Yesterday, I received a wonderful visit from
Jude Deason, a poet of beauty and wisdom who doesn't believe in coincidences in life. At some point in our long conversation, she told me about her shock and disappointment with magazines like People and the National Enquirer on the rare encounters with them at certain public places such as airports or dentists' offices. I joked about limiting my consumption to Angelina Jolie and B.Pitt couple. We both agreed that the news about them could have been handled with more grace and complexity simply because they were quite an unusual couple and contributed immensely to some large-scale humanitarian work and projects over the years. Being obsessed and in love with words, and sentences and languages in general, we thought their stories deserve better.
This morning, as I was skimming through my regular job search sites, I checked UNHCR and couldn't help smiling at finding out the type of news we talked about with Jude. We all know that
Angelina's speech, delivered on 15 March 2017,
did not make the news because it was too uneventful. Majority of people "take a break" from their routine or boring lives when they turn on the news so they want to see some form of entertainment or feel some adrenaline rush. Who wants to hear about the 20 million people who are on the brink of death from hunger in Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan and northeast Nigeria even when the words came out of the beautiful lips of Angelina?
Jolie calls herself an
internationalist and unwraps the term: Anyone who is committed to human rights is an internationalist. It means seeing the world with a sense of fairness and humility, and recognizing our own humanity in the struggles of others. It stems from love of one’s country, but not at the expense of others. By this, Jolie discards a narrow nationalism.
It includes the view that success
is finding your place in a world where others succeed too. Thus, she discards greed and hurtful forms of competition.
In the following lines, Jolie skillfully criticized many leaders, Trump and Erdogan being the ones that I am constantly exposed to:
"We have to challenge the idea that the strongest leaders are those
most willing to dismiss human rights on the grounds of national
interest. The strongest leaders are those who are capable of pursuing
both. Having strong values and the will to act upon them doesn't weaken our
borders or our militaries – it is their essential foundation."
Angelina Jolie is an amazing woman. She is humble and compassionate. She knows how to play the game of media and Hollywood, and generously gives away the money she gets from these sources. She completed
16 years as a UNHCR's Special Envoy visiting many refugee camps, conflict zones and giving many speeches. "In the Land of Blood and Honey" (2011) was about Bosnia and "First They Killed My Father" (2017) explores the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. She will probably continue to get involved with similar projects in the future. She does not care much about making money or being criticized as the following comments on "In the Land of Blood and Honey" reveal:
"I wrote the screenplay in a month as an excuse to get out some of my
frustrations [with] the international community and justice issues. I just assumed nobody would ever see or read it."
It is a long road but clearly she gets the most satisfaction in life from drawing attention to the injustices across the globe and contributing to heal some of the wounds that the wars and conflicts caused in humans. I hope we both live long enough so that I will get to read a good biography of hers written by another woman with passion and elegance that Jolie deserves in the path she has chosen to take.
Note: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the 21 other men and
women, most of them UN workers, died in the bombing of the
UN Headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003.
