My Sophomoric Commonplace

Inspired to be Just Naive Enough

I’ll go out on a limb and call Nathaniel Whittemore one of the spokespersons of our generations movers and shakers (the changers). When I had heard about this year’s Global Engagement Summit (a quasi-training, more inspiritational convention of our generations leaders for global change) line-up I was a little more than excited to see how expansive it all was. My excitement was of course limited to that of a very interested spectator waiting on the sidelines, watching the game with every intention of joining in. But alas, I still want to spread the words of inspiration Whittemore gives us. Keep in mind, most of this blog will probably be quotation of his keynote address which you can find here @ change.org through his Social Entrepeneurship blog. So let me jump right in with what I see as the most important parts of the speech. Whittemore has a knack for giving us the main message of our own collective conscience.

Whittemore starts his speech with a story about Jane Addams, the starter of Hull House in Gilded Age Chicago that stretched out a hand to the urban poor. Addams, seemingly way ahead of her time, hesitated to call her work “philanthropy” for the sole reason that she saw its implicit division––much like I have glossed from Christine Gorman’s keynote speech at the GlobeMed Annual Health Summit. So in the late 19th century, the idea of changing the “us and them” mentality into an “us and more of us” state of mind.

So what unites us, then? Why nothing more than the spirit of democracy. To Addams, “democracy was the force through which the talents, dreams, and passions of all would be unleashed to create a more just, equitable world.”

While I understand what she’s getting at, I fear that this idea leans too closely to a normative claim on the way we should structure each other’s institutions. Instead, I am fond of the idea that we are connected not through some manmade convention called democracy, but through our inner multitudes of experience and thought. We have all known what it’s like to fall victim to injustice, we all know what it is like to get a help up when we have fallen, and we have all wondered how other people have gone through the very same experiences as us and come through with much different reflections. We can communicate on the basest level only because of our basest differences, and we can only move ahead because of the very frictions that ignite us. So instead of uniting under the banner of democracy, I would open that term up to shared humanity (which includes a paradox of shared differences).

But soon enough, Whittemore takes over and cannot do wrong. I want to plaster this all over the wall in my dorm room: “The rhetoric of globalism and human rights are ascendant yet our international institutions are impotent. The question of whether the unregulated free market or the planned welfare state is the best vehicle of freedom and prosperity is largely resolved, and the answer is, of course, neither. The dogmas of the quiet past, are, as Lincoln so poetically put it, simply inadequate for the realities of the stormy present.” This, once again, is a call for everyone involved to get together (to unify) and discuss (to differ).

Moving from this point, Whittemore inspires us to not only unite but to find our passions and remember our responsibilities: “Our obligation is to find our passion, and to unleash the passion of others. Our responsibility is to remember that systems of oppression were created by people, and so too can people undo them. Our hope is to never stop believing that we can change the world, because we must.”

If I see more schwag from the Global Engagement Summit (I haven’t checked out the vids yet, but am getting on it…) I’ll mos def post. Go out and, instead of just noticing the changes that need to be made, make noticeable changes wherever you go.

More Meditations on the Goal of Art (Its Side-Effects)

“The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”

This is a quotation from one of my favorite poets and critics—T.S. Eliot. I came across this passage while using that crazy new stumbleupon application on firefox (one of the coolest tools on the internet today). But anyway, it got me to thinking (and that’s always a dangerous thing for the blank page, or text window, i guess). It all sounds so beautiful, but what does it mean for an artist to go through “a continual extinction of personality”? I journaled my meditation:

I find it hard to believe that humans don’t have some inner capacity that connects them to our larger conceptions of art. There are some, a very select few, who make it into the collective consciousness as what we call artists. But they’re all doing the same thing, getting away with whatever they can in order to represent a reality we all know somewhere. There are a few more who try until their final breaths to get there. They don’t. But there are even more (exponentially more) whose lives unconsciously subscribe to the collective conscience’s notion of art. So now I am under the suspicion (my evidence not yet substantialized) (my claims not yet proven) (or even fully thought-through) that those people—the ones who can converse, who chuckle, who cry and bawl, without the slightest worry about their impact on the world are people who live art. The ones who are free to live without constantly monitoring the firings of their synapses are living art. And artists, if their job is about emulating nature (what is natural), must somehow make and live this living art. To do this, they can have no personality of their own, for they are forced to take on the personality of their subject (humanity, nature, the vast etc.).

