Tag Archives: violence

Cruel and Incessantly Usual: An Advent Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

30 Nov

Cruelty has a human heart
And jealousy a human face,
Terror the human form divine,
And secrecy the human dress. William Blake

I discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression.  Albert Camus

If God is keeping out of sight, it’s because he’s ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they’re responsible for promoting in his name. Philip Pullman

We can never be gods, after all–but we can become something less than human with frightening ease. N.K. Jemisin

You cannot use cruelty against yourself to justify cruelty to others. Marie Lu

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness. Tennessee Williams

Cruelty is easy, cheap and rampant.  Brene Brown

It seems to me that liberal and humane people, of whom there are many among us, would, if they were asked to rank the vices, put cruelty first, intuitively they would choose cruelty as the worst thing we do. Judith Shklar

Those of you who have endured many years of these annual messages know of my personal fondness for the image of the Jewish man or woman sitting on the end of a remote cliff, staring into the vastness of space, wondering if there is any relief for the suffering borne of an enveloping cruelty  part personal and part embedded in the institutions of the day, sadly including that embedded in  religious institutions.  

It is hard for some of us to imagine that moment of being seemingly rebuffed by such a vastness and then having to return to domiciles and communities under oppressive occupation complete with religious leaders who have turned their backs on the needy and dispossessed, people longing for relief who will accept even its faintest hope, a  veritable whiff of a world that is kinder and more just than the one which defines most all of their daily business.

We moderns who like to imagine the superior manner in which we conduct our earthly affairs are more than occasionally guilty of scoffing at the cruelty of those earlier times and the misery they inflicted, scoffing as though we have somehow graduated from the lusts of degrading and subjugating other human beings, graduated from muck to which too many of our ancestors were consigned and about which they felt they could do little.  Look at how far we’ve come.  Look at our “mixed blessing” achievements and successes. Look at our evermore fancy gadgets and the clever economic predations they enable. Look at our decision making which consistently magnifies current interest to the detriment of future interest. Look at the overly confident, divisive, self-satisfied proclamations that our modernity privileges some of us to spout. 

Maybe this isn’t the Advent to look too closely at ourselves.  Or maybe it is precisely the moment to do so.

For the sojourn at the edge of the cliff is not only about the longing for a redeemer.  It is also about the discomfort – at times severe – during those all-too-rare moments when there is nothing but vastness and quiet to distract us from ourselves, to remind us of our relative impotence, the many things we have done and especially left undone, the potential once identified and then summarily squandered, the love and care we failed to provide in sufficient measure or rebuffed as others tried to provide for us.

And the cruelty.  Always the cruelty, perhaps the most shocking feature of our current, collective incarnation, cruelty disturbingly linked to those long-ago days of occupation and crucifixion, those days which relegated sickness to the demonic and branded as unclean anyone who broke any of the complex regulations brandished by religious elites, regulations which such elites often felt entitled to ignore themselves, regulations sold as revelations of a God who ostensibly prioritized honor and deference over compassion and reconciliation.

As many of “God’s people” try to sell in our own time. Psychologists such as Erich Fromm had long identified the “death wish” that can consume people defined by grievance, some of whom are people of faith, a wish that manifests itself in decisions which are short-sighted and anger-fueled, decisions neither in our best interest nor in the interest of generations to come who may well face formidable trouble coping with the massive damage we now eagerly inflict with full impunity. 

Let’s be honest with ourselves.  Cruelty has always been our species companion, the demon that literally consumes much of our life energy and conspires to make a mockery of our values once we stop identifying and wrestling with its threats and allures.  There are certainly many moments when kindness, compassion, fairness and other, deeper and more “horizontal” virtues seem to have pride of place, when we seem to “have it in us” to rise to a higher, more attentive and more responsive standard.

But then we too often allow ourselves to get complacent, or self-satisfied, or we give in to multiple impulses which should have been thoroughly examined and then placed under wraps. In all of this we tend to neglect the uncomfortable spaces which remind us of uncomfortable truths.  And at such times, cruelty is poised to make a comeback, returning to a stage complete with autonomous weapons and violent rhetoric, with ethnic cleansing and partisan hatred, with all of the self-serving justifications one could possibly invoke including willful, decontextualized misinterpretations of religious texts which are at times astounding in their arrogance.

It is a truism of sorts to insist that we are responsible both for what we do and what we enable, that which our own actions inadvertently grant permission for others to do.  A bit like children in a kindergarten class, we defend our own behavior by pointing fingers at those who not only behave contrary to our own interests but who we might feel get away with it, serving personal preferences petty and more profound with what appears to be full impunity. In a similar vein, we trend towards laser focus on behavior we find offensive in others and then too often try to attribute the offense to an entire class of human beings defined by race or ethnicity or gender or religion, all while doing what we can to ensure that the laser never turns back on us.

