Gradually our ideals have sunk to square with our practice. Alfred North Whitehead
We dismantle the predator by countering its diatribes with our own nurturant truths. Clarissa Estés
The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without color, pain or past. Lois Lowry
There is no feasible excuse for what we are, for what we have made of ourselves. Iain Banks
In the year 2025, the best don’t run for president, they run for their lives. Stephen King
Only the sweetest of the sweet would bring brownies to the apocalypse. Shelly Crane
Quietly and complacently, humanity was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine. E. M. Forster
Yesterday on the radio, a New York Yankees baseball commentator was sharing a warning issued by the weather service for the arrival of a tropical storm – perhaps something even stronger – set to make its way up the East Coast of the US this week and thus create havoc for more than just baseball. After the warning, another commentator reflected, “Of course a huge storm is coming. It’s 2020.”
Yes its 2020, a year that once upon a time held a great symbolic hope of clean cities and transparent politics, a time when we might have overcome at least some of the burdens of poverty and predation that we as human beings have inflicted on ourselves and the rest of the natural order, a time when our education and our technology would allow more of us the opportunity to pursue lives of meaning that hold the public interest in as high a regard as the personal.
Whatever that vision might have looked like, what we have “made of ourselves” in the run-up to this stormy year lies in stark contrast. Despite some remarkable, heroic stories coming from our hospital wards and the determination for justice seen on the streets of our protests, we have collectively (to use a baseball analogy) lost a few miles-per-hour off our fastball. We have allowed ourselves to be defined more by our grievances than our generosity. We have indulged what one political commentator this week referred to as a “cult of selfishness” that permits too many of us to obsess on what we have lost during this pandemic with little regard for those who never had it in the first place; indeed those for whom every day is a struggle to hold on to something –- or someone – to help navigate life circumstances more akin to apocalypse than quarantine.
We have in many instances misplaced faith in institutions, in governments, in science. We have also lost a good deal of faith in each other, defending more and more a dystopian worldview dominated by predators, rapists and thieves, people seemingly bent on taking from us what we love and inflicting violence that our security sector seems powerless to stop. And this worldview is being reinforced through a good chunk of media brimming with images of cruelty and violence, scenes where the next betrayal is right around the corner, media products where everyone seems to have a gun, where no one can be trusted, and where the screen carnage often exceeds the grisly toll from COVID emanating from our overstretched and under-resourced hospitals.
This current incarnation of our dystopia is hardly the first and it draws on and perpetuates a deep legacy of (often unaddressed) anger, fear and frustration. Like many others I speak with, especially those in the business of attending to global crises, I know how much “darker” my own dream life has become in recent times, full of danger and rejection, images of free-fall and betrayal. There is this sense – in many of us – that circumstances have simply gotten out of control, that our “nurturant truths” have been buried under the current avalanche of pandemic-generated, personal and economic anxiety, that the best we can do is to protect what is ours, if we can, from threats that seem to be lurking around every corner and for which much of our leadership seems to have no solution that doesn’t revolve around incitement, arrests and tear gas.
Indeed, “our ideals have sunk to square with our practice,” and our practice at this moment is not one in which we should be taking particular pride. Our multi-lateral institutions are delivering less than promised on sustainable development (see climate change and food security), on peace and security (see Syria and Yemen), and on the protection of children from violence and abuse. Our religious institutions have largely misplaced their responsibility to reconciliation and thus have too often become one more partisan influence in a bitterly divided social landscape. Our schools continue to be put in the untenable position of solving social problems which should be resolved elsewhere while attempting to counter the current mood which elevates opinion over science and conspiracy over evidence. And our security institutions have to face the brunt of our collective anger while generally refusing accountability for acts which inflame that anger still.
In such a climate, truth-telling is punished and competency is suspect. While we may not have lowered our guard, we have certainly lowered our standards such that the “best” are more likely to be found “running for their lives” than seeking roles in social and institutional leadership.
In my experience, it is the issue of trafficking in persons where our current emotional and policy fault lines are often most clearly exposed. This past Thursday was World Day Against Trafficking in Persons and, at the UN, a bevy of speakers – first responders, victims, diplomats and others – shared testimony on why this particular type of trafficking, this particular manifestation of human predation, simply must receive greater policy attention. Perhaps the most animated of the speakers was the actress (and UN Goodwill Ambassador) Mira Sorvino who noted that the 2020 pandemic has merely slowed down the already much-too-modest efforts to break up trafficking networks and prosecute offenders. She urged, among other things, better training for judges and law enforcement such that they can become “more than paper tigers” in efforts to counter human trafficking and related predatory acts in all their manifestations, traffickers who have routinely demonstrated more flexibility during this pandemic than those seeking to put them out of business.
That same day, one of our partners, WIIS-New York, moderated in an online event focused on the growing threat of (domestic) trafficking as well as kidnapping and other threats lodged against our youth, especially girls. The focus here was less on policy responses and more on “awareness raising” about the prevalence of predators in and around their homes, schools and shops, as well as the grave difficulties parents face in trying to keep their children, especially their girl children, safe.
One can only sympathize with parents who must assume this protective burden within a social fabric that seems to be fraying more and more, a fabric of public institutions less trustworthy and responsive than they might be, with images streaming through their devices in their current “shelter at home” reality of a world that is badly divided and amply frustrated, where leadership often seems more interested in stoking fires than extinguishing them, and where capacities to apprehend predators and rehabilitate their victims are generally inadequate, sometimes shockingly so.
And yet, part of our current dystopian mind-set involves perceiving threats in all sorts of dark corners where they might not actually exist and simultaneously under-stating our ability to contribute to remediation beyond the boundaries of our personal space. Parents must protect, full stop. And yet so much seems out of their control, not only with respect to trafficking, but regarding the larger economic, health and ecological threats that might well impact children far beyond this stressful year. How do parents protect without paranoia or without imposing a life for children devoid of “color or pain?” How do parents nurture children to be savvy about threats and not overwhelmed by them, to rely on their wits but also to seek help when those wits are unsure? How do they protect children from danger without protecting them from life?
There are no firm answers but many helpful stories. Indeed, one of the most hopeful presentations of the UN’s week was made by a former trafficking victim from Colombia, a woman who suffered, as a girl, grave abuses from which her family was unable to offer adequate protection. But she and her family persevered and, quite remarkably, she is now director of a trafficking-focused NGO in her country, making protective and healing services available to victims that were not available in her own time of need. “We have come a long way,” she proclaimed. Indeed, the same could surely be said about her, a stunning modeling of human resilience and healing that we need more of in these times.
But sadly, we have collectively not come such a long way as we might otherwise have hoped. Especially in this pandemic year we have seemingly given up too much ground to negativity and cynicism; we have allowed a dystopian worldview to take up residence in our souls, thus undermining so many of our common causes. If this year is to be known for anything other than acrimony and suspicion, of lives needlessly facing material ruin, languishing in makeshift morgues, or frozen in fear of any and all unknowns, we would do well to assess the impact of this violent, chaotic darkness on our most personal choices and then vow to contribute more to healing and reconciliation, more than merely “bringing brownies to the apocalypse.”
Even now, even in 2020 we have our “nurturant truths” to share, truths that can help restore institutions, dismantle predators, inspire children and fortify communities. There will never be a better time to share them.
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