Dear Time editors Edward Felsenthal and Sam Jacobs,
Time’s 100 Global honorees are certainly wonderful, creative,
intelligent, inspiring, and deeply committed people globally. But they were not “the world’s most
influential people.” Even collectively
they did little to stem the accelerating chaos in our increasingly insecure
world. Those who were most influential
were either ignoring, unintentionally allowing, or intentionally fueling the
root causes. Many of our seemingly
irresolvable insecurities were, in reality, easily affordable and preventable. Humanity has always had the resources and the
solutions. We just lacked the political
will to do what was needed and evidenced by a 1980 bipartisan Presidential
Commission on ending world hunger.
It clearly warned* of the threats Americans and humanity
would face if we failed to end the worst aspects of widespread hunger and
poverty by the year 2000. We didn’t. And the world we see today has more “diseases”
(infectious, chronic, and mental), “international terrorism” (and domestic), “war”
(edging toward another world war), “environmental problems” (long list), and
“other human rights problems” (refugees, genocide, homeless, human trafficking,
torture, rape, beheadings…).
The
most influential people have been those of us who’ve been ignoring the
inevitable and catastrophic costs in blood, treasure, and sustainability of believing
that the protection of national sovereignty and corporate wealth is more
important than the global protection of inalienable human rights and nature - the
fundamental infrastructure (systems and structures) of all living things.
In your introductory “Behind the list” you wrote “this year's first gathering of TIME100s, in
Davos, Switzerland the overarching theme was the conferences of interconnected
challenges...” But everything is connected!!! “Everything
is connected, everything is interdependent, so everything is vulnerable.... And
that’s why this has to be a more than
whole of government, a more than whole of nation [effort]. It really has to be a
global effort....” Jen Easterly. CISA director. Oct. 29, 2021. [the Cyber and Infrastructure
Security Agency is our nation’s newest federal agency established by the Trump
Administration in 2018].
And the
rise of Trump and other populist/authoritarian leaders globally is the direct consequence
of every ‘independent’ nation’s persistent failure to adequately address the
irreversibly interconnected and interdependent global problems that are impervious
to border controls or independent domestic agencies. The rise of middle-class suffering in most
nations has only stimulated growth in nationalistic anti-globalist views. Within this ‘us vs them’ paradigm more
democracy is not the answer. More global
justice is. What the vast majority of humans want on this planet is to
sustainably maximize their own freedom and security. In Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense,
that is the only legitimate purpose of government.
*Its
commissioners specifically warned ...“The most potentially explosive force in
the world today is the frustrated desire of poor people to attain a decent
standard of living. The anger, despair, and often hatred that result represent
real and persistent threats to international order… Neither the cost to
national security of allowing malnutrition to spread nor the gain to be derived
by a genuine effort to resolve the problem can be predicted or measured in any
precise, mathematical way. Nor can monetary value be placed on avoiding the
chaos that will ensue unless the United States and the rest of the world begin
to develop a common institutional framework for meeting such other critical
global threats… Calculable or not, however, this combination of
problems now threatens the national security of all countries just as surely as
advancing armies or nuclear arsenals.”
They also stated “that promoting economic development in general, and
overcoming hunger in particular, are tasks far more critical to the U.S.
national security than most policymakers acknowledge or even believe. Since the
advent of nuclear weapons, most Americans have been conditioned to equate
national security with the strength of strategic military forces. The
Commission considers this prevailing belief to be a simplistic illusion. Armed
might represents merely the physical aspect of national security. Military
force is ultimately useless in the absence of the global security that only coordinated
international progress toward social justice can bring.”
Today’s
world is experiencing the consequences of ignoring this commission’s warnings.
And combined, these global pressures have fueled the anti-democratic populist
movements thriving today. Independent governments' “self-interests”
can no longer be more important than humanity's potential to thrive.
Our
failure to make the protection of human rights and our environment superior to
the protection of national sovereignty and corporate power is the primary problem.
And national elections won’t stop the current systems of government that are
failing us. Without prioritizing “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s
God” there isn’t enough money in the world to address all the suffering that’s
coming and is directly linked to so many unsustainable local and global trends
that are reactionary in nature.
Prevention is key. And preventing these accelerating trends will require
a comprehensive global action plan. An affordable and achievable
plan exists today: the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs). No organization has yet taken a leadership role in building
a Movement of Movements needed to bring all progress-focused organizations and
movements together. Time is not on our side. The evolution of
pathogens, weapons, war, corruption, environmental distresses, and growing
economic disparities and debt are outpacing our will to voluntarily change our
governing systems. This is literally…globally
unsustainable. Leadership on this is urgently needed. Which
organization will rise to the occasion? Will TIME100 ever promote these
fundamental influencers?
No comments:
Post a Comment