Live Your Life Be Free!

I just finished the excellent book A Race Against Time by Stephen Lewis. Lewis was an envoy for the UN for HIV/AIDS in Africa and became an outspoken advocate for reform of the UN in light of the pandemic.

One thing he was particularly focused on was the UN’s failure to act in the face of AIDS. Instead, they studied and talked:

I make this point because all of us, myself included, who moved too slowly in the face of the viral contagion, who fiddled while Africa burned, who have spent days upon days in incestuous discussions, meetings, conferences, seminars, roundtables, with their reports, proceedings, documents, monographs, statistical compilations ad nauseam, all repeating what has been said before, all pretending to transform the obvious into revelation, all of us spending huge amounts of money on travel and accommodation, money that could have been used to save lives… all of us have a lot to atone for. And there’s nothing quite so unseemly as the refusal to admit we were wrong, we delayed, we conducted business as usual when we were in the midst of the most appalling emergency in the history of humankind.

I find this common in well-meaning people and organizations. There becomes a bias towards inaction, where people with some skin in the game or who can get some personal gain from something DO act. In some organizations, acting on something is almost shunned – as if it is dirty, common work where the thinking and talking is higher. I think these people are also somewhat afraid of acting because every time you act, you can be critisized. I’ve really appreciated working with entrepreneurs and start-ups lately because they know they HAVE to act or die. It deeply saddens me that even in the face of AIDS, an organization like the UN couldn’t even muster up the courage to be more responsive.