The Queue and the Hall Are Measuring the Same Thing

We are told the Concordat's water session is complicated, and it is. But complexity is also where responsibility goes to hide. Strip the frameworks away and the arithmetic is brutally simple: reservoirs on three continents are falling, roughly twelve billion of us depend on them, and the registered climate-migrant count has already climbed past a hundred and eight million people moving because somewhere the water or the harvest failed first. The ministers in Geneva speak of allocation as though the pie were merely to be sliced. The queue two blocks away, where a father waits for one of the two hours his tap runs, understands what the hall resists saying aloud: the pie is shrinking faster than any formula can carve it. I do not begrudge the delegates their difficulty. I begrudge the pretense that difficulty is the same as diligence. A framework that keeps everyone at the table is not yet a framework that gets anyone a drink. Measure the session, when it ends, against the queue — not against the last communiqué. The queue is the only honest gauge we have.