Amidst all of these manifestations of self-deception is a pervasive cruelty.  While recognizing the degree to which social media skews judgments on this matter – providing compelling visuals on incidents individual and collective which would have remained hidden in previous times – it is nevertheless the case that our human compassion has taken a serious hit.  At levels both official and community, a generic indifference serves to  endorse and justify the most obvious instances of cruelty, those which have dented our rational and moral capacities – rapes in El-Fasher and Goma, target practice and food insecurity against Palestinian children in Gaza, brown-skinned people brutalized by aggrieved and poorly trained ICE agents in US cities, religious bias, domestic violence, racial discrimination and killing largely without remorse, without accountability, without any sense of the implications of such brutality for a world which must sooner or later be passed on to children in whatever shape we leave it.  And beyond active cruelty, we move with lightning speed from individual instances of abuse to more categorical denunciations of “other” humans which ultimately encourage more abuse than they identify.

I certainly do not believe that cruelty constitutions our entire genetic and social footprint, not by any means, but from my UN policy vantage point it seems to occupy more of our current frame than most of us would have deemed possible, certainly more than our civilizations can likely survive over the long term.

Returning to the lonely figure at the edge of a cliff, it is also important to acknowledge the degree to which making time and space for self-reflection is also to make time and space which can be filled by anxiety, by self-doubt, by disappointment.  The space of Advent is a moment for reminding me of how far I’ve come but how very much is left undone, the self-honesty and amendment of life which remains an insufficient portion of my seasonal preparation, the  vestiges my own “sweet dreams of oppression” which have led over the years to trespasses which are to be forgiven only in the same measure that I forgive the trespasses of others. 

Collectively, our demons are now well out of the places where they had been at least partially confined, tricking us into renewing cycles of distrust and outright violence that compromise our politics, our faith and possibly our future.  It remains alarming at how quickly we can sacrifice our compassion and dignity at the altar of anger and grievance.  It is equally discouraging (if numerous films are any indication) how easily we can become addicted to dystopian worldviews that, beyond entertainment, reinforce the belief that the world is in its essence a harsh, violent, deceitful and fearful place in which values such as cooperation, discernment, kindness and compassion are naïve if not outright dangerous. 

It may be, as Judith Shklar maintains, that cruelty is the behavior which represents the very worst of ourselves.  But what we fail to recognize as often is how this “worst thing we do” lurks just below the surface of civility, just out of sight and reach until it bursts forth like a plague of long-dormant insects which we then choose to feed and otherwise encourage until the outburst has run its course, leaving in its wake a veritable wasteland of disinformation, intolerance and cynicism. This cycle is compounded by the widespread and insufficiently countered belief that cruelty is an inevitable manifestation of our genetic makeup. Cruelty may represent a pervasive factor in human history, but “inevitable” it is not.  

The reason I particularly honor Advent, year after year, is that it represents yet another opportunity for people of much faith and little faith to confront and overcome what Dostoyevsky termed the “artful” cruelty which dominates far too much of our current human landscape. In our words, in our actions and reactions, we very much have it in us to set a tone that can serve to counter the worst of current influences and thereby ensure places where children can live and thrive when we have finally left this world to their loving care. But this “tone” requires more of us, replacing grievance with thanksgiving, swapping out indifference with caring, renouncing in words and deeds what Fromm worried was “our craving for evil,” pledging to take more risks and give in less to cynicism and fearfulness. 

If the opportunities of Advent seem more dauting this year it is because the “syndrome of decay” which we have over-indulged like Thanksgiving leftovers has been allowed to consume larger and larger swaths of our human condition.  But we can roll it back.  We can recover our shattered faith, our lagging courage, our indifferent stewardship of a world which will eventually no longer be ours to pillage.  For me, Advent represents the latest, best opportunity to restore our collective dignity, prepare to better incarnate my understanding of the divine promise, and “save what’s left” of our ailing planet.  This year, let’s agree to honor that potential.

