Women's Money Wisdom

Episode 216: Finding Hope in Difficult Times with Dr. William Schulz

• Melissa Joy, CFP® • Season 4 • Episode 216

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Melissa Joy is joined by Dr. William Schulz, former Executive Director of Amnesty International USA to discuss the importance of staying hopeful during turbulent times.

How can we stay positive during times of uncertainty? Dr. Schulz explores how hope can be a driving force for change - leading to improvements in our own communities as well as a more just world. The lessons taught in this episode are valuable for all - from investors to friends.

Listen and Learn: 

  • The ‘why’ behind Amnesty International’s mission
  • How to remain resilient despite injustice in the world 
  • The importance behind conscious consumption and where you spend your money

Resources:

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Melissa Joy:

Welcome to the Women's Money Wisdom Podcast. I'm Melissa Joy, a Certified Financial Planner and the Founder of Pearl Planning. My goal is to help you streamline and organize your finances, navigate big money decisions with confidence and be strategic in order to grow your wealth. As a woman, you work hard for your money and I'm here to help you make the most of it. Now let's get into the show. How do you maintain hope when you know the worst that's possible in people? That's the topic in today's episode. It sounds dark, but I believe this conversation is really important but also really inspiring, and we are blessed to be joined by someone who knows exactly how to do this.

Melissa Joy:

Dr William F Schultz, we're going to call him Bill in this episode, is the past Executive Director for Amnesty International USA. He worked from the refugee camps of Darfur, sudan, to the poorest villages in India, from prison cells in Monrovia, Liberia, to the business suites of Hong Kong and Louisiana's death row. This is where he traveled during his work across the globe in pursuit of a world free from human rights violations. Dr Schultz served as Director of Amnesty International USA from 1994 through 2006. Before that, he had been the President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, and he also has a variety of experiences in human rights and also as a minister. He's going to be a fascinating guest, and I'm fortunate to have the opportunity to know Bill as a client of Pearl Planning, so it's great to support clients of the company, and he has written a memoir that was published last year and we're going to be talking a lot about.

Melissa Joy:

You know more information based on his book and I can't recommend it enough. The name of the book is Reversing the Rivers a memoir of history, hope and human rights, and we will make sure to have a link in the show notes, and I strongly encourage you to buy it, download it and make sure to read it. So, without further ado, let's go to the episode we call our podcast Women's Money Wisdom. Wisdom is a huge part of what we want to instill, and you just have literally written the book when it comes to American perspective on human rights. When it comes to American perspective on human rights and I want this episode to be both give our listeners takeaways when it comes to human rights and how you can see the world, and then I want to end on just your extraordinary chapter on hope in the face of things that could typically bring despair. And so, as we get started, tell us how you went from ministerial work and running a large religious organization to becoming the chief of a human rights organization.

William Schulz:

So first of all let me say, melissa, my wife and I, beth, are very grateful to you and Pearl Planning for all the financial advice and assistance you've given us and I'm delighted to be on this program with you and your other clients and friends. So my background is as a Unitarian Universalist minister and I for eight years was president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, which is the denominational body that all UU congregations in the United States belong to, and at the end of those eight years I was looking for a new job. I was unemployed and sometimes young people will ask me how do I become executive director of Amnesty International? And I always answer no, a friend on the search committee, because that is exactly how I ended up as Executive Director of Amnesty International.

William Schulz:

I was not an expert in human rights, of course. I had worked broadly in the international realm as President of the Association. I've been involved in many social justice causes, but I was not an expert on human rights. But I did happen to have a very good and, more importantly, a very stubborn friend on the Amnesty International USA search committee and it was through his intervention that I was eventually chosen to head Amnesty International here in the United States. Amnesty is, of course, an international body with its international headquarters in London and with the time I was there, sections in about 55 countries around the globe.

Melissa Joy:

Wow, we hear Amnesty International. I think it's a recognizable name across the board, but what exactly was your mission? We know you are working on human rights, but how does that articulate itself in terms of the work that Amnesty International does?

William Schulz:

So Amnesty International is the world's largest and oldest human rights organization, and perhaps I should divert here for a moment just to say what are human rights? Human rights are the rules by which societies and nations agree to conduct themselves in order to be considered part of the civilized community. They are the description of a good society. A good society doesn't torture people. A good society provides those accused of crime with a fair trial. A good society makes sure people have enough food to eat, housing and so on. All of those are rights, and that's what human rights at the basic level are all about.

