Humanity Unraveling

In a week when several institutions found themselves with actual decisions in front of them, the more prudent among them discovered that a decision could be postponed indefinitely by the simple expedient of scheduling further discussion of it, a technique requiring nothing more than a working calendar and a willingness to reconvene.

In Ethiopia's Tigray region, where fighting has resumed and internet access has again been restricted, a regional communications authority has apparently filed the resumption of connectivity as a standing agenda item, to be tabled, seconded, and carried forward to the next available session, service itself becoming a motion awaiting a quorum rather than a repair awaiting a technician.

Some distance away, though on the same clerical footing, the two heads of government meeting for a summit that outlasted its own state dinner have entered their cordiality into the minutes as a motion to adjourn amicably, pending a second reading, while a defiant speech delivered to the General Assembly has been logged not as a statement but as an unresolved point of order, carried over, as these things are, to whatever session convenes next.

At a UK byelection hustings, meanwhile, the heckling that followed a candidate's remark that Zionism constitutes a form of racism has been ruled, by the hustings' own procedural custom, a formal point of order in its own right, meaning the room was obliged to suspend its actual business while a subcommittee considered whether interruptions require an agenda item of their own before the original remark could resume being discussed at all.

Elsewhere, a legal filing accusing a musician of an assault the accuser now says never happened, made by someone she says she never met, has been recorded by the relevant court not as a resolution but as a motion to reschedule the case's original filing date, the docket preferring amendment to conclusion wherever the choice presents itself.

And in the week's more decorative business, a proposal for a triumphal arch has been referred to committee, where the blank left in its description, the thing it is actually meant to contain, has itself been tabled as an amendment requiring further debate before any content, ornamental or otherwise, may be inserted.

What connects a communications authority, a diplomatic summit, a byelection hustings, a court docket, and an architectural committee is not politics or grievance but the shared discovery that no outcome need ever be reached so long as it can instead be moved, seconded, and adjourned.

Progress, in this telling, is simply the reliable production of a next meeting, and the week closes, as weeks tend to, without a single item having been struck from any agenda.