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Capitol Offense: Fragility’s New Port of Call, Dr. Robert Zuber

10 Jan

You Are What Your Record Says You Are. Bill Parcels

What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher. Chuck Palahniuk 

Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes! Ray Bradbury 

Every recorded event is a brick of potential, of precedent, thrown into the future. Eventually the idea will hit someone in the back of the head.   Anne Michaels 

Tomorrow was created yesterday…….And by the day before yesterday, too.  John le Carré 

The past sits back and smiles and knows it owns him anyway.  Barbara Tuchman

The evils against which we contend are frequently the fruits of illusions similar to our own. Reinhold Niebuhr

This past Wednesday at the United Nations Security Council, under the presidency of Tunisia, a debate was held to examine the relationship between “fragility and conflict.”

With statements from the heads of state of Kenya, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Niger and Tunisia itself, members of what are known in the Council as the “A3 + 1,” the Council focused as it so often does on the fragility of African states, the combination of widespread poverty, climate change impacts, COVID-19 vulnerabilities, threats from terrorism and insurgency, and weak structures of governance which conspire to create societies which in some instances seem forever hanging over a ledge. 

Several statements, including from the newly-minted Security Council members (India, Ireland, Kenya, Mexico and Norway), indicated an appreciation of the diversity of fragility’s root causes as well as the tools and stakeholders that need to combine forces in order to address those causes, increase confidence in governance and help to build what Kenya referred to as “bridges of peace.”  The issue of “inclusion” was also noted frequently, especially by former president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and the foreign minister of Ireland, both of whom rightly noted the degree to which doors to participation in governance by women, youth and all racial and religious groupings creates more reliable governments and helps to overcome legacies of colonialism, discrimination and militarism that continue to fuel fragility in the present.

But perhaps the most interesting statement during this debate was made by the US representative who, with no apparent sense of irony, highlighted fragility related to corruption, a lack of regard for the rule of law, and “authoritarian tendencies” which, he maintained, continue to sweep across the African continent.  And while lamenting the “politicization” of fragility analysis, the US diplomat reiterated the oft-stated claim by the US that it is Iran which, above all, is fomenting regional chaos and exacerbating regional fragilities, a statement which few Council members have ever accepted, at least not at face value.

To the credit of the US, I suppose, there was at least some recognition that fragility is not an African phenomenon alone, that once we get beyond economic indicators to what Niger’s president referred to as “the health of our governance and the cohesiveness of our communities,” then the fragility of many states and peoples comes into play. In that vein, the habit of Council members more than willing to weigh in on African issues but not place their own fragilities on the table, comes into sharp, if discouraging focus.

When this meeting was over, I had to pivot quickly, not to another UN event but to the unfolding assault on the US Capitol, an assault that had been brewing for months with the blessing and encouragement of the US president and a shocking number of state officials and federal legislators. The fragility which the US representative piously and oh-so-ironically outlined in his Security Council intervention a mere hour ago was now being played out on the streets, not in Tripoli or Juba but in Washington, DC.  The fragility which the US and other large powers have done much to stoke in other places when it was politically or economically convenient to do so could now be found lapping at the shores of the Potomac, threatening high officials with hanging and offering unflinching and unthinking support to a US president who successfully sold a pack of electoral (and other) lies in the way that such lies are often best sold – by repeating them over and over until the audience is ready to die for – or kill for – a narrative grounded far more in negative grievance than positive policy, aside perhaps from the “positive” for some of keeping the US president entrenched in power.

I strongly suspect that anyone reading this post has been fully immersed in commentary and analysis about these events which continue to evolve as we learn more about the players, instigators, fellow travelers inside of government, tools of organizing and much more that serve to appropriately complicate the narrative of the “unruly mob overwhelming Capitol police.”  I won’t presume to waste your time pontificating as one more, erstwhile “talking head,” aside from these few comments that are consistent with your expectations of me as an individual and us as an office.

The first thing to convey is perhaps the most obvious.   This isn’t over.  As I write, dispatches are being shared describing online chatter regarding fresh threats of violence following up on occupations which have now been rehearsed and confidently assessed, both in terms of the tools and strategies of violence and of the existence of sufficient “cover,” for now at least, in state and federal offices to ensure the unlikely event of a retributive bloodbath. Such “patriotic” violence will not, will likely never, incur the wrath inflicted on last summer’s protesters for racial justice, persons who would never have been allowed to get close enough to the US Capitol to see the windows, let alone smash them, even if they had wanted to do so.

Second, the fragility currently impacting the quality and reliability of our own governance is part of a larger pattern, one which the current pandemic may have done more to expose than any single other cause.   Food insecurity is higher than at any point in my lifetime.  Lost wages and livelihoods are only widening the distance between the rich and the rest.  Children across the country, as in other parts of the world, are having their formal schooling and other age-appropriate activities compromised with consequences for our future largely unknown. Masks have become almost grotesque symbols of “oppression” as arrogant dismissals of public health warnings have filled hospital wards and brought health care workers to their emotional breaking point.  Community cohesion is at best in a troubled state as partisan politics and alternative versions of reality conspire to turn neighbors into enemies and provide new incentives for people determined to care about little beyond the borders of their own domiciles and social circles.

