Unity State: Replenishing our Thirst for Reconciliation, Dr. Robert Zuber

While you see it your way there’s a chance that we may fall apart before too long.  The Beatles

Propensities and principles must be reconciled by some means.  Charlotte Brontë

I’ve learned that reconciliation has to occur between the parts of ourselves that are fragmented and wounded. Parker Hurley

The nation as it is currently constituted has never dealt with a yesterday or tomorrow where we were radically honest, generous, and tender with each other. Kiese Laymon

The simple, mutual recognition that mistakes were made is in itself a closing of the divide.  Steven Erikson

Statements often bring controversy. Questions often bring unity.  Emilyann Allen

No us. No them. Just we.  Steve Goodier

Earlier this week, a good colleague of ours called to discuss a new project designed to help promote reconciliation in our highly polarized country, reconciliation which might help unify factions across the US which have stopped listening to each other, stopped trusting each other’s motives, stopped looking for entry points thorough which we might promote each other’s goodness rather than assuming that every pronouncement, every statement, every mis-step, is some manifestation of evil intent.

I share her concern for reconciliation but wondered then as now to what extend there is truly a thirst for it or at least enough of a thirst to make reconciliation efforts viable.  For like the many other mountains of psychology and policy which we are now seeking to climb, reconciliation is also a hard slog, requiring substantial levels of honesty, attentiveness and staying-power, not only to address the excesses and insanity of our adversaries, but our own as well; not only to demand apologies but to offer them as well; not only to answer the questions posed by others but to pose questions that allow for our own spaces of ignorance to be filled with something other than malice and prejudice.

This “will-to-reconcile” is impeded by so many factors, and at so many levels.  The “bubbles” in which so many of us are content (or resigned) to reside – our own bubbles and not simply the ones we identify in our adversaries – can lead us to the mistaken notion that reconciliation is easier to achieve than could possibly be the case in our current circumstances.  If only others could accept the erstwhile “truths” that “we” represent, the “wisdom” of policies and structures that are assumed to be in the best interests of others, the “good intentions” of narratives about the world that seek to silence the guns of others while burying our own hostilities deep within the forms and structures of polite, “liberal” culture.  If only people could cross back over the line into “my” zones of affective and epistemic comfort, if only they could see the fundamental worthiness of my “propensities and principles,” maybe then we could find a common way forward.

It seems more complex than that doesn’t it? Current divisions seem larger and more intractable to me.  My priorities of policy and practice seem generally “right” to my mind, seem to be on a track that promises some pathway beyond climate ruin and the divides of technology, economics, social development, and even COVID vaccine distribution that threaten to expose existing wounds even further.  But I also recognize that others see it differently; others see the edifices and rules of mortar and ideas that people like me have constructed as the means for some to further their own interests at the expense of others.   Indeed, as we have noted often this space, we who are properly horrified at the growing threat from conspirators and their weapons have also to acknowledge that “they” didn’t by their own force of policy and practice create our plastic-filled oceans and staggering economic divides; they are not primarily responsible for our current climate emergency nor the “vaccine nationalism” that might well become the latest stake through the heart of our globalist pretentions.  “They” did not invent our longstanding embrace of racism nor the corruption at the highest levels of governance which takes multiple forms and damages us all.  Mistakes were made, even grave ones, but they have been made by many of us, mistakes compounded by the failure to “see” them clearly let alone to acknowledge or (God forbid) apologize for consequences unintended and otherwise.

While global leaders, including the current US president, are right to call for “unity,” the many steps needed to accomplish this seem only partially grasped. Some of these steps were on display during an extraordinarily busy January week in and around the United Nations, a week punctuated by an alternately sobering and hopeful “state of the union” address by the UN Secretary-General, a strong endorsement of science-based policymaking by the Deputy Secretary-General, and a useful joint session convened by the presidents of the General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council to sort out impediments both to development finance and sustainable development support for the Least Developed States; all of this in the shadow of the World Economic Forum annual event at Davos, a star-studded gathering to assess global trends that seems once again this year to be as much of a confirmation of existing inequities than a sincere effort to eliminate them.

