Tag Archives: healing

10,000 Steps: The Security Council searches out a health regimen, Dr. Robert Zuber

21 Sep

Are we being good ancestors?  Jonas Salk

The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.  Ray Bradbury

Carve your name on hearts, not tombstones. Shannon Alder

It’s the greatest legacy you could ever leave your children or your loved ones: The history of how you felt. Simon Van Booy

The songs of our ancestors are also the songs of our children. Philip Carr-Gomm

This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance. Victor Hugo

The marks humans leave are too often scars. John Green

The planting of a tree is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble. George Orwell

They realize the no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit. Abraham Verghese

What you create today might not go viral. It might not even be noticed. But years from now, it may be the seed someone else needed to survive. Lawrence Nault

Lead in a way worth remembering. Farshad Asl

The real currency of life isn’t money—it’s meaning. And meaning compounds.  Narendra Tomar

On Thursday, the Security Council under the presidency of the Republic of Korea, held its 10,000th meeting in the Council chamber. The theme for this meeting was the situation in the Occupied Territories, a fitting item given how long it has been on the Council agenda, and how little sustainable policy success it has enjoyed over that history.

This 10,000th event itself was highlighted by several delegations including elected members Korea, Guyana and Pakistan, part of the contingent of 10 elected members frustrated by a US veto of a resolution it deemed “slanderous” on the situation in Gaza backed by all E10 members and 4 of the 5 permanent members.  Such frustration emanating from the E10 continues to build as resolutions from the Council are blocked by veto, unimplemented due to a lack of political will, or watered down by policy disagreement to such a degree that their implementation potency remains in serious doubt. 

As one of a handful of groups which have prioritized Council monitoring, we have watched these sessions for over a generation, muffling our share of gasps as the Council failed again and again to embrace,  what Denmark called this week the “decency to act,” or when the Council acts in a manner already compromised and virtually certain to inadequately addressing global threats with the determination and foresight required.

The Council Chamber, of course, is not always given to policy inadequacy, nor is it the only forum in which Council activity occurs. Even the best resolutions require careful and often protracted coordination from penholders and other diplomats assigned to the Council.  Moreover, the Council has mandated subsidiary organs – including sanctions regimes and more thematic considerations such as Children and Armed Conflict – which rightly consume Council attention though largely via the efforts of elected members.

But the Chamber remains the place where peace and security crises and potential resolutions have some transparency, and what is shown to the world which still bothers to care is not always hopeful.  Such was in good measure the case on Thursday as the will of a single permanent member defiantly nullified the desire of Council colleagues for a cease fire, humanitarian access and hostage release for Gaza.  But it was also a rare moment of emotional transparency for many Council members used to more often than not showing off their policy chops mostly by repeating, sometimes word for word, the briefings carefully provided by SRSGs and other Secretariat officials. 

This time there was no briefing to copy, nothing to help convince colleagues and viewers that they know what they were talking about.  But they all knew – about the carnage that they failed to either prevent or end, about the numerous violations of international law which continue with impunity, about the sullied reputation of a Council which cannot or will not uphold its core Charter principles, a Council that will not do what is needed to preserve its own reputation but, much more important, to bring an end to the traumas inflicted on children from Gaza to Sudan, children multiply displaced and deliberately starved, children who may survive the immediate carnage but who will bear scars for life and who will surely will be future candidates for resistance to a world which now abandons them in multiple ways.

Amidst all the pomp and circumstance surrounding the Council, the endless honoring of diplomats and governments, the predictable reading of statements often written by officials not actually present in the Chamber, it is the lack of growth and maturity that is so puzzling, so frustrating, so indicative in these dark times of a failure to heed a “heal thyself” dictum.  As much as we acknowledge the potential still present in Council spaces and the efforts of diplomats, we must also share the concern of a body increasingly in its own way and, more to the point too often in the way of positive change for constituents as well.  Whether we like to admit it or not, when a resolution is passed there are perhaps millions of global constituents who want to believe – need to believe – that something materially is about to change for the better in their circumstances, their communities.  When this does not follow, it is not clear that any amount of calling attention to vetoes and other “constraints” highlighted by Pakistan and others on Thursday will appease these constituents.  How could it possibly?

