Tag Archives: elderly

Humane Harvest: A Labor Day Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

5 Sep
Primary view of object titled 'Wall Street Banquet, Court of Fiestas, Corridor of the Agrarian Revolution'.
Diego Rivera “Wall Street Banquet,” via UNT Digital Library

The air was hot, vivid and breathless–a final fierce concentration of the doomed and dying summer. William Faulkner

People who traveled for so many miles through such horrific conditions in order to find work cannot accurately be portrayed as lazy benefit-scroungers. Patrick Kingsley

The first thing that a new migrant sends to his family back home isn’t money; it’s a story.   Suketu Mehta

Every commodity, beneath the mantle of its pricetag, is a hieroglyph ripe for deciphering, a riddle whose solution lies in the story of the worker who made it and the conditions under which it was made. Leah Hager Cohen

Harvests are a time to remember your sacrifice. William Kamkwamba

The sun was made to light worthier toil than this. Henry David Thoreau

I’ve always been amused by the contention that brain work is harder than manual labor. I’ve never known a man to leave a desk for a muck-stick if he could avoid it. John Steinbeck

In the US we are in the midst of another Labor Day weekend, a time less to honor labor than to forget about it if just for a time.  One more drive with the family, one more picnic with the neighbors before everyone settles in to the routines and responsibilities of fall. For many in this part of the world, this is the end of a summer with many desperate to carve out spaces to reunite with long-isolated friends and relatives or to visit some of the places which inspire mind and soul, places which remind us all that we labor on a planet full of wonder, a planet very much worth more of our care than we currently offer.

While my own brain is still in fog recovery mode from a bout of Covid, it has not stopped appreciating all of the tasks that need to be accomplished in this world for my own life to have the unearned quality it enjoys.  For all of the inefficiencies brought about by (in this country for sure) crumbling infrastructure, bad health choices and off-the-charts levels of personal and communal grievance, there are many millions of people who dutifully teach our children to read, harvest and transport the crops that will sustain us through a long winter, who keep our trains on the tracks and our planes in the air, who ensure that (Flint and Jackson notwithstanding) water is safe from the tap, and who perform a myriad of other tasks whose reliability is perhaps even more essential as levels of social complexity increase and levels of trust in leadership and each other head decidedly in another direction.

I am grateful for all of this and more, even if appreciation sometimes wanes when the trains are running late yet again, my morning berries have been thoroughly colonized by fruit flies or when some other “first world problem” has consumed way more of my conscious life than should ever be the case.  Moreover, as retirement comes more sharply into focus, assessment takes its place alongside gratitude as a major consequence of a life lived long, if not always well.   For after all the writing and monitoring, the mentoring and challenging, the endless stream of houseguests and church guests, and the equally endless errands and other planning that such requires, what has come of all this?  What exactly was accomplished?  What piles were moved?  What policies were delivered to constituencies in a form they could recognize, beyond consensus resolution texts and mere promises of relief?

At this point, I honestly can’t say as I know.  We Global Action folks acknowledge the generosity of our friends and donors and cherish their belief that, at least episodically, we were able to help them preserve their own hopefulness, their own sense that despite all that we know, things are not as bleak for their progeny as they sometimes appear.  We know that many dozens of our interns are out in the world doing good work, often tilting at their own windmills, but also helping people to move towards possibility they might otherwise have forgotten they had.  We also know of the many groups at local level who we were able to help find a place at the table of global policy even if more than a few wondered at some point if the investment was worth the energy. We have worked really hard for many years, and it’s not over for us, but it’s also not been enough.  It was never going to be enough.

And yet despite the ephemeral nature of much of what we have done together, the “outcomes” of such mostly akin to fine sand slipping through slender fingers, there is a certain status (for want of a better word) which has long accompanied this journey.  We get less respect than we used to get, including in UN spaces, but we still get more than our portion.   We get more than the health care workers who endure horrific stresses to extend the lives of people who haven’t done enough to extend their own.  We get more than farm workers who labor in hot fields day after day so that our supermarket shelves can boast some faux abundance, workers with minimal access to health care let alone shade amongst the crops, workers who in many cases do not enjoy sufficient legal protections to allow them to visit family members whom they might not have seen in a generation, allowing them to share stories in person after long and sorrowful absences.  