That said there were two UN events which offered some good guidance how we might attend to our current, multi-layered fragmentation.  On Monday, the Security Council held a discussion that highlighted the ways in which conflict prevention and COVID response are mutually reinforcing, with most speakers affirming what Ireland referred to as our current “dark times” brought about by a combination of inadequate COVID preparations and cease fire arrangements which, if they exist at all, are held together by fragile threads.  It was up to UN USG Lowcock to highlight, in keeping with statements made by SG Guterres, that the pandemic is the crisis that we must find a way to solve together, noting that compromised health capacity, inadequate testing and other preparations and (now) predatory vaccine access have merely allowed fragilities of communities and states to grow, inflaming prospects for armed violence between and (especially) within states, and damaging economies and livelihoods in ways that could easily cost trillions of US dollars to repair. The “common goals” which are so often a prerequisite for achieving greater unity, the goals of ending the pandemic and silencing the guns, are still there, still beckoning, still awaiting a determined and humble response from states and stakeholders now one year on since the World Health Organization issued its initial warnings about the pandemic gloom we have still not unified sufficiently to dispel.

In addition to this, on Wednesday the UN convened a panel on “Holocaust Denial and Distortion,” which highlighted efforts to posit alternate realities which both deny the genocide and pry open rationales for the repetition of mass atrocity violence.  Much attention was rightly paid to Holocaust victims, including some extraordinary prayers and musical tributes and a mournful German Chancellor Merkel who expressed “shame” for the horrors unleashed by Germany but also shared a warning about how quickly our “cherished values can be cast aside.”  But for me at least, one core virtue of this event was not only its “calling to mind” the grave horrors of our not-so-distant past, but the extent to which “denial and distortion” characterize our present circumstances as well, the dual arrogances of unhinged conspiracy and unexamined convention that turn up the heat for all of us and make unity a more elusive goal than might otherwise be the case.

While rightly underscoring some of the specific and horrific consequences of Holocaust denial — including the attempted “rehabilitation” of those in more recent times who have yet to be held to account for the hatred they have espoused and the violence which such espousals have engendered –much of this event focused on the need for a common base of knowledge and understanding from which we can iron out our disagreements and move forward to heal the fragmentation within and outside ourselves, creating what one panelist called a “healthy relationship” with our often “inconvenient” past that allows us to “own our behavior, past and present, and not simply cast it aside or as another panelist put it, bury it under “lies and silence.”

Such ownership in our time would be warmly welcomed. Indeed, as our ideological and lifestyle bubbles continue to thicken, as the “ways and means to share forbidden fruit” only grow in volume and access, and as frustrations over pandemic and equity mis-steps rationalize new expressions of conspiratorial violence, our reconciliation challenges only continue to grow.  We seem to lack viable strategies to restore a reality-based platform on which we can all debate, declare and then build, a reality that now seems to require higher levels of competence and rigor, justice and accountability, but also levels of “honesty and generosity” that are virtually endangered species in our policy and public spaces. 

Though many are now in despair about our growing, seemingly intractable divides, there simply must be a viable third rail beyond “my way” and “your way,” beyond my version of reality and yours. Before we come fully unglued as a species, before our guns settle what our humanity has failed to reconcile, we need to do more than talk about unity, more than encourage unity. We must find the means to replenish our thirst for unity based on genuinely common purposes, common visions, common goals and common benefits; we must also locate and apply that third rail which can power and sustain reconciliation efforts; and we must do so without delay for our very future depends on it. 

Planting Season: Young Advocates as Seeds of Peace, Dr. Robert Zuber

They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.  Dinos Christianopoulos

It’s senseless to disarm the hands, if the heart remains armed. Bangambiki Habyarimana

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. E.B. White

To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.  Buckminster Fuller

If things don’t work out the way you want, hold your head up high and be proud. And try again. And again. And again!  Sarah Dessen

Art cannot change events. But it can change people.  Leonard Bernstein

In some ways, the United Nations represents the epitome of an “if at first you don’t succeed” institution.  Important discussions on emerging global issues occur long before resolutions are tabled and adopted.  And many adopted UN resolutions appear in similar form, year after year, in the hope that additional states will “get the message,” on matters from capital punishment abolition to ensuring greater protection for journalists, “getting” indicated not only by support for the resolutions themselves but for the policy change at national level that the resolution seeks to promote.

And its not only with respect to UN resolutions, these carefully negotiated documents by diplomats trying to navigate between instructions from capital and the compromises needed to move policy priorities from possible to actual.  In the realm of peace and security where we invest much of our attentions, change can be painfully – even deliberately slow, in part because of a lack of consensus regarding the direction that change should take, whose interests are served, how the consequences of change should be managed.  This leads to some severe policy bottlenecks, such as with respect to Syria and Yemen as well as some stunning ironies such as this week when officials in the city of Bangui, Central African Republic were forced to declare a state of emergency just one day after the Security Council met to consider how best to confront armed groups determined to undermine and even reverse recent presidential election results.