Combined with fresh authoritarian indulgences, this stew that we have prepared for ourselves with its multiple ingredients of fragility, chaos and self-deception has been simmering on a metaphorical stove for some time, the toxic scents from which having sent our own version of Humpty Dumpty crashing to the pavement.  

As in the childhood riddle, our own Humpty’s injuries are severe, a reminder that “all the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.” This inability to effect proper healing needn’t be our contemporary fate, but there are things required of us now, beyond the security fortifications and rushed impeachment proceedings, beyond the now-pervasive accusations and condemnations, matters related to our national character which we have yet to fully examine let alone adjust.

As with other national crises in my now-long memory, I am once again stunned by the delusional and self-righteous defaults of so many of our national commentators, including those representing my section of the political spectrum – the “I told you so’s,” the half-truth equivalences, the rolling out of the old national game of “light and darkness,” good and evil.  If our Humpty is ever to be reassembled, is ever to be made close to “good as new,” it is self-righteousness that we can least afford now.  We did not “all” storm the Capitol building, nor did we “all” pin our knees to the necks of black protesters or bring our health care system to the brink of dysfunction through our own willful negligence.  But each in our own way – my own way – we have helped bring this current crisis to a boil.  And while we might well “root” for punishment or sanction of the offending “others,” we need to also own our own mess, our own contributions to a social (dis) order that has never been as kind, helpful, generous and fair as we have more than willingly imagined it to be.

One large piece of what we need to “own” comes courtesy of a statement from president-elect Biden as well as others within and beyond his circle, that this current wave of violence does not represent “who we are.”  This tendency of ours to extrapolate a version of ourselves that conflates our aspirations and our practices is a habit that we simply cannot indulge at this thoroughly unsettled moment.  No, Mr. Biden, this is in fact who we are.  This is our record now.  This is what our history of choices has made of us. Indeed if you listen to the stories and voices beyond our elite centers of policy and their self-referential bubbles, this is part of who we have always been.  Part of our gender and racially-challenged national profile.  Part of the exceptionalist arrogance which we have too willingly inflicted on others in all global regions.  Part of the self-righteousness in which we have liberally bathed even when that water was obviously more polluted than pure. Part of the ample “portions” that we have enjoyed but that were not ours to take in the first place.

As a nation we have excelled at much, at times benefitting many through our universities, our technologies, our multiple forms of expertise and, at moments, our progressive values. But sadly this “much” also includes slinging often-demeaning allegations and indictments beyond our national borders, as well as beyond the borders of our intellectual and ideological comfort zones.  This isn’t going to work for us anymore.  The fragilities that we have patronized and misrepresented in other cultures and communities have found their beachhead here. And they won’t readily recede even with the shifting of the tides.

No, it’s not over and won’t be until we are willing to faithfully address the multiple fragilities now manifest in our institutions and in ourselves.  Our national iteration of Humpty is lying in pieces on the pavement.  It will take much more than political retribution and enhanced security forces to make it whole again. Indeed, it will likely take a national reckoning of sorts –an examination of historical patterns towards which we remain largely oblivious, the bricks that we don’t recognize until they hit us squarely in the head — if we are ever to firmly and fairly pursue the good that we have too often presumed and insufficiently practiced. We’ll see what we’re actually made of in the weeks and months to come. A large swath of the global community which is not laughing at our follies is now holding its collective breath.

I’m holding mine as well.

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Baby Face: A Christmas Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

24 Dec

Christmas

I don’t need a holiday or a feast to feel grateful for my children, the sun, the moon, the roof over my head, music, and laughter, but I like to take this time to take the path of thanks less traveled. Paula Poundstone

I have accepted a seat in the House of Representatives, and thereby have consented to my own ruin, to your ruin, and to the ruin of our children. I give you this warning that you may prepare your mind for your fate.  John Adams

If we had paid no more attention to our plants than we have to our children, we would now be living in a jungle of weed.  Luther Burbank

Christmas represents an outlier moment for many persons, including those who work on “peace and security.”  After months of pondering solutions to some of the existential threats that we have manufactured for ourselves –the clever ways we have concocted to subjugate and humiliate each other – the attention of many of us turns to a baby in a barn, a baby in whom some invest mountains of hope, but a baby nonetheless; a baby as shocked and bewildered by the profound implications of the short voyage from womb to world as the rest of us were; a baby experiencing its first chills in the evening air, its first experiences of “distance,” its first uncomfortable naps in some seasonally dry hay, its first hiatus between desire and accommodation.