But I realize now that it is not just artists who must blur the lines of their relationships with people. Anyone concerned with humanity in general, must consider all humans (even the ones they are close to) in somewhat the same fashion. They must either feel the deepest empathy for all the souls they come across (we call this philanthropy), or they must feel the sincerest indifference, maybe even hatred, for all the souls they face (we call this misanthropy). Either way, the lines of human relationships are blurred. With that, I must add this to My Sophomoric Commonplace; it’s a quotation from Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth:

“The people who take society as an escape from work are putting it to its proper use; but when it becomes the thing worked for it distorts all the relations of life.”

The Need for Connections (in life, but more so in Global Health)

I don’t know what it is about today, but I think the word “connection” has prodded and poked my brain enough to put a hole through my forehead. In reading a post on the blog concerning partnerships and equity in global health research/initiatives written by Ankur Asthana (http://www.sghequity.org/?p=539), I realized that there is a real disconnect between the rather sterile, scholarly world and the nitty, gritty world of practicioners. Asthana’s closing question: “when it comes to something so vital as global health, is it just to withold valuable information from practicioners because of their inability to pay such large sums?” The question is rhetorical, but the expected answer is a stern “no”. And he is right in his acknowledgment of the injustice. But, I have certain problems with the implications of this rhetorical question. I understand the injustice of a scholarly journal or database’s “greed” and am all for an easier way for practitioners to access this valuable information, but I am a little hesitant to lash out at the institutions that help propogate this information-gathering research with much the same fire and brimstone as Asthana. There is a need at this stage in the Global Health Dialogue (what I see as a three way conversation between scholars, practitioners, and the public) for building bridges instead of drawing lines in the dirt. What we need right now is to connect and allign our forces, our various knowledges, together to make a unified approach to fighting Global Health Inequity. And honestly, I find complaining about the system only an initial step between the impetus of the problem and its solution.

Christine Gorman, in her blog “The Global Health Report” (http://globalhealthreport.blogspot.com/), shows that connections are being made (allbeit on a very local level) between scholars and interested outside parties. She discusses a progression on the blog “The Pump Handle” (http://thepumphandle.wordpress.com/) much alligned with the needs I see to solving our problems. Gorman states: “I have noticed that they are expanding their list of contributors well beyond Georgetown to academics at Boston and Tufts Universities, as well as a few well-chosen advocates and even one anonymous blogger.” While these connections to other institutions (opposed to the George Washington University-centric posts of the site’s past) and the lone “anonymous blogger” are small gains in this struggle to expand the discussion (the circle, as Gorman would call it), we must still understand that they are gains.

But the future, at least in my mind, does not look so bright if we cannot somehow connect the problems of Global Health to the problems of the average, bourgeois Westerner. We believers in Global Health Equity (or should I say we believers in the notion of positive human rights) do nothing for our cause if we preach at our friends and family. As Gorman implies with a question to the GlobeMed Health Summit held the first weekend in April: “How do you translate the goals of universal access to health care in language that resonates with everyone from the ordinary Muslim laborer to the anti-abortion activist to the libertarian atheist?” We cannot gain by merely quibbling with the people who are already on our side (“the converted”) or by using the same dogmatic language on “the non-believers” (my phrase).

We cannot fundamentally change the world’s view on the need for Global Health Equity through the shibboleths of medical jargon used by the practictioners and researchers that Asthana discusses. The gulf between the practitioners and researchers probes is equaled (if not dwared by) the canyons between these very practitioners and the general public.

In my limited involvement thus far with GlobeMed at Rhodes, I’ve already experienced this disconnect. I cannot count the times that people have seen the phrase “GlobeMed” on our pamphlets and put them back on the table saying “Oh, I’m not a Bio major”. We must, as Gorman demands in the same address to GlobeMed students, stop “preaching to the converted” (I will lump “bicquering with the converted” into that as well) and start spreading the news, the good news, the Gospel of Global Health.

We need to start making connections amongst all of our different backgrounds (is now too late to mention I’m a creative writing major?). We need to show the world (or at least those around us) that the problem of Global Health Inequity can only be resolved through inter-subjectivity, through the connecting of our own individual cogs. We must translate (or at least close-caption) the Global Health Dialogue so that everyone can understand their part in the discussion.