Within the domain of weapons and weapons systems, there is also ample room for frustration with occasional if welcome, bursts of sanity in the form of resolutions and treaties which promise, albeit with significant caveats, to regulate or even prohibit altogether the weapons that continue to threaten human communities, even human civilization. These include weapons locked in silos or placed on submarines, weapons trafficked across borders or carelessly allowed to leak from government control into a vast illicit market, weapons placed in outer space under “dual use” cover, weapons designed to explode primarily in heavily populated areas; weapons with new “bells and whistles” manufactured at still-staggering rates and shipped off to states with dubious human rights records or without much of a clue regarding what to do with the weapons – still deadly – that are set to be replaced by newer models.

These are not, for the most part, new issues for the UN nor for the many NGOs gathered around headquarters with a keen interest in promoting a disarmed world. Their determination to find ways to end the threat from nuclear weapons has persevered, a threat which has only grown as the weapons themselves display greater precision and payload and as unresolved global tensions have provided ready (if not convincing) excuses for states seeking to hold on to their weapons stockpiles or even develop their own nuclear capabilities.  Some of my closest UN colleagues, have invested a professional lifetime of thought and organizing energy in a valiant effort to solidify the relationship between disarmament and non-proliferation obligations, including obligations under international law, as well as to examine political obstacles to “general and complete disarmament,” and to remind governments and citizens of the overwhelming humanitarian imperative to keep these weapons out of harm’s way until they can be eliminated altogether.

I also have a long history with disarmament obligations and issues, which I won’t unpack here, except to say that nuclear weapons issues proved to be a “gateway” concern for me, one which I have never renounced or discarded but one which has made space for other “human security” concerns to which we are now linked by a bevy of excellent institutional partners who focus on torture and climate change, racial discrimination and biodiversity loss, atrocity crimes and incarcerated children, terrorism and corrupt governance, unsustainable cities and food insecurity.  While making it clear that we endorse the specific concern of our nuclear weapons partners – that human security priorities must not be reconstituted as security “conditionalities” which excuse neglect for nuclear disarmament obligations – it remains our view that security linkages can lead in the best of circumstances to mutual security investments that can, among its other benefits, strengthen support for the disarmament we all want and need.

While more and more of my older disarmament friends and colleagues have moved towards a more nuanced security framework, especially with regard to gender, race and climate, our younger colleagues have embraced such linkages as a matter of course.  This week’s entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) (for the treaty in multiple languages, click here: Ch_XXVI_9.pdf (un.org)) bears the broad policy and preambular concerns of several progressive states (such as Mexico, Austria and Costa Rica) along with youthful leadership from around the world who together brought the treaty into existence While holding on to the hope that the core promise of the TPNW – that nuclear weapons rendered “illegal” by this treaty will lead to concrete disarmament measures – we nevertheless applaud the degree to which the treaty’s prohibitions and positive obligations for ratifying states are certain to “shrink the space” for the influence of nuclear weapons, impeding security cooperation with nuclear-armed states in part through the rejection of longstanding “nuclear umbrellas” and related security arrangements.

The TPNW should perhaps be understood more as a stage than a solution, but it is a hopeful and welcome stage, one which seems to have unleashed some positive and inter-linked initiatives by young advocates who are well-suited to organize online and across barriers of identify and culture in this age of COVID.  One initiative close to home is “Reversing the Trend,” which was also launched this week by a diverse group of young advocates with support from the diplomatic missions of Costa Rica, Kazakhstan and Kiribati.  In a virtually seamless manner, the leaders of this initiative, including our office-mates Christian Ciobanu and Danielle Samler, have fashioned a format for discussion and advocacy that brings together youth from diverse cultural backgrounds but also links the nuclear weapons issue to other powerful impediments to their future (climate change and racial discrimination among them). They have also opened a space for creative contributions (fashion design and visual art so far)  that not only help to contextualize nuclear weapons threats but allow young people to blend policy leadership and artistic expression as they navigate the personal, structural and ideological minefields that older folks like me have not done enough to clear.

