October 24th: United Nations Day

How many of us remembered that today was United Nations day? No matter.

In all truthfulness, I probably forgot that "tid bit" 10 minutes after learning it in the 6th grade! It's sad really....what the UN has become - or hasn't become, dependant on how you look at it!

I can remember what a "big deal" it was to go on a class trip to the United Nations. How "cool" it seemed to us kids to eat in the cafeteria and see all the dignitaries in their native dress. I know I still have the wooden chess set I bought for $13.00 during that visit, and how my friend Eric Rosenthal taught me how to play the game.

Organized in 1945 to replace the League of Nations, the intent of the United Nations was to improve communications between all nations, and intervene in conflicts with the hopes of avoiding war. Yes, well....we all know how that's worked out!

The first time I remember any negativism about the UN was in 1961 when Dag Hammarskjöld, the Secretary General of the United Nations was killed in a plane crash in Africa. As a Swede, Hammarskjöld was a national hero and my Swedish parents were monumentally proud of this man who "haled" from close to where they had both grown up in southern Sweden. They both cried when he was killed - and there were many conversations centering around "who was responsible for Dag's murder" for a number of years in our house - whenever Swede's got together.

During the intervening years, and certainly during my adulthood, I've come to view the United Nations as an example of everything slovenly bureaucratic and broken, in international relations and politics. It is vice-ridden, openly corrupt, and in my estimation driven by overt anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. The "topper" was inviting terrorist Yasser "I'll bring my Uzi" Arafat to address the General Assembly in November 1974. (Last year's Chavez, and this years Ahmadinejad speeches have become "annual anti-American clown concerts").

Aside from allowing us to keep a relative close-eye on most of our enemies, I can see no positive result for the United States to play "host" to this modern-day "den of thieves." We gain nearly nothing from it - and succeed only in depleting our national treasury by continuing to fund it. (Certainly the NYPD would be relieved by the removal of the diplomats and their limo's.)

In as much as both the United Nations and the United States Congress, exist and have become constipated by committee, I must agree with Sir Barnett Cocks, who served as Clerk of the House of Commons from 1962 until 1974. He once spoke about committees using a phrase which describes both organizations perfectly...to their infamy. He said, ..."A cul-de-sac to which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled." How perfectly accurate.

United Nations day.....disgraceful......a stain on our country.