Yes, that baby: a miracle at one level; a life form struggling to cope with unfamiliar “rules” and surroundings at another.

In the Christian tradition, we tend to sentimentalize this singular newborn.   We just assume that this baby can manage the frosty air filling its lungs; we just assume that this baby has no genetic predispositions to childhood disease, is not allergic to his mother’s milk, is invulnerable to the many germs hovering around the barn to which he has not had nearly enough time to develop a resistance.

This baby apparently is the beneficiary of some divinely-procured pathogen defiance, apparently exhibits some innate ability to tolerate changes of 20 degrees C or more from the womb where it lay snugly only hours before; this baby –with blanket protections but no proper blanket — has taken on sacred significance in ways that have captured the imagination of persons from all monotheistic faiths and a fair number of others besides.

A baby so much like other babies of his time; so much like other babies of our time; yet underscored by such a hopeful and enticing narrative, such a different set of expectations.

This hope is not so different from the hopes we have for the babies born in settings from modern hospitals to tents in refugee camps.  When a child is born, there is a real sense in which the world begins anew.  It begins “anew” because of all the potential locked up in that squirming ball of humanity that has survived perhaps the most dramatic and difficult transition it will ever face over the course of its life, potential that too-often neglected and even traumatized parents must find some way to unlock.

It is this potential that we continue to squander, at times neglectfully at other times intentionally and even murderously.   We cut off health care to children at their most critical developmental moments. We bomb hospital and schools creating mass trauma while eliminating the institutions that might help children recover some measure of their emotional bearings.  We lie to our progeny (and to ourselves) about the future these babies are destined to inherit; a melting, more militarized, more divided world that is virtually guaranteed by the reckless, self-interested decisions that we (and our erstwhile leadership) make each and every day.

With all due respect to the UNICEF team here in New York, it still amazes me after all these years that the human community needs some large multilateral agency (and its numerous national counterparts) to guarantee a modicum of respect and care for children, a modicum which, by the way, we are a long way from ensuring.   What is the matter with us?   How can we pour so much sentimental significance into a long-ago baby in a makeshift manger and then so little into the babies – in Yemen, in Honduras, in rural areas of Central Africa, in urban favelas around the world, even in our own neighborhoods – whose life-enhancing potential is being undermined the second their umbilical cords are severed?

I don’t get this.  It remains for me a Christmas mystery matched only by the star that functions like a GPS device and parents gathering around a manger in rapt attention despite what might well be their own hunger, fatigue, nausea and chills.

In trying to get through this mystery, I have benefited greatly from contributions from two friends of mine (and this office), two of the many women of great substance and thoughtfulness who have helped me (and many others) interpret the times and navigate a way forward in both personal and institutional aspects.

Marta Benavides reminds us frequently from El Salvador about the degree to which “greed and ambition are clouding vision and action,” blinding us to the inequalities we create and the human potential we rob in the name of power and “progress.”  In a similar vein, Lisa Berkley has noted that “If there is one thing the #metoo movement is showing us, it is just how wounded we all are.”

There is, of course, much beyond greed and ambition that clouds our vision, much beyond #metoo that exposes the wounds to which we give so little attention and which are thereby likely to become a most unwelcome slice of our babies’ inheritance.  The greed and personal ambition that we won’t curtail results in decisions that barely benefit the present but surely undermine our prospects.  In the same way, the wounds we will neither confront nor heal in ourselves will surely morph into infections for which no metaphorical antibiotics will ever be sufficient.

Being a baby in this world – not to mention caring for them – is simply too challenging now.  We are as a species, indeed, too damaged, too greedy, too smug; we are too ambitious for our own interests and too little concerned with the general interest.  These deformations of character are things we can address.  Indeed we must, as the consequences of our folly will consume the elders as readily as they will our youngest.

This year, my Christmas prayer for our “lands of confusion” is that our reverence for the manger child becomes not a substitute for, but an enabler of our active reverence for all the babies who enter this world, most entering not under a star but a cloud.

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Compound Fracture:  Addressing Poverty’s Multiple Wounds, Dr. Robert Zuber

7 May

ICRC

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.  Mother Teresa

The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society. Muhammad Yunus

Love conquers all things except poverty and toothache.  Mae West

The Chibok Girls, at least 82 of them, were released by Boko Haram this week. We’ll no doubt hear much more about this, including we hope from the ICRC: the stories of their captivity, the brutality and isolation they experienced, perhaps some of the despair and frustration they felt from having spent three long years of their relatively short lives wondering who if anyone was looking for them, why it seemed that they had been so completely abandoned?

