This is our world...and we must "own" it and "claim" it for our grandchildren....

 Ban Ki-moon:  Sustainable development is the pathway to the future we want for all. It offers a framework to generate economic growth, achieve social justice, exercise environmental stewardship and strengthen governance. Lifting people out of poverty, advancing economic growth…these are one and the same fight. We must connect the dots between climate change, water scarcity, energy shortages, global health, food security and women’s empowerment. Solutions to one problem must be solutions for all.

Between 2007 and 2016 Ban Ki-moon served as the eighth secretary-general of the United Nations and prior to that served as South Korea’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade between 2004 and 2006.

From un.org, we read, “I grew up in war…and saw the United Nations help my country to recover and rebuild. That experience was a big part of what led me to pursue a career in public service. As Secretary-General, I am determined to see this Organization deliver tangible, meaningful results that advance peace, development and human rights.”

At the opening of the 77^th UN General Assembly, September 20, 2022, the current Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, is reported to have said (from aljazerra.com):

We face a world in peril across our work to advance peace, human rights and sustainable development, Guterress said citing conflicts and climate change, a ‘broken global financial system’ poverty, inequality, hunger and divisions. Addressing common challenges will require continued solidarity as we demonstrate the great promise and potential of this organisation.

Two of the most recent Secretaries-General utter a similar tutorial, to connect the dots and to work in solidarity, from the pinnacle of the world’s sole organization dedicated to keeping the world from eviscerating itself, over a decade apart. And the conditions for their perspectives have only grown more cloudy, more divisive and more dangerous in the interim. Their work, as leaders in such an diverse, complex and some would argue dysfunctional organization, is compounded by many factors.

News outlets, from individual nations, generally tend to adopt the “parochial” or provincial view of their respective countries of origin. Consequently, Americans are fed a diet of pro-American information that inevitably paints America’s enemies in colours that perpetuate the traditional, standard, expected and stereotypical negative reinforcement of American views and expectations. That habit is almost uniformly and deliberately followed in each of the media of each of the member nations. Friends are friends, enemies are enemies…and rarely does that “plate” shift. Coverage of United Nations conferences, like those focused on climate change, champion the successes of individual nations’ representatives, as a way of convincing the “people back home” that all is well.

Foreign policy and foreign approaches to global issues remain fundamentally ‘in the closet’ among some many would consider ‘egg-heads’ or ‘foreign policy wonks’ whose language, perspective and diplomatic training renders them in another league from the hurly-burly of domestic politics. Foreign affairs rarely if ever find a place on the public rostrum in the middle of political campaigns, given the almost complete vacuum of public interest and knowledge of the people who will be casting votes in a nation’s general election. National politicians, too, find “cover” in rarely having to debate foreign policy issues in their legislatures, unless and until a conflict breaks our, like the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, that demands a response. Language of urgency, in the diplomatic theatre, tends to read like luke-warm tea, as compared with the vulgarity and contempt that tends to colour political campaigns for election. Even the tepid temperature helps to neutralize foreign issues from the general public, so inundated by incendiary viral screams on Twitter, Meta and Tik-Tok.

Geo-political power currents, and the personalities engaged in both swimming in and generating those currents, for most of us, seem beyond the pale in both cognitive understanding and emotional approachability. Whether it is an oil price hike, or a production decline, a hostage-taking on the West Bank, or a missile intercepted on its way into Tel Aviv, or a terror raid conducted by Al Shabbab in Africa, foreign affairs have, for most of us for many decades, been a rumble of thunder far off from our immediate circle, and often too, detached even from our homeland. Rarely, and only recently, have those clouds broken out in some kind of military ‘lightning’ or a terror-strike, or a bombing of a mosque or synagogue or church prayer meeting. And even those domestic terror events, while inflicted on “our” people, are still shrouded in both mystery, incomprehension, dismay and an unconscious (if not conscious) and willful attempt to ‘distance’ ourselves from their import and impact.

No longer.

It is no longer either feasible or tolerable for us to consider those thunder clouds of foreign affairs to be devoid of lightning and high winds and storm surges and draughts, food shortages, home destruction, inevitable serious strain on local and national budgets from events, both natural (with human responsibility) and directly resulting from human activity. It is also no longer acceptable for national media organizations to fall victim to the ratings/advertising/revenue electro-magnet of audience apathy, disinterest and detachment from foreign affairs. Headlines announcing the third British Prime Minister in three months (Rishi Sunak), after the precipitous fall of Liz (Lettuce) Truss, is hardly adequate coverage of the UK political dilemma, which, although it must be directly managed by 10 Downing, has and will continue to have repercussions for the world economy, including North American, the Middle East, South Asia and Africa.

A similar observation has to be emphasized about the repercussions of the war in Ukraine on the world economy, including direct impacts on whether or not millions of people will survive, in the face of food shortages, poverty, disease and shifting employment opportunities. The word ‘economy’ is so abstract, and yet has so many reverberating implications in the lives of individual human beings and their families. And we, ordinary citizens, have to shed our glazed eyes, ears, minds and hearts in order to being to peek into the weeds of the winds of economic/military/geo-political/climate/starvation ‘dots’ and the degree to which each of these files overlaps and impedes on the successful addressing of the fine points in each file.