William Schulz:

So Amnesty is the world's largest and oldest human rights organization.

William Schulz:

It was founded in 1961 when a British barrister by the name of Peter Benenson read that two college students in Portugal, which was then under a military dictatorship that these two college students had been arrested by the secret police for no greater crime than sitting in a bar and toasting to freedom with their mugs of beer.

William Schulz:

And Benenson thought to himself you know, this is really outrageous. These people didn't break any law. They were doing something non-violent and we in the larger international community ought to do something about it. And so he put an editorial in the London newspaper inviting people to write to the Portuguese government to demand that these students be freed. And that was the beginning of the idea that, by mobilizing citizens from all over the world, human rights could be improved and those who were victims of human rights crimes could be rescued from incarceration or even from death. Amnesty created the category prisoners of conscience, we hear is exercising their right to free speech, to free press, to exercising their religious faith nonviolently, who are then in some fashion targeted by their governments or by military groups or by corporations and are punished in some way or in danger of punishment. Today, amnesty's mission has expanded far beyond prisons of conscience, but that was the original gist of what Amnesty was all about.

Melissa Joy:

Well, you found yourself within the organization at a turning point. Just a few months into the work that you were doing, the world experienced and watched as there was a horrible genocide in Rwanda. Experienced and watched as there was a horrible genocide in Rwanda and from there, some of the formative political international events of my generation were unfolding across the world. So just so much going on. How did you learn on the job and how does an organization like Amnesty International make a difference, dr?

William Schulz:

So it was a very steep learning curve for me. As I say, I was not an expert on human rights. And you're quite right. In 1994, just about a month after I had assumed the leadership of the organization, the Rwandan genocide occurred, in which close to a million people were slaughtered, most of them part of the Tutsi tribe, some of the moderate Hutus those were the two principal tribes within Rwanda and it was a catastrophe that then spilled out later into Burundi and into Congo. So you're absolutely right, that was a major turning point. It was followed as you alluded to. It was followed by the genocide in Bosnia and then, of course, by 9-11 and the war on terror, Guantanamo Bay, the use of torture by the United States. So it was a very turbulent time.

William Schulz:

How does an organization like Amnesty make a difference? Well, it can't always change the course of history we're human beings after all but what it can do is to make sure that the kind of crimes we just described, the kind of human rights violations that were taking place in Rwanda or anywhere else around the globe, do not exist in a vacuum, that they are not covered up or hidden, that the world can't ever say, as so many people did following the Holocaust, as so many people did following the Holocaust. Oh, we didn't know, because human rights organizations exist to make sure that everybody knows. They also exist, of course, to try to pressure governments and corporations to do something about those violations. In Rwanda, amnesty was not successful in pressuring the United States government to do something, though eventually the French government intervened.

William Schulz:

Rwanda and the Rwandan genocide is one of the great failures of President Clinton, the United States and the United Nations, which was requested by a UN general on the scene to provide him just 2,000 UN troops, and he thought he could stop the slaughter of almost a million people, and the UN, under Kofi Annan, refused to provide those troops, largely at the behest of the United States. So human rights organizations are not always successful, but in many instances we are able to ameliorate human rights crimes that are ongoing. And it's important, whether or not we're successful, that the norms that human rights represent, the norms of a good society, are maintained one way or the other, and that, at the bottom line, is what human rights organizations try to do.

Melissa Joy:

There's so much to unpack there. First of all, just thinking many of these people who you just mentioned are people who you've met. They're not binary good guy or bad guy, but they're individuals making decisions in a moment in time, and you and an organization like Amnesty International is operating to influence decisions, to create a better pathway for something different. What was the role of people like our listeners, people that are connected to heads of state and have the ears of celebrities, to act as a bigger voice and amplify the mission of an organization like Amnesty International? How does the organization involve common citizens?

William Schulz:

So Eleanor Roosevelt, who was instrumental in the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is the document upon which all human rights law is based, she once said human rights begin close to home, in the small places where each one of us can make a difference, and that's absolutely true. Let's think about it. Each one of us makes purchases in our lives, and those are purchases from businesses and corporations that themselves have significant influence in certain places around the world with regard to human rights. We can make an impact in that respect. Each one of us has influence over our local governments, and often change in the human rights world starts at the local level. Each one of us is involved in a community, and those communities in turn often raise new human rights issues that have not been on the agenda of the powerful, of the decision makers. But the decision makers are forced to look at those new human rights violations that they may not even have known about and make a difference.