As I stare at this ICRC photo and others, there is sadness, certainly in the faces of many of the girls, but in me as well.  This ordeal is not over for them.   They are thankfully freed from terrorist control, and they will be for a time the focus of international attention and support.   But the support will fade, most probably sooner than needed, and the girls will be left with their questions for families and government officials, their recurring nightmares and pervasive insecurities, their struggles to find meaning and material sustenance with psychic impairments as severe as any physical deformity.

And they will never get their childhoods back.

Many diplomats and observers at the UN rightly insist that poverty reduction must become what India this week called the “unrelenting focus” of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  Though poverty reduction per se is first in the listing of the SDGs, it is not the only SDG concern for the international community.  Climate and oceans, employment and gender discrimination, corruption and violence, health and employment all need attention and are all interlinked.   While the Security Council was away assessing the peace agreement in Colombia, the rest of the UN in New York was engaged in a dizzying array of events focused in whole or in part on diverse aspects of the poverty reduction challenge.  From global health and the health of our forest communities, to the rights of indigenous persons and the need for the UN (as noted clearly on Friday by UN Deputy-Secretary General Amina Mohammed) to streamline mechanisms for better coordination of poverty responses (including its conflict prevention dimensions), the UN’s grasp of the magnitude and diversity of its poverty-related challenges seems to be growing by the week.

Though relatively few persons in the UN community have endured poverty or lived in communities of material or psychic deprivation, the UN’s current levels of interest in all aspects related to poverty reduction are thankfully more than rhetorical, even more than material. Diplomats now widely grasp the peace and security implications of a world of large and growing inequalities, disparities which rightly annoy and largely inconvenience some but condemn others to an often-disheartening life with too few options.  As populations in global regions grow disproportionately, as drought and desertification expand their reach, and as water and other resource scarcities reach epidemic levels, our ability to manage stresses related to our systems of governance and security is certainly under strain.   So too is our ability to respond to the collective psychological needs of children and other victims of violence and deprivation.

And much of that need lies beyond the headlines. I recall vividly from my time in a Harlem parish in the 1990s some of the many ways in which poverty subtly and unhelpfully diverted the attention and energies of the community.   People didn’t dare to dream too much; they largely coped – with losses of income and relatives, with often unresponsive and even dismissive government bureaucracy, with schools that seemed design to keep students in their places rather than opening doors to a better place, with drug-induced street violence that erupted almost without warning.  Coping, adjusting, shielding, standing on endless lines, cutting your losses: It wasn’t always that dire, it wasn’t the plight of the Chibok Girls or of the families fleeing violence in Mosul, but it was often dire enough, disheartening enough.

For the children of Harlem at this time, it was also the dawning of the social media age and its multiple messaging.  On the one hand, cellular technology has opened new worlds for people and helped them overcome some of the pervasive limitations of the still-applicable digital divide.  The other side of course is that the new technology represents a handy medium for keeping close track of all that some people have that others do not.   The relentless marketing by “smart” phones that seem mostly “smart” for advertisers brings a world of affluent consumption into the personal spaces of so many millions, serving as a constant reminder of what it is possible to own and have in this world and, perhaps more insidiously, invites people to assess their own lives in accordance with the prevailing standards of luxury.

For a generation of Harlem children, let alone the Chibok girls and others fleeing violence without their families in makeshift life rafts, such reminders are most likely to aggravate their wounds, to compound their anger and frustration, to grow their sense of isolation and doubt that they are worthy of love and material support in a fair, predictable and secure global environment.

For us, there has always been truth in the maxim that assessment is largely a function of expectation.  And even in this increasingly climate stressed, resource scarce and violence-riddled environment, expectations for affluence have perhaps never been higher.  Nor have the many gaps of education, income and health care separating the affluent and those on the margins been so obvious.  If “inequalities” are permitted to herald our collective undoing, if our “share and care” capacities are left buried under mounds of trauma and material envy, if we can do no better than simply manage violence and “comfort” its many material and psychological impacts, then the carnage that currently fills our media screens will only become more frequent. The cycles of destruction and deprivation will tend to spin ever faster.

A World Health Organization representative on a UN General Assembly panel this week highlighted that agency’s “no regrets” model of detection and treatment, referring primarily to pandemics such as Ebola that, like armed violence and drought, both push people into poverty and dig a deeper hole for those already there.

