Reflections on Charity and Sovereignty
Two issues jump out of yesterday’s ‘dig’ for the divine
amid the terror:
First, the searing and penetrating truth that charity
brings gifts that are unimaginable, yes to the receiver, but even more
importantly to the donor.
Second, the almost inconceivable hurdle, threshold and
even chasm for nations, and especially politicians to “surrender sovereignty”
as if each place and person was inviolable, sacred and carved in the marble of
history and tradition.
Driving through the streets of Kingston Ontario, one
reads glued to the concrete abutments that provide outdoor patios for
struggling restaurants, two words, in both English and French: “Love Kingston”
and “Amor Kingston.” Our pop culture is flooded with songs, greeting-card-dramas
(think Hallmark movies), and even dark psychological thrillers that revolve
somehow around the notion of human’s pulsing need for, search for, failure in,
depression from, dreams of and ultimately attempting to find purpose in and
through love. We ‘love’ our favourite shows, our pets, our treasured memories,
this or that doctor, teacher, dentist, neighbour and especially the half-dozen
people with whom we were actually in some kind of relationship that had the
promise and the scent of enduring. We ‘love’ our parents, our aunts and uncles,
our cousins, our grandparents…even if those individuals remain unknown because
of their death, absence or distance or even those few whose early treatment of
us was less than supportive.
We also celebrate those acts of “love” that rescue us
from a burning home in the middle of the night, or from a terrifying tornado,
or those who, in the tradition of the Good Samaritan, attend to the injured and
dying in a traffic accident, or a mass shooting. Recently, owing to the empty emotional bank
account of the current occupant of the Oval Office, devoid as it is of empathy,
compassion, and even the bare minimum of sympathy, we are giving more attention
to the Democratic candidate’s perceived and authentic reservoir of empathy,
given the many personal and family tragedies that he has had to endure over his
nearly eight decades. Each time he reaches out to an individual in real pain,
we celebrate the moment, starving as we all are for connection, for being seen and
known, after months of isolation.
We humans simply crave being known, understood,
appreciated and celebrated, and we also crave the opportunity, too often denied
through reservations of many kinds, to
express our deep appreciation, through growing insight and consciousness, of
the other. Whether for each of us, these moments of “caring” and “compassion”
and “empathy” are acts promoted by a faith base, or merely as a transactional
exchange, or also from an emotional intelligence perspective that acknowledges the
benefits of reciprocity in human relationships, there is at least a hint of what we call “humanity” in
the moments.
And if we pause to reflect after such moments, we will
feel something akin to poetic ‘warm glow’ regardless of whether we were the donor
or the recipient. Something memorable has just happened; and when that kind of moment
seems missing or rare, in the public square, we are perhaps unconsciously even
more sensitive and responsive to them when they happen to us. What is
perversely common, however, is that many times such moments are pooh-poohed as “frivolous”
or “embarrassing” or “too feminine” or “unmasculine”….when we all know that
both men and women need and deserve them in abundance, regardless of our age or
other identifying traits.
And in our hell-bent drive for objectivity, distance,
and ‘professionalism’ in all of our daily business, we have willingly and overtly
or unconsciously, stripped much of our human discourse of these moments. While
we legitimately wish to avoid cheapening them either through frequency or
superficiality, it can be argued that we may have thrown ‘this baby out with
the bathwater’ of conventional, corporate, professionalism. In their place, too
often, I hear superficial and throw-away comments about ‘how nice’ someone looks,
when the encounter is primarily, if not wholly, transactional.
Another sphere from which any genuine compassion,
empathy, and expressions of charity have all been eradicated, is the field of
diplomacy, geopolitical dialogue, given that, with ‘friends’ there is little to
no need, and with enemies, to go ‘soft’ can and likely will be considered as “weak”.
So here is the point at which charity and sovereignty
intersect. If a nation suffers a lethal blow from a tsunami or a volcano, a
hurricane or a storm surge, agencies like the Red Cross and Red Crescent,
funded primarily by private money, come to the rescue. UNICEF, and the
International Rescue Committee, CARE,Caritas Internationale, Doctors Without Borders, Food for the Hungry,
Oxfam, Save the Children, World Vision are a few of the relief agencies to
which thousands contribute and from which thousand more benefit. What seems so
ironic, if not outright self-sabotaging, however, is that many of these relief
agencies would not be so essential if the world powers were to come together to
discuss and to commit to a few, if only modest at the beginning, commitments to
give up some long-cherished sovereignty as an act of charity on behalf of the
whole of humanity.
Naturally,
many will argue that nations are not in the business of charity, compassion,
empathy or even respect for other nations, other ethnicities, other linguistic
and cultural communities. They are in the business of “providing for” and “protecting”
their people, as their public and propagandistic utterances declare. We have
deployed the instruments, processes and language of law as our primary path to
enter into and to generate specific concords between and among nations. And in
so doing, we have by default, established very low bars, for participating
nations to meet in order to establish what has come to be known as the system
of world order, following World War II. Not incidentally, the Marshall Plan, while
settled in official documents, looms as an historic light beam of charity,
enabling the restoration of the German society. So, the precedent is not
unavailable to the current and future leaders of the world’s nations, from
which to draw both inspiration and courage.
While George W. Bush is known and remembered, sadly,
primarily for his
Iraq War, his administration also participated in one of the world’s most
charitable initiatives addressing the AIDS epidemic in Africa. USAID has,
until, trump, also provided millions of foreign aid, to developing countries,
as part of the spread of democracy and the liberation of people seeking human
rights. China, for her part, is currently embarked on a massive infrastructure
program in Africa, as their transactional approach to enhanced hegemony.