Why I Study What I Study

A lot of my friends and family have long been asking me why I am an English major, and on top of that, a Creative Writing major. For a while, I could come up with no real answer other than that I loved it for some reason. But in the process of declaring my major I had to write a short paragraph detailing the answer to that very question. It was, to say the least, a cathartic experience and I would like to share:

“It would be vain and conceited of me to say that I desire to study creative writing for some reason more special than any other soul who has come before me. That I, some nascent and innocent contributor and spectator to the body of all fiction, could claim the impact of literature on me to be singular and relegated especially to me is nothing but an unnecessary repetition of every other Creative Writing and Literature major’s own claims to the form. So, with that necessary digression out of the way, I must lay out my purposes for taking up this wild goose chase for truth and meaning we call studying English. Language, this ingenious construct invented by and solely for humankind, has an innate tension: it is both the basis for human understanding (for some semblance of inter-subjective truths to be proven or even exist, we must have language of some kind) and the singular obstacle to that very same comprehension. To be a philologist (as I want to be), or to claim to love words (as I do) can mean nothing more than trying as hard as humanly possible to bridge these antipodes together––to run our own word-particle accelerator and smash concepts together and gather the data. But how am I, as a student of this inbred tension between clarity and ambiguity, supposed to gather data? There are no labs focused on the sub-particle makeup of our language. This is true only if we blind ourselves from the connection between the creative process and its analysis to the scientific process of hypothesis, experimentation, and conclusion our intellectual cousins in Frazier Jelke live for. We have our own Gregor Mendel’s and our own Werner Heisenberg’s (only their names are something like John Milton and Jacques Derrida). As a philologist, a lover of words, I cannot stop at just studying words’ previous, chemically volatile interactions with each other. I must run my own experiments; I must carry on the torch of language’s innovative representation of its own inner tension. I cannot be anything other than a scientist for the whole English language, and that means studying not only literature but also creative writing.”

Writing this was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. The fact that I wrote it in less than an hour was powerful confirmation of its truth to me. I beg of everyone to try to do this with their own goals and desires in life. Write a mission statement; write a damn good one. Frame it, post it, flaunt it, and parade it. Write one you’re actually proud of, and don’t stop till you’ve found out how to say what you’ve been wanting to do for your life up till that moment. But don’t stop there. No, don’t ever stop there. Take it off the wall. Rip the frame from its edges. Make the paper bleed with your ever-changing revisions of your self. Then let it sit and coalesce in its juicy meaning for until you forget to remember it. Then remember it and do the whole thing over. When we can read our selfs (what particles of our minds we pour, we flood) on paper, smile, and then rip it apart, we’ve done something worthwhile.

Gaps in The Global Fund

The Global Fund is in a crisis.

The Global Fund is an organization founded by the U.N. under Kofi Annan in 2002 whose mission is to alleviate the problems of Malaira, Tuberculosis, and AIDS. It was deemed “a new approach to international health financing”. At its inception, it proposed a $10 billion dollar fund to be set-up for individual countries to apply for. This is the Global Fund’s innovation. By mandating that countries apply for aid by supplying quality proposals, the Fund is doing nothing more than acting as a sound lender (an idea many financial executives on Wall Street haven’t tried in a couple business cycles) to a growing need for global health funding.

The Fund, since its inception, has done a lot of good for the world’s 3 major health problems. It has injected 57% of all the funding that goes TB treatment, 60 % of all that goes to Malaria treatment, and 23% of all  HIV/AIDS. Because of this funding, 4.6 million people have received treatment and another 70 million are the proud owners of TB-treated bednets. On the HIV/AIDS front, 2 million individuals are now on ARV (Antiretroviral) medications while another 62 million have been tested. Another 445,000 mothers are on PMTCT (Preventing Mother to Child Transmission) medication. But not only has The Fund affected those with the actual virus, it has helped over 3 million orphans who have been impacted by HIV/AIDS infection in their families.

So with all of the good that is being done, why is The Global Fund having such a hard time finding funding? It is a two-fold problem. First, Round 8 of their Technical Review Panel decisions yielded a 300% increase in approval from the last round. This means that country proposals are of a higher quality and are more ambitious. This is a great problem to have, because it shows that these countries are taking more and more initiative in their own public health systems. But, (and there is always a but in these situations) the member countries who proposed to back The Fund are starting to break their promises. This creates a humongous gap in what the Fund has promised and what the Fund is actually able to give. That gap right now is 9.8 billion dollars.

How do we solve this problem? I see two different approaches, both on opposite ends of a spectrum. The first, the simplest and probably most ineffective, would be to renege on the promises the Fund has given to these needy and (more importantly) willing countries. But what would this do for us in the long run? Nothing but increase an already inspid pessimism of global legislative initiatives to aid global health and poverty. The second, the most difficult (and most beneficial), action to take would be giving hell to our politicians. In situations like this, when the government is not supplying a need (or even a promise) to a large and detached populous, people have a tendency to not care about government action (research any articles on an economist’s “myth of the rational voter” to see my point). Thus the only way to shrink the gap between our promises and our payments, we MUST lobby together for a healthier world.