of us who have been holding our breath (at times even our tongue) that this period of political – even criminal – hardball will soon pass recognize that democratic oxygen is still in short supply and that the grievances – legitimate and otherwise – that have driven us to an authoritarian brink are likely only to intensify over the next 10 weeks.

Assuming that a genuine political transition occurs in my country, and that is no foregone conclusion, we anticipate that (what we interpret as) benefits from a new US administration will accrue in the form of climate action and other multilateral efforts to curb the pandemic, reduce social and economic inequalities, disarm weapons and promote sustainable development.  The UN, which has largely refrained from criticism of the US (as it does routinely with all major state powers and funders), can expect a bit of a post-inaugural holiday as dues are paid in full and abandoned political commitments that can readily be reinstated will be.

This US election season also cast light on a UN agenda that is often-discussed but less-often implemented, and that is the concern for inclusion, the basic belief that all should have a say on matters which affect them; the belief that our increasingly inter-dependent world requires diverse voices on a wide range of matters both complex and mundane, including on matters of governance.  In  the US, our own myth of inclusivity has taken a pounding in recent years by those in positions of authority espousing equivalences between “whiteness” and “greatness.” This has resulted in some hard-to-remove stains on our national character including children separated from families and parents afraid to send their children to the grocery store for fear of confrontation with store managers or police; but also ordinary citizens having to fight through what appears to be willful disenfranchisement as polling places were closed, ballots arbitrarily rejected,  and voting lines in some “minority” neighborhoods permitted to stretch for miles.   

While grievances in my country now spring forth like weeds in an abandoned garden, there are some that have deeper roots, louder echoes of oppression, producing more pervasive anxieties.  There is much listening we need to do far beyond our comfort zones, ideological bubbles, evidence-less presumptions and political preferences.  And a special listening post must be dedicated to those whose “ticket” has yet to guarantee them a seat on most every ride, the mothers and grandmothers whose heartstrings are “tied to a hanging noose,” those who live under threat every day that their next venture outdoors will trigger some hate-filled response or even a one-way trip across the nearest border.  

The UN in its own way has tried to keep alive the flickering flame of inclusiveness, insisting with varying levels of success that we find the courage and the means to ensure that those habitually left behind are invited to the head table; that their “ticket” to viability and safety is deemed as valid as any other’s; that their full franchise is both encouraged and protected; that the fruits of development (or a COVID vaccine) are distributed without politics or prejudice; and that the justifications we employ regarding the “causes” of our discriminatory ways are recognized to be largely without merit.

This past week there were several key events (mostly virtual) at the UN that underscored the ever-deepening relationship between inclusiveness and the promotion of peaceful societies. In the Security Council, in the General Assembly, and during events celebrating the increasingly gendered commitments of UN policing and highlighting efforts to abolish capital punishment, the mantra of inclusiveness and an end to discriminatory practices — as well as the incitement which stokes racism, xenophobia and other human behavior we could better live without — were duly reinforced.

Among the primary takeaways from this long and exhausting week included Malaysia’s lament in the General Assembly’s 3rd Committee that the COVID pandemic “has brought out the worst in us,” specifically with regard to racial and religious discrimination. And in a Security Council discussion on “drivers of conflict, Sir Hilary Beckles underscored the tangible steps needed to reinforce this current “age of apology,” while the Prime Minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines reminded delegations that we cannot hope to overcome chasms of distrust and apathy unless we can speed up our current “baby steps”

There was even more of value to digest including UN Special Rapporteur Day’s plea to address and eliminate the “habituation” in many societies that allows people to tolerate discrimination, Mexico’s call for higher levels of government consultation and trust-building with the most vulnerable and marginalized within national borders, and the Netherlands urging of UN member states to be better “truth-tellers” on racial justice.

While one could surely chide the UN for its own “baby steps” regarding its long-delayed success in gender-balancing peace operations and other core security-sector functions, the UN also enables valuable guidance on how hold together a global community which has too often threatened to disengage from one another. Keys to the reconciliation we need include broader-based consultations, higher levels of truth telling and truth-hearing, firmer commitments to address the scourge of incitement in public and online settings, and better protection of spaces where “public goods” (such as a potential COVID vaccine) take precedence over private interests.