And we get more than the teachers poised to receive a new crop of students, teachers who seem now to be suffering through one indignity after another, yet more assaults on an already-daunting profession by overly-anxious and/or entitled parents and by ideologues in legislative settings who have taken an often-warped view of “God’s will” as the pretext for curriculum which denies large portions of our history, establishes one version of faith as the “fertility cult” of choice, and ignores the pluralism in which a goodly portion of my own  society’s value to the world is grounded.

On this Labor Day weekend, we must admit that we live amidst a landscape of devalued labor, a landscape from which thousands of caring and devoted teachers and health workers flee their now-utterly politicized professions of choice, more and more people are plotting a permanent if perhaps unsustainable escape from their minimum-wage tedium, and those participating in the “great resignation” are only slowly finding ways to use their time on earth which do not involve months and years of soul-crushing, market driven, repetitive labor.  Moreover, we have not reformed our social status system beyond athletes, celebrities and political leadership, nor have we found the means to create genuinely multi-generational collaborations which allow younger people to gain their footing in a world they are destined to manage, while also allowing we older people facing our own inevitable decline to contribute (even sacrifice) meaningfully beyond the end of our formal employment.

As we in the northern hemisphere face the end of our “doomed and dying summer,” we also continue to face a crisis of labor – of people underutilized, too-often purchased and too-little respected, of status deserved but rarely conferred, people who now broadly threaten to withhold in one form or another the skills and engagement we simply cannot manage without.  As we conclude our seasonal and well-earned trips to the beach or mountains, and as folks like me look back over decades of work which accomplished barely a portion of what had been hoped for, it is clear that the multiple pains of our labor have yet to be adequately addressed.  We will need to more effectively respect and then harvest many skills of labor from all ages and backgrounds if we are to successfully climb out of the holes of acrimony and mistrust, of ethnocentrism and climate impacts, that we have dug for ourselves.  I am at a loss to see another viable path forward.

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Star Wars: Guidelines for Reaching our New Normal, Dr. Robert Zuber

17 May

Evola 2

The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise.  Maya Angelou

It is hard work to control the workings of inclination and turn the bent of nature; but that it may be done, I know from experience. Charlotte Brontë

Something – the eternal ‘what’s the use?’ – sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis.  Gustave Flaubert

Where there is not community, trust, respect, ethical behaviors are difficult for the young to learn and for the old to maintain.  Robert Greenleaf

Even eighty-odd is sometimes vulnerable to vanity.  L.M. Montgomery

The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes. Frank Lloyd Wright

We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Samuel Ullman

One of the challenges for me of writing these weekly messages is resisting the temptation to focus on issues of national interest rather than on human interest or, as my organizational mandate would suggest, the multilateral interest.

My own country is completely at odds with itself now.  We attack the very people trying to save lives and manage a generation-shifting pandemic.   We have allowed the stresses of the moment, egged on by some tone-deaf leadership, to justify the release of demons we would have done better to keep in quarantine – not only those flashing guns and symbols of intolerance in front of cameras and legislatures, but also those making fortunes off the misery of others, going so far as to consciously divert resources meant for struggling families to line their own pockets yet again.

In this time of viral threat, we have created no common symbols of mourning for the many persons we have lost, no places of public esteem for those who have honored their oaths and thrown themselves into the most harrowing medical emergencies. Our leadership misrepresents the times and its challenges, leaving us all to double down on the mistrust of institutions – and each other – that defines our era in many respects.

And neither has this been a moment of ringing endorsement for multilateral alternatives.   The World Health Organization is being scapegoated, UN peacekeepers struggle under external threats and mandate confusion in several global regions, the UN’s general budget is under strain –reeling from decisions by key member states to withhold assessed contributions — and the UN’s humanitarian relief functions are experiencing both resource limitations and access barriers that make it difficult to bring aid to the millions suffering under violence that we seem almost powerless to prevent.

And the eminent Security Council remains a place of some paralysis, consumed by big-power stalemates over COVID origins, Israeli annexation plans, remnants of the Iranian nuclear agreement, unabated weapons flows to Libya, and much more.   Council members, at the direction of their national capitals, have some successes to which they can point – notably in Sudan and Colombia.   But the presence of so many unresolved conflicts – and this at a time when the global public is becoming more restless, not less – raises the specter of new agenda items for the Council on top of those it has already demonstrated an inability to resolve in a timely and effective manner.

