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Greetings All,
Do you feel things are really moving fast? Do you feel you’re crawling inch by inch atop the caboose toward the runaway engine? With winds of change against our faces, I hope the next construction of civilization, which has already gone full steam ahead this decade, will be eventually poised for balancing the qualities of women and men.
Flagrant inequalities with flippant insincerities and broken promises too often repulse the spirit of women. Most men, and perhaps too many women, are hardly aware of the dominance insinuated in violent words psychically piercing the heart of everyday conversations.
There’s a marvelous relief for many involved after flummoxed leaderships have told the truth, and have authentically behaved out of that truth. One might then observe cordiality easily blending with the feminine nature to nurture good policy, disappearing poverty and disease and thwarts to developmental goals. After all, aren’t one country’s domestic policies another country’s foreign policies?Earthlings could see the light at the end of the tunnel once the train’s windows aren’t fully draped with felonies, and the engineer’s full-dress uniform no longer cloaks invisible rulers of patriarchical intolerance. But, rather a bright light at tunnel’s end can be filled with health care, education, and physical protection for women and children, treasured and nurtured. Then, the paradox of tolerance might become a thing of millennia past during our travel on the train of human existence.
Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance, even to those who are intolerant; if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
~ Sir Karl Raimund Popper (b 1902), from the first volume of The Enemies of the Open Society. As heard on Chris Hedges’s lecture on WGBH Forum Network in partnership with The Cambridge Forum.
The rest of the ezine is a transcription of the last seven minutes of the Final Address by Stephen Lewis, who tells the truth, to The Sixteenth (XVI) International AIDS Conference in Toronto, Canada, August 2006. The four section headers, as seen in the usual layout of Staying Awake ezine, are neither part of Lewis’s address nor assumed by this author as dissimilar to the spirit of Lewis’s context.
Men Holding Men Accountable
“The global fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria is still half a billion short this year, and more than a billion short next year. At the moment, there is no obvious way to close the shortfall; it is almost inconceivable that the extravagant promises of Gleneagles [in Scotland, place of July 2005 G8 Summit] are revealed as so fatuous that the global fund is now compromised. No one is asking for any more than that which was promised, but the Pavlovian betrayal of the south has already begun. Everything in the battle against AIDS is put at risk by the behavior of the G8. Yesterday, Dr. Julio Montaner courageously characterized that behavior as genocide. brackets are mine
“I remember back in 2001 in an op-ed for The Globe and Mail, I used the phrase mass murder. It’s hard in the face of the annihilating Cuban toll not to be driven to linguistic extremes. This issue of resources makes or breaks the response to the pandemic. It is imperative that the delegates here assembled never let the G8 countries off the hook.
“What has to happen, I think, is that we place a temporary moratorium on the endless, self indulgent proliferation of meetings, seminars, roundtables, discussion groups, task forces, ad nauseam, plus the production of reports, documents, monographs, statistical data, ad repetition, and concentrate every energy at country level.”
What’s Been Missing?
“At the opening of this conference, Peter Piot talked of the next twenty-five years; he’s right to do so. He indicated it would be a long and difficult haul; he’s right again. But if the next twenty-five years are to take advantage of the guarded optimism of this conference; if the next twenty-five years are to overcome the lethargy and inertia of the last twenty-five years; if the next twenty-five years are to link inseparably poverty and disease and the millennium development goals, then it has to happen in country, on the ground, organized and orchestrated by the countries themselves. And, the agencies on the ground, whether multilateral, bilateral, or civil society must be held accountable. That’s what’s been missing. That’s the job of the delegates to this conference: holding people and organizations accountable.
“This XVI International AIDS conference beyond any preceding conference has given voice to youth, but it’s still a limited and marginalized voice reflecting the hostile ambiguity of the adult world. The figures are brutal and stark: fully fifty percent of new infections between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, and yet who can deny the appalling absence of programs for and engagement of young people in the fight against the pandemic. The situation cries out for redress, and it must be redressed well beyond smarmy tokenism.”
Women’s Rights
Are Human Rights
“Finally, in my view, as delegates doubtless know, the most vexing and intolerable dimension of the pandemic is what is happening to women. It’s the one area of HIV and AIDS, which leaves me feeling most helpless and most enraged. Gender inequality is driving the pandemic, and we will never subdue the gruesome force of AIDS until the rights of women become paramount in the struggle.
“Last Monday morning at the Women’s March, the signs read Women’s Rights Are Human Rights. That was a slogan that captured the Vienna International Conference on Human Rights in 1993; it was the slogan repeated at the Cairo Conference on Population in 1994; and yet again at Beijing in 1995. It’s never been made real—and so long as men control the levers and bastions of power, it never will be real!
“Whether it’s the apparatus of the United Nations, including the agencies, or the endless number of high level panels, or auspicious studies of human development, like the Blair Commission for Africa, the demeaning diminution of women is everywhere evident. And those examples are but proxies for the wider world, particularly the developing world where freedom from sexual violence; the right to sexual autonomy; to sexual and reproductive health; social and economic independence; and even the whiff of gender equality, are barely approximated. It’s a ghastly, deadly business, this untrammeled oppression of women in so many countries on the planet.”
All Roads Lead from Women
“My closest colleagues and I have come to the conclusion that one of the ways to diminish the impact of the AIDS virus is by creating a powerful international agency for women, funded and staffed to the teeth. There must be voice and advocacy and operational capacity on the ground for fifty-two percent of the world’s population. There is a UN reform panel at the moment contemplating the creation of a new entity provided they have the courage to confront the warped and abysmal gender architecture of the United Nations. If they find the courage, I deeply believe that we could begin to still the carnage; and, what works for AIDS can work everywhere.
“I challenge you, my fellow delegates, to enter the fray against gender inequality. There is no more honorable and productive calling; there is nothing of greater import in this world—all roads lead from women to social change, and that includes subduing the pandemic. For my own part, when I leave the post of envoy at the end of the year, I have asked that my successor be an African. But, most important—an African woman!”
~ Stephen Henry Lewis, C.C. (b 1937), Canadian politician, author, journalist, labor arbitrator, broadcaster, diplomat, United Nations Special Envoy for HIV AIDS in Africa 2001-2006, currently Social Science Scholar-in-Residence at McMaster University; speech transcribed from the video below.
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