These youthful advocates are skillful, articulate and determined.  They know that their very future is on the line as pandemic variants continue to spread, as ice caps continue to melt, and as weapons continue to modernize and find new hiding places.  They also know that tinkering with the existing frameworks is not likely to be good enough; they recognize that they must locate a healthier balance between “changing the world and enjoying the world;” and they are determined that efforts to “bury” their ideas and influences are destined to fail as these young people represent, indeed, the seeds of future well-being for themselves and so many others.

And the diplomats are paying attention.  For instance, Ambassador Maritza Chan of Costa Rica, a longtime champion of the TPNW and advocate for “human security” lenses on contemporary threats, was one of those welcoming the Reverse the Trend launch.  She reminded the largely youthful audience that security is ultimately “not based on military competition but on human cooperation,” that multilateralism is key to progress on peace, and that diverse voices worldwide, including a new generation of experts on human security and the rule of law, remain dedicated to ending what she described as a “perverse” arms race.  For his part, the Kiribati Ambassador was more cautious, noting the longstanding and stubborn resistance to disarmament by the nuclear possessing states but also reassuring the audience that, in part due to the TPNW, nuclear weapons threats can still be overcome under UN auspices.

My own hope for initiatives like Reverse the Trend is that they can help examine and assess, together with the rest of us, which models of governance can be fixed and which need to be replaced; which skills and voices must get closer to the center of discussions about the “world we want” and not just the world that seems most likely ; which threats most impact their future and how can such threats be robustly identified and then addressed in tandem; which “seeds” these young people are keen to plant, may already have planted, and how we can all do more to help nurture a successful crop; which global problems are most likely to resist resolution and how can we best inspire perseverance across generations until they are finally sorted.

And perhaps we could add to that a bit of youthful guidance regarding a task that, certainly for my generation, has proven even more daunting, even more elusive than forging resolutions or negotiating limits on weapons and weapons systems: the task of disarming our own hearts as we seek to disarm the world.

Night Mood: Ending Terror in our World and in our Dreams, Dr. Robert Zuber

You are enough to drive a saint to madness or a king to his knees. Grace Willows

I’m well used to burying such things in a dark cellar and moving on.  Mark Lawrence

Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other’s heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?   Arundhati Roy

I don’t know which is worse. The terror you feel the first time you witness such things, or the numbness that comes after it starts to become ordinary.   Tasha Alexander

I felt now that my life was practically lost, and that persuasion made me capable of daring anything. H.G. Wells

We passed from laughter to terror which, like love and hate, are close relatives.  Lise Deharme

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. Martin Luther King, Jr

When I was younger, which in this past year has seemed like an eternity ago, I spent much time working on issues related to nuclear disarmament.  At the time, the UN was immersed in a high-visibility disarmament push and it seemed to me, aside from addressing the compelling and seemingly looming disaster of nuclear war, that this could also serve a “gateway” issue for me, a path to a wider “human security” engagement on environmental care and racial justice to mention just two other enduring concerns.

It was also a time when my subconscious life seemed to be running on overdrive, when my nightly sleep was punctuated by dreams of pure terror – of being out of control while falling from bridges, of pending disaster and the panic of not being able to successfully outrun the coming storm, including and especially the nuclear storm.  The infamous “doomsday” clock was always ticking away in my earlier dream life, always positing some existential disaster that I had ill prepared for and couldn’t manage to escape.

After years of what passed in my life for a higher level of sanity, complements of an apartment full of “dream weavers,” a remarkable church community, and some of the best friends and partners one could ask for, some of those terrors of the night have returned.   A year of running from COVID impacts and weighing in on a bevy of complex and daunting issues, global and domestic; another year of trying to contribute to what remains of our seemingly dwindling options on climate change and reconciliation among nations and peoples; another year of reminding people of what they don’t generally want to be reminded – that the ills that afflict us, including our now-pervasive political turmoil, are personal as much as structural – those fears that I once conspired to “bury in a dark cellar” are now leaking from their receptacles and finding their way back to prominence in my nocturnal affairs. 

These contemporary terrors of the night are different in tone from earlier iterations.  Not so much about being out of control as being frozen in response to looming threats, of not having the ability to counter whatever is “coming for me” or even being capable of moving to places of safety or like possums, playing dead.   In these dreams, “my reactions” are more like what rabbits do, freeze in place until an avenue for escape presents itself.  But in my dreamlife, there is no such avenue — only the sounds of danger getting louder and closer.  