This model seemed like a hopeful metaphor to inspire much of our sustainable development activity. “No regrets” on ending inequalities of rights and opportunities.  No regrets on efforts to prevent armed violence, genocide and war.  No regrets on creating conditions for safe and healthy communities. No regrets on ending assaults on the dignity, confidence and psychic integrity of our children.  No regrets on our messaging to next generations that balances acquisition and almost infinite distraction with a genuine hopefulness for the future and our own deep resolve to fix what we’ve broken.

Slowly but surely, our policy communities are coming to full recognition that lonely, angry, abused, unwanted children and youth can scuttle our development agenda as surely as super typhoons and cluster bombs.  We must resolve to keep all these challenges to the human spirit together at the center of our development policy and practice.

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Tension Headache:  Attending the demands and aspirations of those who still “don’t matter,” Dr. Robert Zuber

10 Jul

This morning on Twitter, we were alerted by Brian Stelter of CNN (a network I rarely watch) about the contents of the front page of this Sunday’s New York Times (a paper I rarely read).  What was remarkable about that front page is that all of the significant pieces of journalism were focused, in one way or another, on the “above the fold” headline:   America Grieves, Tense and Wary.

We rarely in this space venture into “domestic affairs,” though the nonsense emanating from this presidential election season is sometimes so very tempting.   But today is different – the confluence of anger, confusion, discrimination, weapons access, media bias and more has created a situation that some find predictable but many more find intolerable.  The murders of the Dallas police officers have largely stolen the national headlines, and one doesn’t have to accept the recently-offered narrative of “domestic terrorism” to acknowledge the massive pain inflicted on both families and the reputation of a police department that seems at least to be trying.   But in many news services (not the Times per se) Dallas has become both a watershed moment and a bit of a diversion from a season’s worth of mass demonstrations and senseless shootings by and of police, some of which had their own moment in the media, others merely taking their place on a still-lengthening roster of incidences involving people who are more than weary from the many implications of lives “on the margins.”

This aptly designated “tense and wary” scenario is directly related to activities taking place across the street from where I’m sitting, preparations for tomorrow’s important opening of the High Level Political Forum (HLPF) of the UN’s Economic and Social Council.

The agenda and assessment activities for this HLPF are clearly focused on one objective:  “leaving no one behind. “  A noble and hopeful objective, to be sure, though one requiring much and strewn with obstacles both identifiable and unforeseen.

As we have written previously, the UN community is doing due-diligence in getting out in front of the massive responsibilities incurred through the goals and targets of the 2030 development agenda: reducing poverty, ending inequalities of economic, educational and political access; saving ourselves from our own relentless assaults on our forests, oceans and climate; and promoting forms of governance and security that offer inclusive participation and rights-based protection.

Despite these welcome UN efforts, we are currently far from these goals, in some cases farther than we dare acknowledge.  Even if we have articulated and assembled the right goals to pursue; even if we are sincere in our financial pledges and fidelity to agreed indicators of success; this 2030 agenda is a daunting business.  It will require sustained commitments by national governments, vigilance by the HLPF and diverse UN agencies and then some; for it will also require more of each of us.  Slogans such as “leave no one behind” can galvanize some measure of our collective responsibility, but their overuse can deaden us to tasks that will, if we are to overcome our current epochal violence and planetary disregard, require greater self-scrutiny and more reliable attentiveness to others than we have so far in our collective history demonstrated.

The discouraging events of this past week are hardly unique but certainly offer yet another reminder of how many people in our world are still left behind, still on the margins, still don’t matter.  From Baton Rouge to Juba, from suburban St. Paul to Gaza, people struggle mightily for respect and relief, for justice and stability.  Tension and suspicion are partially understandable responses to what we see and read about so many human struggles at home and abroad; but these are the reactions that prompt us to seek out stronger locks for our doors but also for our souls.  These are the reactions concerned less about reaching those left behind and more about not getting “dragged” by them ostensibly towards some uncertain and indeterminate bottom.

We can identify the collective mood as the Times and others have done; we cannot give in to it.   The challenges of inclusion characteristic of these times imply that our routine forays into petty self-distraction are not so petty after all.   From the physicist Stephen Hawking to the man in the local Bodega who sells me beer and dish soap, many and diverse voices are wondering if we collectively have what it takes to extricate ourselves from this “tense and wary” swamp of our own making.

The hope of the 2030 development goals is that we do indeed have what it takes but only as a grand and collective endeavor that invites and integrates far beyond those currently on the world’s VIP lists.  In this, it will be especially important to keep at bay all those “locksmiths” seeking access to our personal, cultural and community contexts.

