Failure is an Option

For the past two weeks a major sports athlete’s indiscretions have dominated the news cycle. The sheer amount of coverage if perplexing not because everyone seems to think should have an opinion about one man’s private life but also because we seem genuinely shocked about this man’s fallibility. Human beings fail. This is not news nor is it a revelation.

On December 3^rd, an alleged mistress was set to give a press conference. On another continent a bomb went off in the Hotel Shamo, killing nearly half of Benadir University’s Class of 2009. Here were 24 human beings who saw pain in the world and wanted to end it. This was only the second medical class to graduate in Somalia in the last two decades. Here were two dozen people who saw the myriad problems in their homeland did not abandon it, did not look for greener pastures. They were making a stand. But this is not news.

No, failure is news. And such is a reminder of our failure. We have failed Somalia. We have failed Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Burma, Sudan, Fiji, Guinea, Chile, Argentina, Selma, Alabama and Newark, New Jersey. And the list does not end there.

Perhaps if we dedicated half of the resources we are currently using to crank out golf and sexual innuendo jokes we would have been able to make 1996 the year we eradicated poverty instead of just passing a toothless resolution. On the other hand only 27 years passed between the International Year of Disabled Persons and an international convention on the rights of disabled persons, so hey maybe they can look forward to actual change in the next three to four decades.

On the 61^st anniversary of the Universal Declaration we should remember our failures. We should remember how many people still are born into slavery, how many governments refuse to allow their citizens privacy, how many journalists risk their lives every day reporting on rights violations. And while we remember all those we failed let us commit ourselves to a single success this year. Let this be the year that all of us take a stand.