But will we listen? The US president-elect’s oft-repeated claim to represent all US citizens — “those who voted for me and those who didn’t” — is a welcome if somewhat conventional claim, albeit with challenges destined to frustrate all but the most sincere and robust of -commitments. We have, regrettably, conspired over many years to create a culture that is long on acrimony and short on listening; long on grievances and conspiracies and short on evidence and compassion; long on self-delusion and short on self-reflection. We are less mindful than it is in our best interest to be, both about the demonizing we do routinely within our own borders, and the violence we inflict — directly or by proxy — beyond them. We simply cannot survive much more of this no matter who occupies the White House.

I want to end on a more hopeful note by referencing last night’s speech by vice-president-elect Kamala Harris. She delivered a strong and humane point of contact with women and men across my country (and likely beyond) for whom “color” has been a burden; a burden for those who have suffered much, often over many generations, but also a burden for those who can see no way out of their own predicaments other than through more threats, more intolerance, more dubious claims of “superiority.”

For Ms. Harris, her own burden seemed, for a glorious moment at least, to have become something more akin to a joy. As she proclaimed with great enthusiasm, “I am the first, but I will not be the last.” She has found her well-deserved place in the sun, but she also recognizes that if that same sun is somehow prevented from shining on all, the ones we like and the ones we don’t, the ones we trust and the ones we don’t, then the democratic values and processes we presume to cherish will eventually and finally slip through our grasp.

Clearly we need more “firsts” in our country and our world, “firsts” emanating from every corner of human community, especially where people are feeling neglected or abandoned, disrespected or humiliated. And as Ms. Harris rightly suggested, we need more “seconds” and “thirds” as well.

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Logic Choppers: Ancient and Contemporary Threats to Civic Virtue, Dr. Robert Zuber

15 Dec

Euripides

You become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.  Aristotle

You can fake virtue for an audience. You can’t fake it in your own eyes.  Ayn Rand

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as ‘moral indignation,’ which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.  Erich Fromm

When the rare chance comes, seize it, to do the rare deed.  Tiruvalluvar

Discourse on virtue and they pass by in droves. Whistle and dance and shimmy, and you’ve got an audience!  Diogenes

Few are those who wish to be endowed with virtue rather than to seem so. Cicero

May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal; that deformed monstrosity — a virtuous woman.  Mary MacLane

To be in Athens is evocative at so many levels, getting in touch with the ways in which we have far transcended the culture of Socrates, the Sophists and later Aristotle, but also the ways in which we have culturally digressed – failing both to learn some of their hard human lessons and to commit to walking a more virtuous path ourselves.

Such lessons (literally and figuratively) washed over me this week in places like the Ancient Agora, where persons of high intellect once debated profound matters but also (in the case of numerous Sophists) put their “wisdom” up for sale to the highest bidder, apparently after having become quite comfortable with the notion that one could make a handsome living by teaching matters of the heart and mind without having to commit much of oneself to such matters. 

For some of these thinkers (both Socrates and Euripides comes to mind) there was something seriously wrong with making money off ideas that the teachers themselves had largely kept at arm’s length. Thus the pursuit of wisdom, and the pursuit of civic virtue through which wisdom is made incarnate, made way to what James Jarrett referred to as “logic choppers,” people who seemed to love the sound of their own voices more than they actually sought to impact a world that had in some sense ossified into “accepted ways” that served only a sub-section of the public for which they were ostensibly intended.

One can argue (and these rhetoricians did endlessly) about matters that we modern sophisticates have largely abandoned – notions of “universal” truth untainted by culture and power (they surely are) as well as the ways in which our senses can deceive us on a regular basis  (they surely do).  But what some of the more sophisticated Sophists also understood is that, our need for permanence notwithstanding, the world is spinning in and out of acceptability.  And thus we have a duty to question what some would prefer to hold aloof from dialogue or critique – “certainties” revolving around their own needs and aspirations in so many instances. 

I was also able to revisit the responsibility, firmly understood by Aristotle and others, to invest part of ourselves in civic space as an indispensable element of civilized living.  Ours is hardly the first age which has largely abandoned civic virtue for ubiquitous distractions or mercenary applications of inherited wisdom.  But the pace of distraction has certainly intensified in our time as has the “value” that nothing matters except what can be bought and sold, what can be counted and commoditized.