The young (mostly black) men who work alongside our church folks in the food pantry each Saturday morning in Harlem are not at all immune from the tension that now routinely flares into discrimination and violence.   These men work hard early on Saturdays when most of their peers are sound asleep, carrying and stocking huge quantities of provisions, providing service to people who don’t always treat them with the greatest of respect.

But they also know that they need to watch their back.  The news splashed all over this week’s media was not news to them; neither the killings, nor the arrests, nor the tension and suspicion that are so-often and inappropriately hurled in their direction.

These young men have much to contribute perhaps currently more in potential mode; but potential is also inspired by invitations to participate and opportunities to practice — and a commitment from the rest of us not to leave them behind.

We’re going to see what we’re made of over these next 15 years as our 2030 development promises take shape.  Transforming rampant tension and suspicion might well be our species’ next major test.

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Between a Rock and a Hard Place:  The Decisions Mothers Must Make, Dr. Robert Zuber

7 May

In many communities on this Mother’s Day weekend, people worry about whether their children will remember them with flowers or chocolate, whether they will still appreciate their sacrifices, whether the sentimentality of this occasion will translate into genuine gratitude, real recognition.

But today in other parts of the world, as this week’s Security Council meeting on violence perpetrated against medical facilities underscored, mothers also wonder if the hard and often painful decisions they have had to make for the sake of their children will pan out – if the hospitals to which they take their children seeking safety and healing will somehow become their gravesites; if the rafts on which their families have boarded and for which they have mortgaged their material futures will set their children on a new life course or literally drown every ounce of their potential.  At this meeting, Council members themselves were rightly deemed complicit by both the ICRC and MSF in at least part of this pattern of displacement and carnage; but lost in the inevitable blame game that accompanies our long and gruesome conflicts are the many decisions that mothers make in an attempt, sometimes wholly in vain, to protect children from dangerous circumstances that lie fundamentally beyond their control.

And the pain that comes from trying to be a nurturing, protecting mother when so many options are blocked, so many decisions fraught with peril, is by no means confined to the realm of geo-politics.  I was in a middle school in Edmonton, Canada this week at an “attendance board” meeting convened by an old friend of mine.   Across from the board sat a mother – with responsibility for three children while living in a modest hotel awaiting housing that might take many months to clear – and her 9th grade son, a quiet boy with a limited interest in school who had apparently just recovered from gall bladder surgery.

The board members were kind and attentive, asking the right questions and doing their best to keep the mother and son engaged.  But the looks on their faces, looks I have seen so many times in the Harlem parish in which I used to work, communicated palpable discouragement.   The mother had clearly been through this routine before, perhaps many times, based in part on life decisions that she made for herself and her children, decisions that turned out to be — at best– only partially effective. Her somewhat stunned and subdued presence at the attendance board signified many things, one of which was likely a painful doubling back on the hard choices she felt she had to make to give her struggling children a fighter’s chance.

Mothers (and their mates if they are so endowed) make many hard decisions over the course of a child’s life, some of which bear unforeseen consequences, others of which are beyond their innate capacities of control or discernment.  The women riding the seas with children on substandard “life” rafts or appearing for the 10th time in front of well-intentioned social workers don’t love their children any less than other mothers; but they certainly live with the daily, grim reality that they cannot fully protect them, nor nurture them to full health, nor always guarantee them predictable nutrition or education.

There are smaller rocks and softer “hard places” than these to get trapped between, to be sure, but all carry with them the burdens of life as it wasn’t intended to be.   Many mothers report that they can barely remember a time in their life when they weren’t mothers.   When their decisions end in painful or even ruinous circumstances for children, that nightmare is equally persistent.  It is more difficult than we might imagine to make the “right” call for children (or even for ourselves) when bombs are flying, crops are failing, schools are crumbling, abuses are pervasive, living allowances are at a premium.

We need to do much more, in policy and practice, to support all who spend too much time living in those spaces between the rocks and the hard places, mothers trying to make the most out of bad options and then living with the painful (and almost inevitable) compromises for their children.  Today, as all days, we should recall the many millions of mothers who have little say in policies – many still shockingly gender/social class exclusive — that routinely result in conditions that disrupt the pursuit of family normalcy and often dash their collective dreams.

Indeed, as we give in to the duties of today’s mostly sentimentalized ritual, it is important to recall the human costs of our inadequate social and security policies, pausing as we pick up the flowers or the restaurant check to recall the plight of mothers who must bear the brunt of finding safe passage for children in some of the roughest seas of my lifetime.

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