Most delegations including Pakistan clearly understand this.  Indeed, among the moving statements on Thursday, Algeria seemed to capture the moment best (and arouse the ire of Israel most directly).  The Ambassador didn’t pretend to have answers that the Council given its current limitations would be willing to accept.  Instead, in an all-too-rare moment, he simply asked for forgiveness, forgiveness for not being able to defend Gazan doctors, journalists, aid workers, entire extended families. Forgiveness for the famine which spreads as we write and which the Council has done little to stop.

As moving as this was for us and surely for some others, we must remind ourselves that forgiveness is part of a two-step process, the latter of which is amendment of life — that determination to pay attention to patterns of inadequacy and dysfunction followed by the resolve to break those patterns.  At this moment  it is unclear whether this Council can overcome its current constraints or whether the Ambassadors gathered around the oval would even be authorized to jettison the limitations which undermine both the Council’s legacy and a meaningful chance at a peaceful and prosperous life for the children of the world.

There are ongoing, some would say “endless” efforts within the UN to “reform” the Council mostly focused on the veto and the Council member “makeup,” searching over and over for consensus on how to make the Council more representative of the modern world. But this protracted process runs the danger of largely reinforcing the Council’s current culture, configurations and state interests. The “culture” of the Council, the culture which must be healed so that is can better effect the healing of others, remains largely off the radar. Perhaps this concern would be considered an “insult” to states. However, to fail to heal the culture of this divided and acrimonious Council could well be seen — and we would wish to do so — as an insult to global constituents bearing burdens which none should bear alone.

There is a belief among some medical authorities that walking 10,000 steps is key to preserving and restoring human health.  It is unclear at this moment that 10,000 meetings have resulted in a healthier Council, one which is committed to “carving its name on hearts and not tombstones,” one which understands the abiding need to touch the lives of people with pressing needs which transcend national interests, one which grants honor and attention to others which it seems endlessly to demand for itself, one which incarnates the understanding that we are merely caretakers in the transition from what we inherited to what we bequeath to others.

The Council, needless to say, is not required to listen to me or any other NGO voice, and it is not clear that it is equipped to do much more than patronize those who do speak out, even if requested by the Council to do so. But I’m pretty confident about at least one thing; if the Council fails to grow into its responsibilities, to fix what needs to be fixed and heal what needs to be healed, it will have lost for good the attention and trust of states and constituents long before its next 10,000 meeting milestone.

Tags: ,

Burden Sharing: A Mother’s Day Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

12 May

What we don’t need in the midst of struggle is shame for being human. Brené Brown

To heal is to touch with love that which we previously touched with fear. Stephen Levine

The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems.” My bones said, “Write the poems.”  Andrea Gibson

There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds. Laurell K. Hamilton

That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.  Khaled Hosseini

May your forgiveness still the hunger of the wound. John O’Donohue

The mistakes of the world are warning message for you.  Amit Kalantri

The wind will rise; we can only close the shutters.  Adrienne Rich

One of the highlights of my recent trip to South Africa was meeting Fr. Michael Lapsley, the founder of the Institute for Healing of Memories (www.healing-memories.org) a program which has resonated with communities from Durban to Detroit.  Fr. Lapsley has overcome his own trauma from violence inflicted during the transition from apartheid to a reasonably functional democracy.  He has turned his own affliction into ministry, helping mothers and others who carry great burdens through their lives to lay some of those burdens down, to swap out the toxic effects of trauma for healing and forgiveness, recovering some of the energy that their families and the world at large often require of them. 

This engagement with the Institute, which I hope will continue to develop, is the latest iteration of an organizational  priority to better balance policy and personal engagements which already includes work on Servant Leadership with Dr. Robert Thomas and on Inner Economy with Dr. Lisa Berkley.  While they differ somewhat in focus and intellectual underpinnings, all convey the truth that we have collectively struck an unholy alliance between policy and technology which largely bypasses dimensions of character, compassion and service which are essential attributes  of societies which refuse to give in to hatred, grievance and entitlement, which refuse to abandon the aspiration of a world in which humans and other manifestations of the created order can live in a better harmony, can nurture and celebrate the commons instead of seeking to control it, can cease the degrading march of green and public spaces into private ownership and exploitation.  