What has clearly suffered in too many instances is the time and/or inclination to influence the civic culture that, in our collective absence, has become less thoughtful and more vulgar, and less “user-friendly” than some might have thought possible.  This is not mostly about people like me who have been granted the privileges of time to reflect with virtually-assured policy access on a regular basis. Indeed, this time in Athens has only strengthened my appreciation for other actors; especially for archeologists and art historians, for curators and translators, without whom none of the takeaways from this trip – even my half-baked ones – would have been even remotely possible.  That people such as these have not been properly honored or enabled in civic space is, indeed, a symptom of a greater alienation, a genuine civic malfunction. 

No, the enabling of access to public space, the striving for public effectiveness, isn’t about (or shouldn’t be about) competition for attention or status or “followers.”  It should be more about the willingness to engage and share beyond our zones of comfort, to force ourselves to “weigh in” on the most important social and political matters of our time with all of our cognitive and emotional skill, not just the matters that weigh more privately on our minds and hearts, on our careers and pay stubs.

And those matters are surely related to virtue, a term once deemed so high-minded that it caused some logicians around the Agora to wonder aloud if it could even be taught, a term now largely discredited due to the ways it has been “worn” by the unscrupulous and the mercenary, the vain and the self-righteous.  We all know of too many people who can “whistle and dance” for an audience but can’t reach them in some deeper place than the one that merely desires to be entertained. We also know people for whom virtue is merely a convenient gateway to envy or hate, an excuse to belittle or humiliate, a rationale for some version of “might makes right,” even (certainly in the case of still-too-many women) a means of holding people in place with no commitment to releasing their power.

The lessons to be learned for me from this Athens sojourn are that virtue, to the extent that it is still relevant in modern terms, must be practiced and made visible in public spaces.  It is not, it cannot be reduced to some private possession.  It is neither a jewel to protect nor a club with which to beat others over the head. In this context we must recognize that there are times in every life where we are called upon to repurpose at least part of our precious virtue for the sake of a greater good, to embrace the murkiness of leadership, to be willing to make the difficult decisions knowing that all the relevant facts are not in, while understanding that the decision might cause harm to some in the hope of possibly freeing many others from a worse fate. Such times as these are perhaps rare for most; but they are also emblematic of our still-potent ability to blend successfully the virtue we have cultivated with real-time solutions to real-world crises as they are made known to us. 

The other lesson is one which we have spoken of often in this space: that we are not who we proclaim ourselves to be as much as what we choose to practice in the world.  As Aristotle and others recognized, the path to bravery lies in brave acts; likewise the path to justice lies in just acts.   If there is a path back from the brink of lofty rhetoric that so-often in our time (and in times past) masks paper-thin commitments, it is through a thoughtful and resolute engagement with civic space. This invitation must be directed less at the professional class of do-gooders such as me, but at all who seek it, all who can contribute to making our civic life more civil, all who can still be tempted to join this party that might turn out to be key to keeping our very civilization civil.  

What the great thinkers and logic dissemblers around the Agora apparently could not recognize clearly enough is that the circle of civic concern essential to grow and sustain their vibrant culture was simply too small, certainly too male, and likely too addicted to the “rush” of rhetorical flourish.  We do indeed have the responsibility to teach as some of the ancients made crystal clear; teaching not only the things that will lead to “secure employment,” but the things that will lead to attentive and thoughtful lives, lives of purpose and intentionality, lives that can puncture the veil of civic space and demand a place for themselves.

And perhaps most of all, lives that resonate with those of their teachers who, in every sense of the word, seek to practice what they preach.

 

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Registering Discontent: The UN seeks to renovate a damaged democracy gateway, Dr. Robert Zuber

6 Nov

voting

The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.  John F. Kennedy

Today is Marathon Sunday in New York, a time for fireworks, physical achievements and extraordinary courage by those overcoming significant limitations to push themselves across the finish line.

This is also, of course, the Sunday before the US presidential elections, a marathon of another sort, as sordid a civic affair as I can ever recall.

The disappointment goes deeper than the compromised candidates, the numerous leaks of known and unknown origins, the obsession with fondling that slides past legitimate human rights concerns into reality TV titillation, the ascriptions of “deplorables” that obsess on the specs in the eyes of others but fail to see the logs blinding ourselves.