William Schulz:

I prison guards to have sexual relations or sexual violation of women prisoners. Now that seems outrageous. 17 states did not make that illegal. It was entirely a grassroots movement then that influenced legislatures across the country to change that lack of a law and to make such violations of human rights a crime. That's just one of. I could give you dozens of examples of the ways in which people at the local level can have a profound impact on the world, starting in their own communities, where human rights crimes are also taking place in forms of discrimination, for example, and harassment. Starting at the local level, but moving up the chain of government and power Human rights begin close to home.

Melissa Joy:

That's so important. I know that the messages coming from overseas start with the community saying this should change or a person, the heroic voice of a person and I know that many of the people that we work with really care about how their money influences actions and whether their money is aligned with their worldview and their considerations for humanity and we plan to have an additional episode that is just about this, talking about the influence of economic levers as well as the opportunities within the investment world to articulate your point of view, if this is something that resonates, with you Mentioning Eleanor Roosevelt, and in your book you provide an anecdote of a formative experience for yourself as a child, and many of the people listening here today are parents Can you talk about your first trip, growing up in the I would call it the Northeast and taking a trip to the South as a young child?

William Schulz:

Yes, so this was 1956. And, by the way, I grew up in Pittsburgh and Pittsburghers would be very honored to be considered as part of the Northeast. Pittsburghers always want to be thought of as the Northeast, but many people love Pittsburghers with the Midwest. In any case, yes, 1956, and I was six years old and my parents were driving us to Florida for a few weeks vacation there, and this was, of course, during the era of segregation, that public facilities in the southern states below the Mason-Dixon line were racially segregated, and we stopped in North Carolina to have lunch at a diner. My father, by the way, was a professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh and very active civil libertarian. We stopped at this diner and I wanted to go to the bathroom, and I was very proud of the fact that at six or seven years old I could do that on my own, and so I headed toward a door which said NEN, but what I didn't realize was that it said colored under it and that I was heading into the segregated restroom reserved for people of color, for African Americans, and just as I entered that room there was a hue and cry in the restaurant stop, no, boy, no, stop, stop. And I was startled. I didn't have any idea what was wrong and I returned quickly to my parents. I'm sure I was crying at this chastisement from what felt like the entire restaurant. They explained to me that, though they didn't believe in segregation, this was what we were facing in the South, and when I experienced that, which was the first time I'd ever experienced it, I was both dumbfounded and a little frightened, because it made no sense to me.

William Schulz:

I had a young African-American friend back in Pittsburgh with whom I often played. She came to our house. I would go to her house, we went to the bathroom in our respective houses when we needed to bathroom in our respective houses when we needed to. How would people in the South, african Americans in the South, know that we were from Pittsburgh? And we didn't agree with this?

William Schulz:

But, more importantly, my father, after carefully taking advantage of what we would today call a teachable moment, my father said to me words that I've never forgotten. He said Bill, it won't always be this way. And this was just around the time of the Montgomery bus boycotts, the beginning of the civil rights movement, of which he was of course aware, though I was not Bill this won't always be this way. And so a little seed was planted and I think you're pointing out that parents can plant these little seeds even in the minds of six-year-olds and while, of course, I didn't understand the larger ramifications of that, I did get the notion that change takes place. And a few years later, when those public facilities had been integrated and there were no longer colored and white restrooms, I could see the endpoint of exactly that kind of change or close to it, or 60 or 70 years ago, and it's important to talk about.

Melissa Joy:

you know that you don't need so often today. It's protect the children from perspectives in the world that might be disappointing or depressing, and hopefully our conversations can help to remind people that there's opportunities to plant these seeds. You know that in your case, led to extraordinary things. Another thing that was really just inspiring for me from the book was your discussion of how important it was to see heroics heroism, people that stood up in the face of injustice, and you got the opportunity to know the stories and meet some of those people. Can you describe how you see heroism today, after your work?

William Schulz:

Well, I would say that heroism is a willingness to sacrifice our immediate and apparent self in the interests of a larger ideal. And you're right. I had the great honor of meeting many dozen prisoners of conscience or other political prisoners who had non-violently exercised their power to oppose governments, even when it resulted in their incarceration. I'll give you just one example. Wei Jingsheng is called the father of Chinese democracy and he was very instrumental in the democracy wall and the democracy movement back in the 80s and 90s and he was put in jail for some 17 years as a result of that. And when he was finally freed and he came to New York and I met him, I asked him what had sustained him during those 17 years. Sustained him during those 17 years and among other things he said simply the fact that I knew that people were aware that I was there.