What does this have to do with Mother’s Day?  Several things I believe.

Amidst the annual panic to sign cards and buy grocery store flowers, amidst and annual blitz of commercial propaganda selling the aspiration of “all” women for the gift of diamonds and other jewelry, it is worth remembering that the person deemed most responsible for this annual faux tribute to mothers, Anna Jarvis, was so put off by the superficiality of the day – cards instead of conversations, diamonds instead of dialogue – that she petitioned to have the annual event which was designed to honor her own mother revoked.  But by that time, this latest in a sequence of transactional honoring had caught on. We had eagerly purchased another surface, created yet another opportunity to dive into a few hours of recognition which ought not to be calendar-induced nor satisfied by sparkling pieces of pressurized coal. 

Many of the mothers associated with programs such as Healing of Memories don’t have any reason to anticipate or welcome this annual bling.  They often bear the scars of a difficult and demanding  life, scars which many are determined to bear with dignity lest the children they seek to protect would have their own enthusiasm for life dampened by the struggles of their parents. These are some of  the mothers determined as they are able to “touch with love” even as the winds howl beyond the shutters and the mistakes of the world beat at their very doors. These are some of the mothers determined to live poetic lives even as hurts are deep and inspiration remains beyond reach.  These are some of the mothers for whom the storms all-too-rarely relent but who nevertheless accept the responsibility to quell the fear of those around them without exposing for family or public view the fear also raging inside themselves.

The three hopeful  program priorities of Healing of Memories – prevention, healing and empowerment – convey a complicated message for participating mothers, for all mothers really.   Yes, mothers know well of prevention, the injections that prevent childhood deaths, the clothes that buffer the hostile elements, the diets which help to guarantee proper physical development, the out-loud reading that paves the way for future learning.  But beyond the walls of domicile, there are threats of even greater consequence, threats from more sophisticated weapons and degraded agriculture, threats from the serendipity of climate disruptions and the hatred of humans given license to grow even more toxic.  These we must also do much more to prevent at the level of policy and governance if the prevention undertaken by mothers as mothers is truly to be honored.

And what of healing? Yes we can bind the scrapes of children as we are able.  And if we are fortunate enough we can enlist medical professionals to help ensure that the sicknesses of children don’t become chronic, even life threatening.  But children become physically and emotionally disabled. In some parts of the world they die in shocking, horrific numbers.  And in all parts of the world, children face disappointment, lonliness and heartache.  And they look to parents – to mothers – for succor and solace, for some modicum of healing from people who often struggle with their own wounds, their own pain, their own disappointment and heartache.  What a former teacher of mine, Henri Nouwen, referenced often (via Carl Jung) as “wounded healers” applies to many more of us, certainly many more mothers, than we generally acknowledge.

We must become clearer with ourselves about just how vulnerable a species we can be – how long the distance often is between the wounds we inflict and their healing.  We should also be clear about our collective creation of a world with many ways to inflict damage and fewer ways to heal what we have inflicted.  And so we must follow the inclinations of those mothers seeking to become more accomplished healers, to invite unburdening rather than trying (largely in vain) to seal off our wounds, trying to sequester them in those deep places away from public scrutiny or even consciousness itself, forgetting that the pain of children – much like our own — will eventually find the means to “claw its way out.”

Ultimately, we must find a more effective way to turn off the spickets of destruction and abuse that complicate and undermine healing in all its forms.  We must do more in our policy engagements to ensure broader spaces where the bombs no longer fall, the storms no longer rage, the relentless soiling of our own habitats is at least suspended, making spaces more conducive to healing, to reconciliation, even to empowering young people and others to face the strong winds and invest more of themselves in making a better life, not only a better living. We have learned much from mothers about how this is done, how they inspire more courageous, empowered and intentional living despite the “hungry wounds” they often experience in their own souls and bodies.

This burden sharing is what we strive to better achieve but also to better honor, this day and every day.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Power Grid: Accompanying the Traumatized and Those who Serve Them, Dr. Robert Zuber

22 Aug
See the source image

To know someone who thinks & feels with us, & who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden. Goethe

When the remembering was done, the forgetting could begin.  Sara Zarr

The ripples of the kind heart are the highest blessings of the universe.  Amit Ray

You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.  Amy Tan

I am weary of this frail world’s decay.  Murasaki Shikibu

I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.  Albert Schweitzer

When you don’t think you can, hold on.  James Frey

While riding the subway to and from our shared office this week, I noticed a new public service announcement among the placards which adorn each of the cars.   This one read, “connections are stronger than addiction.”  

