August 19 was World Humanitarian Day.
Most people in the world didn't notice. Some who did might have wondered where the humanitarian bit actually fitted into the designated 24 hour span.
There were many places in the world where the very idea of being humanitarian was being violently elbowed aside.
Pretty much everyone of us has an idea how to be humanitarian. Vladimir Putin and his ilk are obvious exceptions.
But we are all prone to distraction, sometimes inclined to give short shrift to our fellow human beings.
Nobody on the planet, barring the saintly, can cast the first stones.
But all too many do.
President Michael D. Higgins, a man who is well-tuned to the ways of the world from his position as president of Ireland, opined that issuing a statement for World Humanitarian Day in 2024 "is extremely challenging."
Said Higgins in part: "In almost every aspect of our shared lives, there is less and less space for a discussion as to how we might reduce what are ever-increasing humanitarian disasters.
"It is as if the world has become desensitised by the daily loss of life, so much of it avoidable, that it has descended into a passivity which includes an ever-decreasing respect for International Law. Indeed, the prospects as to whether International Law can survive, and any of the institutions associated with it, means that the forthcoming United Nations meeting in New York is by any standard a crisis meeting.
The domination in the discourse, both internationally and regionally, by the politics of fear and by the definition of power as capacity to access weapons of destruction is another indication of the crisis we face.
"However difficult, we must all remain positive and seek to encourage hope. There are great projects that deserve global support. Achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals, speaking for peace, and responding to climate change must continue to engage all our efforts, they are after all our main sources of hope.
So also is the recently launched global campaign to end hunger and poverty by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil.
"We cannot continue to ignore the debt burden hanging around the necks of the poorest in the world. They have no fiscal space to do any of the things being sought of them. Norwegian Church Aid has recently reported that servicing of debt exceeds total social spending (that is spending on health, education and social protection combined) in 33 countries.
"The report further finds that debt servicing exceeds education spending in 104 countries, health spending in 116 countries, and social protection spending in 107 countries.
"Overcoming these crises, and building a world based on humanitarian values, is a task which must now be addressed with the utmost urgency by all countries and by all of our international institutions.”
Now these words could have been penned and uttered in any year up to and, of course, including this one. And, to be honest and practical, they will probably resonate twelve months from now.
But that doesn't mean they should remain unsaid. We need to be reminded of humanity's higher purposes, and more than even in face of war, hunger, climate change and natural disaster.
But that reminding can't be confined to just one date on the calendar. It has to be heard all days of the year, and in all corners of our gravely challenged world.