William Schulz:

His guards had attempted to isolate him from the larger world. I said did you ever receive any of the amnesty communications? He said I didn't receive a single one. But once a guard slipped and he said old way, you're getting a lot of letters. And I noticed that whenever I was getting a lot of letters, the light in my cell would be turned off at night so that I could sleep more easily, and at other times it was on 24 hours a day.

William Schulz:

But none of those difficulties, none of those kinds of harms that he and so many other prisoners of conscience experienced, none of that prevented them from being willing to go ahead and endure with Andeer. We've seen this most recently with Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident who died just a few weeks ago in a Russian prison. He was in Germany after his initial poisoning. He could have stayed in Germany. Many dissidents in Russia and China and elsewhere do leave the country and carry on but he chose to go back. I don't know exactly why. I presume he felt that he in some way needed to be a direct witness to what was going on there.

Melissa Joy:

But that's the kind of heroism the sacrifice of one's own immediate or apparent self-interest in the interest of some higher ideal despair, to say, when you've seen the worst that is possible in humanity, that they're to feel hopeless, to feel pessimistic, to feel like the glass is half empty and to feel like you know that, even with all the work that is done to have you know ongoing abuses and disappointments, that there's not kind of a light that you're pursuing and you spend the last chapter of the book talking about your reflections on that question.

Melissa Joy:

How do you go on when you know the worst? And I just thought that whole chapter I really enjoyed the book in general and there's so many terrific stories you just you've lived, you had huge experiences during your work there and before and after that are really relatable and readable in the book. But let's talk about that chapter because I want to relate that to the perspective of investors as well. I really think that some of these conversations about you know there's so many reasons to feel disappointment and pessimism have some investment lessons as well. So when people say, how do you have hope in the face of such awful things? What have you learned?

William Schulz:

So first let me say, melissa, that one of the most telling remarks that was made to me over my years at Amnesty was made by one of these prisoners of conscience who said to me hopelessness is a privilege of the wealthy, and what he meant by that was that poverty is no friend to justice, poverty is no friend to heroism. And the work that you do in terms of helping people to manage their finances well, realize them, live a comfortable life. That is not a luxury, that is an opportunity that you help people create to then be more engaged in the world in generous ways. And so I want to just start by acknowledging the importance of the kind of work that you do in terms of doing justice as well. But let me try to respond to your question On a very personal level. What I have found is that there are at least two factors that lead to resilience. At least two factors that lead to resilience. One is to have good role models. Good role models of people who are generous-hearted, kind, doing good things, sacrificing for their fellows. It can be a parent, it can be a teacher, it can be an aunt, an uncle, it can be a friend, but good role models are critically important. And the second quality is to try to be open to life's blessings, and I saw these examples over and over again in my work. I'll just cite one of them.

William Schulz:

I knew a human rights lawyer in Cambodia who had often been on the verge of despair Cambodia, of course, the Khmer Rouge, one of the most brutal regimes in the world and she said I was saved by calligraphy. What did she mean? She said when I was in despair, I would use my calligraphy skills to replicate the book of Psalms. And it was the very fact that I had that skill and I could create something beautiful that reminded me that the world had beauty in it. And, after all, justice and blessings are really codependent. If you don't first love the world, you don't have any reason for saving it. But if you don't create conditions that allow human beings to live, then there will be no world, in the last analysis, to save. So justice and blessings are codependent.

William Schulz:

I was often asked how do you sustain yourself in the face of all the horrible things that you know? And there were a couple things that helped me. One was we know how to combat evil. I won't go into the details so we can talk about that at another time, but we know that we have the skills. We know how to combat evil in the world. It doesn't always work, we don't always succeed, but we know how to do it.

William Schulz:

A second factor is that the cosmopolitan ideal upon which human rights are based, and that is the idea that, at the end of the day, what human beings share in common is more important than what separates us, and therefore, you know a simple way to put it is all of our blood flows red. What we share in common is more important than what separates or divides us, and therefore we have to respect differences and play by the same rules. That's the cosmopolitan ideal and that's the ideal upon which human rights are based. And, interestingly enough, I would argue that the cosmopolitan ideal is the prevailing cultural norm in the world, despite all of the human rights violations that we see around us. How can I say that? I can say it because the behavior of tyrants gives it away, and I'll just give one example.