This reminded me of what has now been years of accumulated evidence from neuro-biology that humans are, indeed, “hardwired for connection,” that as Dr. Amy Banks and colleagues put it over a decade ago, before the onset of a death-scattering pandemic and the systemic degrading of our politics, “we need to get back to the real basics of having relationships be at the center of our meaning.”

The implications of her work (and others in her field) lie far beyond the realm of the drug and alcohol addictions which were the sub-text of the subway messaging.  Indeed, one can make the case that our “addictions” are, perhaps even more than they always have been, much broader and more pervasive than substances alone: the stubborn habits of the heart that bring pain to ourselves and others but that we feel powerless to change; the ideas and values which we have allowed to ossify into conspiracy, becoming more and more divorced from any human realities they might once have been intended to address; the defensiveness that rises to the surface at the slightest provocation, indeed often absent any provocation at all; the paranoia which comes from social isolation (often now self-imposed) and which attempts to project on to others a malevolence which has often taken shape first within our own souls.

As at least some have been reminded during this seemingly endless pandemic, connection remains a good portion of the cure for what now ails us.  Unfortunately, it has also become uncomfortably clear across lines of age, of gender, of race, of culture, that we simply don’t know enough about each other — or perhaps even care to know — to nuance our responses to the complexities of other lives, to see the flaws but also the promise, to appreciate the contributions more than the inconveniences, to resist the rush to judge and to punish which often serves interests far darker than any alleged nobility of justice.   We have “wearied of the world’s decay” in part because our experience of that decay is less and less first-hand, a product of images that tell us less than we think they do, as well as accounts from diverse media that tell us mostly what some think we want to hear or, perhaps more to the point, that share only what they think “our hearts will allow us to know.”

If as the neuro-biologists increasingly accept, that we are “hardwired to connect,” then much of our current behavior constitutes a dangerous denial of our very essence, a particularly distressing challenge to those who seek to keep connection at the heart of their own life’s mission, but also for those have suffered in greater measure and who understand the degree to which the “ripples of kind hearts” are indispensable to their own healing, indeed to the full restoration of their own capacity for kindness and compassion. 

This week at the UN, amidst some appropriate hand-wringing over the fall of Afghanistan and its implications for everything from women’s rights to state corruption, amidst the latest crises of high winds and shifting earth heaped upon the already-traumatized people of Haiti, we gratefully joined with others in modes of reverence, mourning and connection.  At a series of events honoring the sacrifices of peacekeepers, UN field personnel and humanitarian workers (as part of World Humanitarian Day), an array of speakers paid homage to those who choose to place their life energies at the service of others, to stay the course and “hold on” when others would be tempted to flee the scene or lift their hands in desperate frustration, those who choose to remain at their demanding posts, insisting as one staffer boldly said this week  that threats from terrorist violence, a pandemic and climate-related factors often closing in around them are simply not enough to “deter humanitarian vocations,” are not enough to distract their attention from those “traumatized from attacks” including women made widows and children made orphans by weapons, famine or other forms of abuse.

While many in the audience resonated with the words of UN High Commission Bachelet honoring this “work of a lifetime,” to accompany survivors and raise our voices on their behalf, many also recognized that this is now, in places from Yemen to Tigray, much easier said than done.  Yes, we must learn better how “to support each other” along life’s journey.  Yes we must, as SG Guterres notes this week, place more services at the disposal of those facing unimaginable “heartbreak.” And yes, we must continue to honor and support the sometimes-incomprehensible risks taken each and every day by humanitarian workers in conflict zones — but this requires the rest of us to ensure an end to the violence which complicates every facet of their life-preserving work and which also claims the lives of far too many of the workers themselves well before their time. 

