Twenty-five years ago, Jim Grant died.
On his death, there was universal expression of sorrow.
The then US President Bill Clinton even signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child (which the US Congress never ratified) to pay homage to his memory.
No head of an international organization had ever visited so many heads of state, personalities, academics and other major social and political actors, as Jim did during his time at the head of UNICEF. His amazing activities are well illustrated in the excellent book written by Adam Fifield, A Mighty Purpose.
Yet, while travelling round the world for different conferences, I am surprised to see how little reaction Jim's name elicits today.
At the World Social Forum, which usually gathers no less than 70,000 activists from different fields of civil society, very few have heard of him. This is the destiny of the unusual men and women who, in the 1970s and 1980s, shaped the agenda on global issues, which until then had been absent from political and international agendas but have now become part of our general awareness.
Another good example is Maurice Strong, the Canadian who was instrumental in calling the Stockholm Conference on the Environment in 1972 that led to the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Maurice was its first director, and then again played a crucial role as Secretary-General of the UN Conference on Environment and Development (the "Earth Summit") in Brazil in 1992, which opened up the path that culminated in the UN Climate Conference in Paris in December last year. Maurice died just a week before the Paris conference and was not even mentioned there.
In a sense, the best measure of success is that such issues no longer need a champion ... or do they? After all, the right of the child is no longer just a legal treaty but is considered part of our general view of a better world.
During his tenure at UNICEF, Jim saved 25 million children from death, yet today we still have 16,000 children under the age of 5 who die every day! So Jim has certainly left a void that nobody has filled so far. It is clearly not in the spirit of the times to take on difficult battles or daunting risks. What Jim achieved is a telling lesson for today's world and its political establishment. Here was somebody who took action based on ideals and carried that action forward with ferocious tenacity, making possible what was until then considered impossible, such as getting warring factions to agree to a ceasefire so that children could be vaccinated.
Today, the first call we hear is to be realistic, pragmatic, and Gallup polls have become the limits to imagination. The difference between utopia and chimera has shrunk. Since Jim's time, we have slipped into a world of greed, and we are on the threshold of a world of fear and, according to a general view among historians, greed and fear are what change trends in history.
However, Gallup polls also tell us that young people are disenchanted with the system (in fact, US elections show us that the older generations are also disenchanted), and one of the problems is that they lack idols and human points of reference.
A generation without idols is a generation which lacks embodiments of ideals. In an age in which images, tweets and computer pages have become the windows through which the world is observed, symbols have become even more powerful than ever.
And it will not be the billionaires, successful stockbrokers and lavishly paid CEOs, who can become idols. Nor will it be politicians intent on administering the possible, while avoiding any risk with the impossible.
When I speak to young people of Jim Grant, they usually remain in silence ...for a while. It is so unexpected for them to come across someone who did so much in his life for humankind, that they struggle to process this fact through their view of the present world, and they have to think it over. They often ask me:＂Why are there are no longer people like this?"
The United Nations is a shade of what it was at Jim's time. To different extents, the great powers have been re- appropriating the power that they originally gave to the United Nations.
Would it be possible today to have the United States agree to contribute 25 percent of its budget? Would it be possible today to pass the Universal Declaration on Human Rights as it is? Globalization has two engines - trade and finance - and they are out of the UN system. Meanwhile, new fora have been invented to shape agendas out of the multilateral system, from the G20 to the World Economic Forum in Davos...and the same mechanisms are at work in Europe against European institutions.
I am convinced that this Initiative , gathering contributions from man people, will be a suggestive and timely effort to focusing anew on ideals and commitments, on the fact that it is possible to change the world if there are those who believe in it and work towards it. The growth of civil society is possibly the element of globalization which carries the seeds of a transformation to the better world, to the world which Jim wanted to make reality.
Rome, March 2016
ROBERTO SAVIO is an Italian-Argentine journalist. Co-founder and former Director General of Inter Press Service (IPS). In recent years he also founded OtherNews, a service that provides "information that markets eliminate".
Today, the first call we hear is to be realistic, pragmatic, and Gallup polls have become the limits to imagination. The difference between utopia and chimera has shrunk. Since Jim's time, we have slipped into a world of greed, and we are on the threshold of a world of fear and, according to a general view among historians, greed and fear are what change trends in history.
However, Gallup polls also tell us that young people are disenchanted with the system (in fact, US elections show us that the older generations are also disenchanted), and one of the problems is that they lack idols and human points of reference.
A generation without idols is a generation which lacks embodiments of ideals. In an age in which images, tweets and computer pages have become the windows through which the world is observed, symbols have become even more powerful than ever.
And it will not be the billionaires, successful stockbrokers and lavishly paid CEOs, who can become idols. Nor will it be politicians intent on administering the possible, while avoiding any risk with the impossible.
When I speak to young people of Jim Grant, they usually remain in silence ...for a while. It is so unexpected for them to come across someone who did so much in his life for humankind, that they struggle to process this fact through their view of the present world, and they have to think it over. They often ask me:＂Why are there are no longer people like this?"
The problem, I tell them, is not that there are no more Jim Grants, there are not many left of his companions in travel who laboriously worked with him to make the children's agenda a central one. The success was a collective success. And then, asking them what they are doing to change the present world if they do not like it, I say to them:" My generation screwed it up, leaving it no better than the one I found. But this is your world. This is your time!" I believe that, besides greed and fear, fighting for a better world can also change societies and history.
The United Nations is a shade of what it was at Jim's time. To different extents, the great powers have been re- appropriating the power that they originally gave to the United Nations.
Would it be possible today to have the United States agree to contribute 25 percent of its budget? Would it be possible today to pass the Universal Declaration on Human Rights as it is? Globalization has two engines - trade and finance - and they are out of the UN system. Meanwhile, new fora have been invented to shape agendas out of the multilateral system, from the G20 to the World Economic Forum in Davos...and the same mechanisms are at work in Europe against European institutions.
I am convinced that this Initiative , gathering contributions from man people, will be a suggestive and timely effort to focusing anew on ideals and commitments, on the fact that it is possible to change the world if there are those who believe in it and work towards it. The growth of civil society is possibly the element of globalization which carries the seeds of a transformation to the better world, to the world which Jim wanted to make reality.
Rome, March 2016
ROBERTO SAVIO is an Italian-Argentine journalist. Co-founder and former Director General of Inter Press Service (IPS). In recent years he also founded OtherNews, a service that provides "information that markets eliminate".
Those like Jim, sadly, only come once in a generation
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