Seemingly hundreds of reasons exist to not vote for the “other” candidate, but few rationales seem to have been offered to vote “for” someone, for something, for a vision of the future that doesn’t lock us into perpetual mistrust of others, impeding pursuit of our lofty and urgent social projects, including projects on climate health and the prevention of mass atrocities undertaken with the United Nations and other multilateral settings.

Are our candidates to blame for this mess?  Is the media?   Is it our “culture” of violence?  Is it the fault of habituated, self-interested neglect emanating from too many of our political and economic elites?  Is it really just a matter, as the late US President Kennedy (along with many others) seemed to imply, that some people are smart enough to “get it” and others just can’t?

Can it possibly be that simple?   Is “ignorance” really that easy to identify?

And it’s not only here on this corner of our planet.   From El Salvador to the Philippines, people are grasping for ointment to sooth their own deep disappointments, the sense that their lives have not improved as promised, that the system is perpetually tilted away from themselves and their families, that life has been needlessly stressful, needlessly challenged, needlessly insecure, but also deficient in key elements that make life worth the bother – including dimensions of importance and meaning.

And this struggle to discern genuine pathways from disappointment is not getting easier. What is now held to be “true,” apparently, is little more than what you can convince others to be true.   We do it on Facebook.   We do it in politics.  There is too little now that we can place our trust in beyond branding, beyond self-promotion, beyond our “distractions” of preference, beyond the masks that conceal who we really are, what we are fearful of revealing to those close to us, let alone to Wikileaks.

We can do better than this.   We can fix what is broken.  But this clock is winding down.

On Friday, a small segment of the UN community took a short break from controversies over nuclear weapons, the International Criminal Court and the treatment of Syria refugees to ponder ways to “strengthen electoral integrity.”   This timely, frank and urgent discussion was sponsored by the government of Mongolia and involved representatives from International IDEA, the UN Development Programme, the UN Department of Political Affairs and Harvard’s Electoral Integrity Project.

Insights from the session were both numerous and relevant to current circumstances. One observation of note urged us to abandon a “free and fair elections” mantra that implies electoral “perfection” often beyond our capacity to reach. The panelists spoke rather of “credible elections” with robust protection of ballot integrity, the prevention of voter harassments and, perhaps most important, the willingness of the parties to peacefully (if bitterly) recognize and accept election results.

There was also acknowledgment that we make a mistake by at times assuming such a strong link between our “right to vote” and the maintenance of healthy democracies.  Harvard’s Pippa Norris made a strong pitch for oft-neglected “civics education” while also noting that elections (and the growing business of election monitoring) are merely the opening gambit in a process to ensure that all political factions and all stakeholders have a place at the policy table.   How we elect is one crucial matter.  How we work together (or not) in the post-election period is even more important, even more determining of our ability to resolve our conflicts and fix lingering matters such as voter access and security sector intimidation before the start of our next, also likely contentious, election cycle.

Indeed, as the very wealthy in the US are now legally permitted to both recognize and operationalize, voting itself is one of our more modest “influence footprints.”  Indeed, the health of our democratic system is only partially about casting a political preference; but also in part about how closely we listen to and care about each other, how much we are willing to overlook (or even forgive) each other’s flaws, how willing we are to resist substituting a “rooting interest” (at times even at the tip of a gun) for a sincere engagement with political processes from the local to the global, the needs and rights of others (not only the well-positioned) placed on par with our own.

Voting is to democracy what Christmas-only church attendance is to Christianity – helpful in its own way, but by no means an engagement sufficient to the challenges of political or religious life.  As one of the UN panelists on Friday noted rightly, “good elections” are not the same as “good governance.” Both matter greatly, but the latter will always matter more, will always demand more of us.

The claim of one of the US candidates notwithstanding, there appears to be little chance that our upcoming elections will be corrupted from forces beyond the ballot box. The “insider” erosion of our democratic processes, however, is quite another matter.  At the end of this electoral marathon, there will be few roses to hand out as we reach the finish line, little to celebrate beyond the families of the candidates and their closest political confidants.  For the rest of us, a bit of temporary relief perhaps, but also worry that the larger political marathon – the one about rescuing our democracies from ourselves – remains very much stuck in the starting blocks.

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