And then there were the discussions focused on the survivors themselves, survivors of often horrific terrorist violence which represented, as noted by the Iraqi Ambassador to the UN in Geneva, “attacks on humanity itself.”  As USG Voronkov acknowledged, there are times when our preoccupation with fighting terrorism “obscures our view of the victims who need more from us.” Indeed it can also obscure from view the testimony of victims who know for themselves what they need in order to overcome the trauma that generally lingers longer than they could possibly have imagined, trauma that, as one said, can change life dramatically “through no fault of your own.”

And what did they say they most need?   For starters, they need people around them who can resist the temptation to forget, to forget about the dark side of the what this world can continue to offer up once the remembrances have concluded and the symbols of honor have been stored away for another year.  Moreover, survivors of terror, or mass atrocity violence, or sudden displacement or tragic personal loss recognize that the pain can never be healed through social isolation, can never be restored by allowing personal trauma to metastasize into a life force, an addiction if you will, one which denies the core of our biological essence.  It was so encouraging to hear one survivor after another call for “platforms for healing and connection,” for “powerful victims’ networks” which can help restore something close to full functionality in this challenging world.  It was also encouraging to note the support expressed by survivors for the humanitarian workers who so often stand in courageous attention between those vulnerable persons for whom “time seems to be running out” and the person-centered services that can help them re-engage with more of the life which can still be experienced in many places as a kind of “inhabited garden.”

For those who doubt that lives of trauma can become lives of healing and purpose, for those who believe that the deep pain of violence and abuse is forever consigned to impede and isolate, we end as we began, with words from Amy Banks and her neuro-biology colleagues, those who understand that lasting change in our distraught human community is still possible despite all contrary evidence.  The key to this change, they make clear,  is within us, in the quality and steadfastness of our “motivation and interest in making different choices which will stimulate new areas of the brain and re-wire us.”  And as they know, and as the survivors of violence and abuse we heard from this week and those humanitarians who accompany them also know, there is no choice more impactful to healing and change than the choice to connect, to widen our circles, to reinvest in what we think we know of others including those we have already “given up on,” to have the courage let whatever kindness we have at our disposal flow to every corner of life that needs it, to refute the lonely conspiracy and paranoia that a life of isolation and distance is prone towards, to affirm what is most natural to us rather than investing in what are often vast quantities of energy required to keep connection buried under layers of resentment, suspicion and grievance.

Every once in a while in our UN spaces, the traumatized and victimized among us serve up reminders to those of us who seek to “re-wire” our national and global institutions, to both recover the core of why they were founded in the first place and help them meet current expectations. One such reminder is directed squarely at us; that we also can recover and nourish that capacity at the core of our human condition, the connection that alone can ease the deepest pain, stem chronic suffering, vanquish isolation, and restore that kind, human presence which can steadfastly rewire our institutions and refresh relationships with those they are mandated to serve.

The good news is that we still have what it takes to do this, though we must resolve to return to the path of connection without delay.  The longer we deny who we truly are, the longer we bury the power of our own hardwiring, the longer we will have to deal with the consequences of people and institutions being less, sometimes far less, than we need them to be.

Tags: , , , , ,

Starting Blocks: Resolving to Heal in this Desecrated Moment, Dr. Robert Zuber

3 Jan
See the source image

When you can tell your story, and it doesn’t make you cry, you know you have healed. Helen Keller

Your doubt may become a good quality if you train it.  It must become knowing.  It must become critical.   Rainer Maria Rilke

In an interactive, decentralized world, the voiceless do not need someone to be their voice. They need a megaphone.  Heather Marsh

We are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land.   Wendell Berry

There should be only one political ideology and that is good governance.  Amit Abraham

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

Not everyone is able to show courage, but human decency must be demanded of every person.  Andrzej Duda

We have turned the calendar on a year that for many around the world was filled with uncertainty and sorrow, people not knowing where their next income was coming from – and in too many instances their next meal – and having to bid farewell to loved ones through glass barricades or over Facetime, if they were even fortunate enough to have windows or internet access. Moreover, our politics also remained a source of sorrow as elections were contested, weapons were drawn, repression was authorized and groups which barely managed a truce amongst themselves found even those thin bonds severed.