I know that I am by no means alone in facing mental health challenges that seem mostly to play out after hours.  Especially people who are raising children and/or have jobs to which they need to travel and which often barely cover basic necessities have no choice but to retain as much functional sanity as they are able, to perform their daily duties and let their unconscious self sift through fears and anxieties once sleep has been able to descend. I know how much better I have it – have always had it – than so many in this world.  I never forget (though don’t always appreciate sufficiently) how many blessings have found their way to my door without being asked, like packages from the postal service I don’t recall having ordered.   I also know from many years at the UN and in the field the terror that is routinely inflicted on so many people in this world; those who need not wait to close their eyes after dark to experience threats that never seem to abate, fears of long-term pandemic ruin, of societies splintering at the point of a gun, of climate change that turns productive lands into dust bowls, of education for so many children put on hold, of fires of all varieties that rage on and for which we seem to have crafted insufficient preventive alternatives. 

For too many, the sounds of terror become louder and closer mostly in broad daylight, the guns that have yet to be silenced, the screams from too-many domestic abuses, the sirens of ambulances rushing COVID victims to what might well be their final earthly stop, the government helicopters whirling overhead designed to intimidate protesters at least as much as to uphold the law or protect citizens.  

As we in the US sift through the details (and its many enablers) of the recent assault on the US Capitol, an attack which more and more bears the marks of coordinated domestic terrorism, the UN has been assessing its own mechanisms and measures for identifying and addressing terrorist threat, as diplomats are fond of saying, “in all its forms and manifestations.” This week, under leadership from Tunisia’s Foreign Minister, the Security Council examined progress on countering terrorism since its landmark Resolution 1373 was adopted in the aftermath of the attacks on the US on 9/11. Key to resolution progress has been the work of the UN’s Office on Counter-Terrorism and its Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate, bodies which have done much to ensure that the counter-terror measures adopted by states are coordinated (especially across borders), adequately resourced, sufficiently attentive to the causes and instruments of extremist recruitment as well as the means for successful reintegration of “foreign terror fighters,” and that any and all measures adopted are consistent with the UN Charter values and human rights obligations already assumed by member states. 

While levels of urgency regarding the need for more robust counter-terror operations varied from Council member to member, it was gratifying that so many of them, including Estonia, Mexico,  Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Niger (which recently endured its own terrorist-related massacre), understood that the task at hand is not primarily about military confrontation with terrorist elements but of depriving terrorists of “oxygen” in part by restricting access to funding but also through policies and practices that promote sustainable development and what CTED referred to as “healing and justice.” Such counter-terror priorities also stipulate governance that is more effective in service delivery as well as more transparent and otherwise deserving of citizen trust, governance with the will and skill to eliminate what UN Special Representative Chambas referred to in another Council meeting this week as “the toxic influence of exclusion.”

Putting this bevy of good ideas and lofty rhetoric into collaborative practice requires high and sane vigilance of thought and action, the commitment to overcome all vestiges of the “sincere ignorance” which magnifies threats to the very lives it purports to help.  The manifold dangers  that constitute the waking lives of too many global citizens –including threats from heavily armed terrorists luring away children and robbing communities of dignity, livelihoods and even of life itself — warrant the full implementation of every preventive measure at our disposal.  For whatever reason, I remain convinced that at least some of the turmoil which punctuates a number of my own nights would be alleviated if the seemingly endless threats which punctuate the days of too many of the rest of us could finally attain some sustainable relief.

With whatever energy and mental health we can muster now, after a long year of lockdowns, physical distancing, political fragmentation and emotional challenges, I feel some assurance that our own lives will be a bit less stressful, our nights a bit more restful as we do what we can to help ensure that the days of many millions around the world are themselves less threatened, more prosperous.  If it is the case that we, together, have sufficient skill and capacity to “drive a saint to madness or a King to his knees,” we surely have enough to bring about an end to fingers trembling on the triggers of deadly weapons, an end to governance that serves the interests of only some and not of all, an end to terrorist violations and social deprivations that stop the development of children in its tracks and lead many adults to the desperate conclusion that they simply have nothing left to lose.

In my dream life, perhaps in yours as well, there is now an over-representation of numbness to terror, of frozen limbs amidst a growing sense of panic. But once the alarm sounds the end to another night of fitful rest, the demands of the day intervene, including the demand to do what we are able to lower the terror threshold that millions struggle mightily to escape regardless of the time of day, as well as the demand to ensure that we never permit ourselves to become numb to worldly deprivations we are well-placed to address. For me as for others, these demands are — and will remain — worth sacrificing sleep over.

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

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.

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

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.