It’s not just today that the UN appears toothless in solving the world’s problems…it’s been going on for far too long now.
At the bottom end of the UN food chain you have the local national UN employees, normally during times of crisis and war they are at the coalface trying their level best to make things work for the innocent civilians caught up in the scenario around them, often with great risk to their own lives.
However, at the “tippy top,” you have the International ambassadors who are appointed to the UN. Way too many are Lording it, living in fine lodgings, eating at great restaurants, meeting in fine city wine bars and wanting for nothing while living their life of luxury given their superior status within stable and secure surroundings.
They have work to do…big, big decisions to make in line with the foreign policies that their own countries have adopted.
When a UN resolution has come about, no matter which organ of the organization has raised it, it is vitally important for the civilian population on the ground, that each and every country has a say in it. Each ambassador is there in my opinion with big broad shoulders and an upstanding adult mindset to stand up for what is right in this world, and either vote for or against the resolution…not act like a child who hasn’t been picked for the playground game and run away by abstaining.
In my opinion, and I’ll use todays extremely traumatic and bloody scenario being played out in the Middle East, with once again those Israeli and Palestinian civilians and children caught in the middle, there is no room for abstaining.
In my lifetime working as a civilian in hostile environments, I’ve walked through the body parts of children and small babies in three different conflicts. I just happened to have been there at the time of detonation, and three times I’ve survived almost without a scratch. Those parts are so fresh that they’re still bleeding, still moving, still warm! I can see them, I can hear them, I can smell them, and I can touch them…as I’m walking through them. There are strands of body parts hanging from barbed wire on top of a school wall and hanging off charred branches of trees. There’s a head lying on the pavement…there’s a little leg under the rubble, and it will probably only be recognized by the shoe that’s still on the tiny foot, there is shredded clothed meat and bone everywhere. And my bloody horrendous description could go on, but I’ll stop there having about to make my point.
These young children and babies have all been born innocent…and they have also died innocent. They were all too young to have become bigoted and indoctrinated by their elders, no matter which side of the conflict fence they were born into.
I live with these images daily. You don’t have to be a parent to feel the horrendous and needless waste of young lives, you just have to be a decent human being.
If these ambassadors have no feelings and are able to abstain in line with their countries foreign policies, because they haven’t the balls to vote one side or the other…then perhaps before becoming an ambassador to the UN, they should be made to walk the streets that I’ve walked first…and just maybe they should bring the leadership of their abstaining’ countries with them.
Bob Shepherd 
The most toothless, morally bankrupt set of oxygen thieves to walk this earth.
And we pay for them to live like lords.
I often wonder Bob if these so called ambassadors of peace would try just a little harder if they knew they would be the ones at the coal face Sent from my Galaxy