William Schulz:

Why is it that Vladimir Putin has rationalized his war on Ukraine by saying that he is fighting the Nazis, by claiming that he is fighting to defend the rights of Russians in the eastern part of Ukraine? Why did he have to lift up such a presumably noble ideal? Why? Because even someone like Vladimir Putin knows that the cosmopolitan ideal, that human rights ideals are the prevailing cultural sentiment of the world. Do we think that Lenin or Tamerlan or Idi Amin or any of the great brutes of the world, would have bothered to rationalize their actions by saying they're fighting for the protection of Russians in Eur, that they're fighting against the Nazis? No, even Putin knows that he has to create a mist, that he has to create a framework around his evil, aggressive behavior that makes it look noble.

William Schulz:

And the reason he chooses to make it look noble is because human rights have won.

William Schulz:

They've won the cultural war, the war for worldwide norms, even if they haven't in all cases won the war on the ground yet. And that is the third source of hope for me, which is that the arc of the universe bends toward justice, as Martin Luther King, and before him Theodore Parker, said that if, as Spinoza advised us, we take the view from eternity, we see enormous progress in human rights and in many other fields as well. The arc of the universe does bend toward justice. And finally, the last thing I'll say about this is that hope is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and there were times when I did feel hopeless, but I knew that if prisoners of conscience and others were not giving up, then I, in all of my comfort and privilege and I was never personally threatened I could at the very least maintain a voice of hope and a sense that hope is a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, melissa, those were some of the reasons why and some of the ways in which I was able to sustain myself, despite the horrible things that I learned about almost every day.

Melissa Joy:

Wow that's so interesting because it just mimics my perspective from an investment and economic outlook that it's so easy to focus on negative, horrible things or just things that you think are impediments to good outcomes. And I've never used the reference of the arc of the benevolent that we tilt toward more successful outcomes. But that is absolutely the case in terms of the way I see it. When it comes to investing as well.

Melissa Joy:

There are bad days, but seven out of 10 over decades tend to be good years and it's really difficult to remember that in the moment because there are injustices, big economic challenges that make it just from a, you know, your brain trying to protect yourself from, you know, the caveman protecting themselves from the beasts outside, you know that tells you you need to kind of hunker down and be safe.

Melissa Joy:

But having that hopeful perspective, whether it's looking at the progress from 1956 to today, whether it's looking at the progress from 1956 to today in terms of access to systems, whether it's looking at the progress that economic changes have had on opportunities you know running water and electricity were a privilege at one time and now most people in the world have cell phones in order to communicate and they're like a little computer in your hand, and so sometimes it's nice to have a perspective like yours and to be able to step back and realize that the progress that you see isn't always the headline, and good news doesn't always get the same declarations, and it's difficult to see it sometimes in the aggregate, but we're living it every day.

William Schulz:

Absolutely. Couldn't agree with you more.

Melissa Joy:

Well, I cannot recommend your book enough. We are going to include a link in the show notes. Tell people what are you working on today and how can people find you or read more. I know you've written other books as well.

William Schulz:

Well, I have. I think the simplest way is just to Google my name William F Scholls. I don't any longer have a website, but if they do Google that, most of the books will come out. I co-wrote a book a couple of years ago on the future of human rights. It was called the Coming Good Society, in which we tried to talk about a dozen different ways in which human rights are going to evolve and a society is in that long arc going to become, and a society is in that long arc going to become a better place. So that is also a book that people may be interested in the Coming Good Society.

Melissa Joy:

Well, I'll make sure to include a link to that book as well. And I can just say this perspective the very real and harsh kind of reality of times that are difficult, but also the perspective that, with all of that knowledge, still the wisdom tells you to hold out hope, to believe in systems and to believe that you can make a difference is something that I'll take with me into the weekend, whether it's hanging out with the kids and are looking at my perspective and the way we invest for others. So thank you so much for this important conversation.

Melissa Joy:

My pleasure Thank you for having me. I appreciate you. Thank you for listening to the Women's Money Wisdom Podcast. If you found value in this episode, the best way you can support the podcast is to forward an episode to a friend or leave a review. Go to pearlplan. com and the podcast link to get all the resources and links mentioned.

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