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Abolish Foreignness
Eight million children under the age of five die each year from largely preventable causes. One billion people live in abject poverty. Thousands die crossing international borders while fleeing poverty, war or persecution. Rich countries reinforce barriers, laws and measures to prevent people crossing their borders. Hundreds of thousands are held in migration prisons as if they were criminals. 67 million people live as refugees or are internally displaced as a result of persecution, war, poverty or other causes. Believing that human beings are “foreigners” makes such profound human rights violations possible.
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Eleanor Roosevelt’s Prayer: A Vision of a World Made New
Eleanor Roosevelt was the first Chair of the United Nations Human Rights Commission. Her work, with her colleagues, led to the adoption in 1948 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The following, according to her son, is a prayer that she said every night: Our Father, who has set a restlessness in our hearts and made us all seekers after that which we can never fully find, forbid us to be satisfied with what we make of life. Draw us from base content and set our eyes on far off goals. Keep us at tasks too hard for us that we may be driven to Thee for strength. Deliver…
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Identity Crisis
Some countries obsess about ‘who we are’. The obsession becomes more intense, the more people with different coloured skins, different accents, diffent cultures become part of day to day life. In an age of migration “we” can become very confusing. Who can “we” be, if quite obviously “us” includes “them”. This question is not just one of tribalism, although tribalism is at the roots of this anxiety. The world is constructed around the idea of “races”: every nation a state and every state a nation. Italians in Italy, Germans in Germany, Poles in Poland. The theory was simple: better simplistic – and it never worked well. At its worst it…
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The Borders of Science
Surely something as universally true as science could not have borders? Not in the twenty-first century. Not in the age of the internet. Like the refugees who face immense challenges in getting into Fortress Europe, getting the benefits of science to the poor in developing countries is incredibly difficult. The most well-known case was that of aids drugs and their availability to the poor in developing countries. The problem is this: the systems created to protect intellectual property simply ignores the existence of the poor who could never pay for drugs, priced at around US$17,000 for an annual supply. While developed countries were able to pay the price for aids drugs and…