However, such modest yet worthy patterns of rich nations, (primarily
responsible for carbon emissions) helping developing nations with environmental
protection have to be expanded.
When assessing the world’s ‘contribution’ (blame) for
the environmental threat, however, the inevitable “method” and process of
assessing responsibility inevitable erects barriers to agreement. The
foundational arguments upon which the United Nations was built, with a core of
five nations with the veto, has demonstrated its own inadequacy and
insufficiency.
A new approach is needed. And in order to begin a
search for such a creative, effective and promising design, the world needs,
now, and not some vague misty date sometime near the end of this century, a
concurrence that enemies breath the same air, and drink from the same
reservoirs, and plant seeds for food in the same soil as everyone else.
Furthermore, all nations are engaged in industrial processes that can no longer
be tolerated, by a global community already subject in some quarters to daily
masks, because the air they are trying to breath is dangerous to their health.
We need another visionary like Ted Turner, whose
imagination birthed CNN, to envision a new communication vehicle that will
concentrate on the specific news about and the proposed solutions to the
climate crisis. It may already exist in some podcast, or perhaps even a small
network. However, it needs international funding, internationally trained and
encultured reporters and editors, and an international board of directors
committed to the protection of the natural world, including oceans and their
species, forests and their species, deserts and their species, and cities and
their multiple engines of pollutants and laboratories of new environmental
science.
Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and others are providing
leadership in pouring millions in the desperate plight of millions suffering
from disease, hunger, homelessness and blocked access to education. And these
initiatives are both worthy and needed. However, it is time for national
governments to come to the realization, in both concept and in practice, that
whatever natural catastrophe occurs in one corner of the globe impacts all other
quarters and people. It is past time, for example, for the World Health Organization
to be able (technically and legally and jurisdictionally) to provide not only
guidance, but also mandates to governments around the world, using best medical
and scientific knowledge and practice, to limit the spread of pandemic viruses.
And for that to begin to develop, all nations, including the United States,
will have to shift several billions from its defense budget to the health budget
of the WHO, and also to assign some of its best public health brains to its
staff and committees.
The surrender of sovereignty can no longer be
considered a matter of diplomatic and geopolitical standing; it is now a matter
of protecting the health of the citizens of each and every nation. Surrendering
sovereignty, for the benefit of public health, on the surface, may seem a
ridiculous trade-off. However, given the convergence of the many forces and influences
that threaten national governance, public health, economic desperation and depression,
and the ability of all living species, flora and fauna, to access needed air,
water and food, the old world order has to be considered obsolete.
Far from condemning trump for his deliberate and odious
destruction of the nation state of the United States, the world needs to
condemn his administration for the havoc he is rendering to the people of the
planet. This aspect of the current crisis, if it were to be experienced within
a community, a corporation, a university, even a church, would have been driven
out long ago. So, the first priority of a new way of seeing and of working with
the whole world is for the world’s leaders to openly condemn the trump
administration in as loud and as unanimous voice as can be garnered. Naturally,
Putin, Duterte, Netanyahu and others will not join. Whether China would join or
not is uncertain. Next, a council of world leaders, current and retired,
political, corporate, scientific and ethical, could formally announce a
conference to address, not the business of how to make more corporate profit, as
is the case with Davos, but rather a new way of structuring the United Nations,
including its capacities for supporting refugees, educating children, feeding
the starving and for joining forces with the many philanthropics. Guaranteed
annual incomes, while worthy of
individual nations’ support, could offer a model of shifting the relationship
between government and the governed that signifies far greater acceptance of
basic human needs and rights, and then bring into clear focus, how individuals
can contribute to the economy that would be more equitable and more altruistic.
We have to be frank about the need to start seeing
ordinary people as “holy” and as sacred and as worthy, not only as a rhetorical
talking point but as a credible and sustainable truth. And this perspective
cannot be boundaried by national borders; it has to be a fact of life and
belief and truth for all nations. And the process of such a transformational
cultural perspective will require a commitment from all sectors of the many economies,
ethnicities, languages and political ideologies that for too long have held
power.
It is not only a question of civil rights, or gender
rights, or inheritance rights, or religious rights, or the rights of those with
the most wealth, however it has been acquired. We have to recognize that “flattening
the curve” applies to each one of our shared issues, and demand that those who
seek office commit to the proposition that there is no single human in any
nation who can be left behind, ignored, devalued, denied an authentic education,
access to quality health care, clean air and water, and adequate healthy food.
And as part of flattening the curve, we have to come to the place where we are
far less dependent on our hard power, our bombs and missiles, our AK47’s and
our AR-15’s. We also have to come to the place where we know that if and when
we tell our truth, those in power will start from the place that we are
credible, that we know, as well as we can, what we are talking about. We also
know the difference between being lied to and deceived by public officials and being
told the hard truths.
It is no longer okay for us to watch our brothers and sisters
protest in the streets, for a single, yet highly worthy and long overdue
legitimate cause; our shared cause is the future of humanity, and the requisite
steps that can and will offer credible and authentic hope that, together, will
have already committed to the survival of the planet.
And such survival depends on each of us stepping up to
the plate to consider acts of charity, and the surrender of our pride, hubris and
neuroses, as acts not only of charity but as legitimate transformations to new
life. And this model has application to the international forum, although those
currently in the foreign affairs establishment, like all the other establishments,
will need some time to reflect upon what it is they have to surrender.
The sacredness of each human has profound and lasting implications of a transformational nature for each of us and for the planet. And that sacredness is not the private domain of a single faith or a single person. It is a shared attribute, if only we can and will realize and incarnate it into our lives.
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