As with our own projects and ambitions, some of the Council’s under-baked mandates are related to the ways in which it does its business.  An as was the case on Friday, the Council has been willing to take up issues related to working methods, understanding at least in part that how we do our business is as integral to our success as what the goals of that business are.   In other words, the manner in which we go about reaching for the stars has much to do with whether or not those stars become attainable.

As is typical for these “methods” sessions, the Council brought in briefers who are well-known and reliable to their interests, briefers armed with suggestions such as improvements in the system of “penholders” and sanctions committees, of better preparatory processes for incoming elected members, of restraints on the length of statements made in the open chamber, of avoiding what one called “adopt and forget” peacekeeping mandates, of working more closely with other UN entities to keep the Council from becoming, as China noted, the policy equivalent of a “grocery store.”

But at best, and despite calls from the UK and others for the Council to “lead with innovation and urgency,” the day’s truth lay more in Vietnam’s statement (on behalf of other elected members) — that the COVID crisis has “laid bare” the current limitations of this Council.  It simply is not the case, as one briefer suggested on Friday, that the global public judges the Council on the number and content of its resolutions.  No.  We judge the Council on the practical impact of those resolutions, on the Council’s willingness and ability to insist that policy text results in tangible, improved conditions for the many millions who yearn for relief from war, famine and disease.   These resolutions should be understood as opening gambits towards genuine change, not as ends in themselves and certainly not as excuses to downgrade “seized” into some version of unresponsive.

Policy differences aside, there is a bit of “heart sinking” for me in much of the multilateral scrutiny that we try to perform.  Simply put, I can’t resist expecting more of the people making these decisions in these precarious times, people who, too often, are indulgent of the changes they are willing to make but not of the changes that they need to make.  In such a scenario, we can likely maintain some measure of our collective ambition but have lost in large measure our capacity to “reach the hearts” of people who need to believe in us – our goals and methods — more than they do at present if the stars in our firmament of peace and sustainable development are ever to be reached.

I have considerable sympathy for diplomats who are trying to steer an effective policy course amidst severe budget constraints and conflicting messaging from national capitals.  And I have particular compassion for those who have toiled in the fields of peace and human rights, of humanitarian relief and sustainable development, for so many years and who now find that work not only unfulfilled but considerably unraveled by a virus and the selfishness, corruption and ethno-centrism which it has unleashed.

Maybe we simply didn’t do things in the best way.  Maybe our own working methods have been as flawed as those of the institutions we critique.  Fair enough.  But as some in our world want desperately to get back to “normal,” in some instances at the point of a gun, we who have lived a long while under the shadow of different promise need to model a more honest, thoughtful and courageous way forward – to endorse ambition, yes, but not the folly and vanity that often accompany it, follies which for us can include a lack of both mindfulness and the practical respect and compassion that can reassure people that leadership is more than high-sounding words in elite settings uncontaminated by the ills that affect large swaths of global communities.

While life does indeed become more beautiful for some as they age, for others it portends grave physical and economic limitations as well as for those of us in policy criticism from the young who feel – and not without cause – that any abandonment by us of our ideals for the world and its peoples, or any indulgence by us in “what’s the use” cynicism, only serves to make their work to reach a new and better “normal” that much more challenging.  This we cannot, should not do.

We are in trouble now to be sure, but there is opportunity and possibility – and hearts looking for connection and reassurance — still within our reach.  We who have long been in this work have a special responsibility to reflect and encourage, to reach out respectfully to those poised to take over for us as well as those whom we may have overlooked over the years. And we must do this as best as we are able without malice, without vanity or ego, without “wrinkled souls,” modifying our wisdom to context but not abandoning the ideals that have inspired us, albeit unevenly, over our lifespan.

Together, we still have what it takes to “control the workings of inclination” that are, in this moment, bringing us to the edge of an economic, health and rights precipice.  And those of us who have been at this for generations still have a role to play in avoiding that cliff.  But as we age, roles and methods must shift.  Our task now is to demonstrate the will to make the changes that we need to make, not only those we are willing to make.

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