Celebrations at the end of this discouraging year were themselves muted this time around, keeping many more of us at home and just perhaps evoking a bit of thoughtfulness about how this new year might possibly look different from the last one.  The early returns are not entirely promising.  While many wish for the flipping of the calendar to represent the flipping of our collective karma, we know that most of what ailed us in 2020 is being dragged across the starting line for 2021.  Pandemic infections and new variants continue to spread more quickly than people can be vaccinated. In the US, conspiratorial narratives regarding our presidential election outcome are being manipulated by ambitious politicians and could well lead to armed violence in the weeks to come.   And what surely stands as our greatest common threat – a warming planet – continues to melt icecaps, pressure biodiversity and accelerate human displacement.

These desecrations of our planet, our politics, even at times our very humanity are enough to make anyone cry.  Over this last year, they’ve been known to prompt that reaction in me as well.

Clearly we have much to heal this year, in the world and in ourselves.  Thankfully some of the raw material needed to facilitate that healing is already in place – the courage of front-line health and humanitarian workers, the skill of scientists and doctors, the determination of people to stay engaged with each other despite the obvious impediments, the insistence of citizens in many countries that “decency” still has an important place in our politics and our communities, the many projects at local level which are seeking to reset our relationship with the land and its life forms, people of all backgrounds dedicated to halting the senseless desecration of the eco-systems which now struggle to uphold our own lives and must become healthy enough again to uphold the lives of our progeny. 

But beyond initiatives from households and communities, we need more resolve from our institutions of governance as well, greater reassurances that those exercising political power are more invested in the public good than their own riches, that those holding office are capable and willing to look beyond short-term gain and the petty grievances of the moment to the momentous challenges that we adults might well survive but that those who follow us may not. We need institutions that can be reliable sentinels of threats and opportunities, institutions with sufficient public trust and the ability to command attention when it is time – as it surely is now – to take many steps, small and large; steps that can accumulate into a more robust and urgent planet-saving movement, a movement of many hands and multiple “megaphones,” a movement that is kind and thoughtful, connected and respectful, a movement wherein our pious words are connected to gritty and dependable actions, and where our circles of concern are resolutely allowed to expand and become more concrete in their expression.

We are not those people yet.  Neither yet are our institutions.  And the clock on this erstwhile-hopeful year of movement and healing has already started to tick.

The United Nations, our primary focus of institutional concern, has been relatively quiet this past week though metaphorically holding its collective breath that political violence erupting in places like Yemen and now threatened for Washington, DC doesn’t create new pathways for crisis.  Secretary-General Guterres did release his New Year’s message in which he said two potentially important things: He committed the UN “to build a global coalition for carbon neutrality – net zero emissions – by 2050” and also to “make 2021 a year of healing.”  These are both easier said than done, of course, and both UN skeptics and even “trained doubters” (the latter of which we hope applies to us) have questions, not so much about the priorities themselves but how we actually move forward with healing the many wounds of our not-so-distant past. 

For starters, do we actually have 30 years remaining to invest in the pursuit of carbon neutrality before all of our climate “tipping points” have been reached and the damage we are responsible for is no longer reversible?  Is this deadline sufficiently ambitious or are we in danger of “kicking the can down the road” rather than remediating the many eco-desecrations which are part and parcel of our contemporary legacy?

And how is that trust among nations and stakeholders needed to scrutinize our patterns of consumption and ensure equitable access to public services and resources to be cultivated and expanded?  How can we more effectively persuade nations and peoples that all need to take up the mantle of community and climate healing while ensuring that those of us who have contributed the most to global problems, including the climate crisis, do the most to reverse their current course?

And who gets to weigh in on those healing strategies?   Who gets the “megaphone” to keep us alert to threats and guide prospects for effective response?   Is it UN officials?  Ministers of State? Experts on climate or other global risks? Managers of prevention and mitigation programs?  Do we need to hear more from poets, designers and pastors in tandem with financiers and multilateral bureaucrats? If we are to solve the problems of the past that pressure our present, we need the right messages but also the right messengers. We must focus better not only on what needs to be said, but on those best suited in a variety of social and cultural contexts to make the case for climate health and all other aspects of healing to which we must now attend.

Whether in reference to the climate crisis or pandemic-impacted deprivation, healing requires attributes that we know are sometimes in short supply in our communities and institutions of governance.  Healing in this time requires higher levels of honesty about both the wrongs done to us and those we have done to others.  It requires a careful examination of social and economic inequities, and of the power dynamics that highlight some voices to excess and keep others shouting from ever-distant margins.  And it requires trustworthy and accountable authorities with regard to the needs and aspirations they are expected to promote and protect. 

