As ambassadors from IINOI, Grambo and I went to the Millennium Development Goals Awards on Tuesday, held in the UN General Assembly. The objective of the Millennium Goals, agreed upon by 189 countries at the 2000 UN Summit, is to "free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty, to which more than a billion of them are currently subjected."
And to do it by 2015.
But as we learned from an extraordinarily entertaining and inspirational celebration that night, it is not so unrealistic…
[I have to admit that I knew very little about the program for the night, and had no idea what to expect, besides some speeches and musical performances – pretty standard elements of any formal event. But it turned out to be so much more than that, it would take me hours and hours to describe my reaction to or impressions of every unexpected detail. Like the fact that every member of the MDG Awards house band has won several Grammy’s in the course of his musical career. Or how hilarious Desmond Tutu is. Thankfully, the whole ceremony was webcast here. If you do not have the time to watch the whole thing, I would suggest watching the 4th and final section. You’ll at least see Tutu’s acceptance speech and a performance by a very interesting artist named K’naan. But for now, I want to focus my reflections on what I felt was one of the most important elements of Tutu’s speech: the concept of ubuntu.]
You and I were made for one another.
It’s hard not to think of this phrase as a Hollywood cliché (or more recently, as one of the cutest Frito-Lay ad campaigns ever). But at the MDG Awards, this was the definition Tutu gave for the term ubuntu. And thinking about what it can mean on a larger and probably non-romantic scale, it is the simplest way to describe how our society functions every day.
Take language as an example. Many consider the ability to speak one of the only characteristics to definitively separate us from animals. It is our vehicle to transmit moral concepts, preserve histories, develop technology, or have any opinion at all about anything. And yet, it is a known fact that human beings who grow up outside of a society, isolated from other human beings, never develop language and rarely acquire it even after being introduced into a community. But at the same time, any infant from any part of the world, if moved to a different society with a different language, would have no trouble at all obtaining fluency in that language as he or she matured into a child and then an adult.
It is the social, not necessarily biological, element that allows language to be the characteristic that can separate us from animals. And in that sense, you and I were made for each other. Without others, we would not exist as the same human beings we are now because we would have none of the markers we use to establish our identities as shared or dissimilar. It is the concept, as Tutu went on to describe, that “a person is a person through other persons.”
Applying that logic globally does two things simultaneously. It strips away the campy, kum-ba-yah feel of saying all humans are part of the same family. And it heaps a load of responsibility for the conditions of others’ lives on us.
If we couldn’t identify the markers that made us alike or different because we were all feral and isolated, then it seems like the importance we put on those same markers is rather arbitrary. We need each other in order to push each other away? But if we choose society over isolation, then we accept that a person is a person through other persons and must equally accept that a person’s conditions are a certain way because of our own. If you ever had a job, it is because your boss had a job and received whatever training or qualifications he/she had from whoever’s life was such that they could provide them. Examples like this can be crafted for every aspect of human life. So it follows that if to meet all eight Millenium Goals in 15 years will require $50 billion in aid per year, but governments spent $300 billion in 2003 alone on arms and weapon development, something has to be re-evaluated.
For many, the reaction to that may be the argument that much of that money was spent in a war against terror. And perhaps anticipating this, Tutu, in a very poignant and sobering prediction said, "We will never win a war against terror as long as there are conditions in the world that make people desperate.” If we take responsibility for those conditions, it is a war we had a significant part in starting and we are fighting against ourselves.
If you don’t know how you can contribute to this effort, my suggestion is to learn more about it and its various branches. And if you still don’t know what I mean about Desmond Tutu being hilarious, my suggestion is that you watch the webcast of the extraordinary ceremony.
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