The Session That Should Have Been Ordinary

Every emergency is a bill for a meeting we declined to hold. On Monday the Global Concordat Council will open an emergency session on water, and the word emergency will do a great deal of dishonest work. There is nothing sudden about a reservoir. It falls in plain sight, a marker a year, while we agree that next season is the season we will finally negotiate the sharing of a river. The migrant count is past 108 million and climbing through the hot months; that too arrived on a timetable anyone could read. I do not fault Secretary-General Halvorsen for summoning the delegates — I fault the decades that made the summons feel like lightning rather than arithmetic. An emergency session is democracy's confession that it prefers crisis to calendar. The reservoirs are not testing our ingenuity. They are testing whether we can be trusted to act before the marker, just once, instead of after it.