As we begin a new year, we have a way to travel towards healing that is both believable and sustainable.  Our circles of concern are still too small. Too many “experts” presume that what they know is in and of itself sufficient to what we now require, a dubious judgment often rendered without adequate consultation.  Too many personal and institutional habits have been allowed to ossify, becoming more akin to addictions than conscious choices. And as we witnessed on Friday in the UN General Assembly, too many governments continue to reject mechanisms of accountability for abuses committed against their own people, including abuses related to willfully delinquent climate change and/or pandemic prevention and mitigation measures. 

And yet, as this new year struggles off the starting blocks, there is plenty for us to work with, plenty of decency and courage alike, plenty of people with the time and inclination to reset their personal and family priorities, plenty of diplomats who understand that the governance game we’ve been playing, including on peace and security, is simply not relevant enough, indeed is no longer sufficient to shift our policy course, let alone to help heal the wounds of this age. We know that we need better and we know we can do better.

What a wonderful thing it would be if 12 months from now –given all the desecration, uncertainty and anger that we seem determined to drag along with us into 2021 –we could share genuine narratives of personal and institutional growth punctuated by both fewer regrets and fewer tears.  With such stories in hand, we would know that we are truly making progress on healing ourselves and the world we inhabit.

Tags: , ,

Only the Lonely:  A Call to Revitalize Tactics and Connections, Dr. Robert Zuber

26 Aug

(With gratitude once again to Goodreads which, week in and week out, provides me with both content and helpful leads to insightful quotations from thoughtful people.)

Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager.  Susan Sontag

Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal, and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows. Love can only survive these injuries if they are acknowledged, healed and rare.  Brene Brown

Whatever is rejected from the self appears in the world as an event. C. G. Jung

We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep. William James

This was another relatively slow week at the UN, punctuate by a Security Council review of counter-terror collaborations, a Working Group of the General Assembly devoted to preparations for the 2nd Global Ocean Assessment, and a two-day event focused on the work of the many non-governmental organizations (such as our own) that made their way to UN Headquarters this week in larger than usual numbers. And of course the tributes kept coming in for the late Kofi Annan as well as remembrances for the UN staff in Iraq killed in a 2003 truck bombing.

Both ocean health and counter-terror measures are regular “covers” for us, both with major peace and security implications and both with obligations (sufficient urgency of action on the one hand, sufficient regard for human rights protections on the other) that need scrutiny, including some of it from ourselves. But the NGO event, coupled with other conversations that we have had around UN Headquarters about the state of civil society in UN settings, make this a topic of significant, if not urgent concern.

The theme for this event, organized by the UN’s Department of Public Information, was Together Finding Global Solutions for Global Problems. Numerous side events complemented what were occasional bursts of insight and enthusiasm by plenary speakers, including UN officials. In addition to attending a bit of the plenary and a few side events (the ones on poverty reduction were of particular interest to us), we spent quite a bit of time in the UN cafes this week talking to folks we knew and listening to those we didn’t, taking in (albeit often at some distance) the mostly friendly banter and determined NGO sales pitches.

There was nothing wrong with the event, but also little new.  Many sessions seemed to be sparsely attended and yet still often cleaved to the UN format of choice – podium driven presentations that made some time for questions (and rants) from the audience, but little in the way of what we would characterize as genuine dialogue leading to commitments more likely to survive this event once the demands of home and office take over.

Amidst all the valid concern expressed this week for our sustainable development goals obligations – from smart cities and universal educational opportunity to poverty reduction and good governance – the one item that continues to cry out for sustained attention is related to our collective working methods.   We and others have spent much (hopefully productive) time exploring how our sector can adjust its methods and temperament to conform to a new generation of challenges, including the challenge of ensuring that the widest range of civil society voices – often more isolated than we might realize in their difficult and even “lonely” work –finds viable pathways to policy influence.

But beyond the voices is the need for attention to how we seek to make change in the first instance, how we utilize increasingly scarce assets and more formalized “work relationships” in an attempt to influence some admittedly weighty trends, from economic inequalities and declining oceans to rampant xenophobia and a new generation of weapons-related threats.