And it is not only the files, those academic, abstract, and clinical pillow-cases of paper that metaphorically and literally encompass the “papers” of policy proposals, and research papers, and cynical intelligence reports, and analytical trends that are the stuff of the ‘homework’ of every political actor in every nation, on a daily if not hourly basis that overlap. The separate nations, themselves, also now are so interconnected and so interwoven, and so mutually inter-dependent as well as intra-dependent, are so enmeshed in those shared files, on behalf of their respective people, that the United Nations itself is becoming shredded at the edges where the respective interests of individual nations threaten the public good of the international community, including the billions of people all of whom need food, clean air, clean water, health care, inoculation from diseases that are trending in the ‘wrong direction’ and an income from work with dignity, respect and honour.

We can no longer separate, segregate, divide the files of national policy from the glaring and existential needs/threats facing the whole world. We can no longer tolerate a Security Council whose five original members have a veto over each and every decision. We can no longer tolerate a United Nations bereft, by design and by consent, of peace-keeping forces, police forces, international investigatory bodies with both the legal and the enforcement power to inspect, to report and to prosecute rogue nations for their secretive development of nuclear weapons. The surrender of national sovereignty, in the service of international legitimate needs, services, shared instruments with real, while limited, powers, is an agenda item that no longer can be excluded from the political agendas of all political persuasions in all nations, ethnicities, languages and traditions. Not the surrender of all national sovereignty, but the surrender of that degree of national independence that serves to acknowledge, and to implement a level of legal, committed and empowered and demonstrably shared obligations, goals, and a clear path to human survival.

Corporations, continuing to operate in nations where they avoid taxes on profits, or pay far less than in developed countries, will also have to pay their fair share of the costs of levelling the playing field to the degree that we (all of us) never become integrated and enmeshed in the business of permitting people to die, simply because we have an economic and political and ethical ‘system’ that provides immunity and impunity for the perpetuation of colonial, imperial, imposed and tyrannical pursuit of wealth, power and domination of those whose power and influence, whose voices and whose “perceived” value is considered expendable.

Such a model of criminal irresponsibility and criminal conspiracy and negligence was alive and well and operating in the United States of America during the last presidential administration. Tape recordings of conversations between Bob Woodward and the former president, recently released, demonstrate that a knowledge of the significance of the pandemic was conveyed to the chief executive months before it was public acknowledged, while thousands died from lack of care, prevention and inoculation. Without having a legal education, and the knowledge that classifies crimes, it is not a stretch to call the despicable failure of the former president ‘crimes against humanity’ (his own people, for God’s sake!) whether those crimes are ever prosecuted in his own country or around the world or not.

And, having provided the despicable and deplorable failure to accept and to enact responsibility for the job to which he was elected, the former president has set-loose a model of mis-governance, camouflaged by lies, deceit, insouciance, and hubris that, in the midst of the turbulence of the storm in which we are all living and working, around the world, a model that has already found willing accomplices and imitators in too many quarters.

Pitting the United Nations and its Secretary General and the Security Council against the insidious and insurrectionist powers of the wannabe dictators, autocrats and tyrants, whether they hold ‘elected’ office or merely operate out of caves in the ground, is a conflict the outcome from which, while not necessarily totally predictable, nevertheless seems quite ominous. So long as Putin is not held at bay or preferably removed as soon as possible, for example, through the imposition of a formal investigation and prosecution by some world court, under the auspices of the United Nations, this deadly war will continue. And this war will only escalate and many more people will be killed, maimed, abandoned, and declared illegitimate and irrelevant.

It is no longer tolerable for the United States to remain on the sidelines, in public opinion especially, regarding the United Nations as an infringement on national sovereignty. It is long past time for the United States to sign the International Criminal Court charter as a full-fledged member, paying both homage and dues to the international legal system. Weapons, missile defense systems, warheads and humanitarian assistance all worthy of commendation…and still not enough.

The United States could, and should, today, publicly call for admission of Ukraine to full memberships in NATO, even though the process will take some time to complete.

And the people of the United States, not only in and through their ballots on November 8, but also in and through their letters, calls, texts and emails to their respective members of Congress, both Senate and House, call for a resolution that would preclude Republicans from withholding further aid to Ukraine, should they take control both either or both Houses.

The United States, in coalition with its allies, can and must take the lead in re-designing the United Nations, to make it become a muscular agent of nor merely talking points of multiple languages, but a force for international collaboration, co-operation and resolution of the open and glaring holes in international governance.

Putin has demonstrated the futility of the current arrangement; others of like mind will continue to take advantage, patronize, condescend and effectively dismiss the United Nations as it is currently constructed and operating. We have no time to wait. The words of those Secretary Generals cannot and must not drift into the archives as merely nice words, without the impact of full and universal implementation.

Writing on Hildegard of Bingen, the medieval mystic, Elaine Bellezza writes:

We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interprete4d world is not home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light. (from Wanderings on facebook).

Those words have always been true, and never more than today