In our own investigations into some (for us) obvious limitations and deficiencies in our sector, we have relied heavily on others, including Lester Ruiz and Paul Okumu.  Both do their own important work in the world and, apropos to this discussion, both are generous in sharing a critical and inspirational eye with our communities of practice, posing hard questions to both our tactics and our character. Okumu has chimed in more recently in response to the quite-legitimate concern over the recent apprehension of South Sudanese activist Peter Biar, noting that his is merely a high-profile tip of the proverbial iceberg as activists, religious leaders, journalists and others face abuse and “legal” charges that are often anything but.

Okumu goes on to question whether our tactics of choice are actually relevant to the power dynamics that characterize the modern world – one characterized by massive, often unaccountable fiscal flows and states more and more willing to turn their backs on the normative arrangements which their own delegations have painstakingly negotiated. Is there evidence to suggest that what Okumu refers to as “our online campaigns or the mobilization of solidarity groups” is actually able to shift anything?  Is there any reason to believe that those of us who remain attentive to these global “arrangements” are able to provide anything more than familiar patterns of resistance?

The major political and economic powers that influence our multi-lateral institutions have, as Okumu suggests, largely stopped listening to us, largely stopped worrying about any power that we might once have had to reign in their excesses; in part because they don’t need to, and in part because they more or less know what we are going to say and how we will go about doing our “business.” They have come to understand that we are no threat to their ambitions and narratives; that we can scream about “what we’re doing” from the sidelines of conversations that are increasingly cut off from our scrutiny; that the gaps separating their seemingly-supportive rhetoric from effective civil society engagement are growing, not shrinking.

We are not their adversaries; indeed there are diplomats, civil servants and social investors here in New York who represent some of the kindest and most genuinely committed people I know anywhere in the world. But diplomats, secretariat officials and their growing array of high-end “partnerships” here in New York have to navigate their own limitations of bureaucracy, competition and authority, and thus we cannot in good faith accept the notion that they are the definers of our work, nor do we accept that our value lies solely in our willingness to promote what they have handed out for us to promote, as though only “cheerleaders” are now worthy of a place in this multi-lateral game, and not also the referees, analysts and commentators.

And yet the things we choose to promote must be defined by more than a habituated defiance, more than snarky retorts to diplomats, UN officials or “business leaders” who surely already recognize that they are sometimes misrepresenting the story that lies behind the text they are reading, misrepresenting somewhat through what they say but (mostly) through those things about which they have chosen to remain eerily silent.

Indeed, we have work to do here in filling out the unfinished sentences, in providing a fuller accounting of policy progress than those which are routinely authorized to be spoken in this place.  But as Okumu suggests we also need to fix our own working methods, to address the heavily-worn tactics that have too-little impact on journalists who still can’t escape unjust prison sentences, refugees still treated as political fodder rather than as sisters and brothers, sustainable development goals that are still too slow on the uptake, peace and security policies that still serve too many political interests and too few human ones. And, of course, there are the activists like Peter Biar who join with so many others in suffering beyond the reach of well-meaning responses that are often more appropriate to power structures gone-bye.

We sometimes damaged and lonely people who are drawn to this work for reasons known best to our mothers and therapists; we retain an obligation to ensure that this work makes more durable connections, takes more risks, sees beyond the horizons of our own limitations, commits to the eagerness born of attention, and takes the time to analyze what we, sometimes thoughtlessly, project into the world as a substitute for the healing with is our primary charge.

So long as we continue to occupy places of privilege and influence, no matter how modest they might seem to us, we have a clear responsibility to global constituencies beyond the words in our mission statements, beyond our tactical habits of choice and our often-shallow “networks” and “partners.” There is an attentiveness that is also required, a willingness to discern the times and align our tactics and energies with both our deepest values and the world’s deepest needs, to correct “the record” but also interrogate the ways in which our own invitation to healing is compromised both by the things we failed to correct in our societies, and by those things we are insufficiently “eager” to fix in ourselves.

Our values and tactics must be aligned in the world – the world that exists in real time and not simply in our institutional memories – such that injuries inflicted (including on ourselves) are “acknowledged, healed and rare.”

Tags: , ,