There was a gathering at the United Nations in New York last Monday that nobody paid much attention to. The World Series and a high-wattage Senate race were distracting New Yorkers. A murderous flareup in the Middle East and a surreal encounter in Pyongyang were distracting the rest of the world.
There is always something, of course, to take our minds off the doings of the U.N., but the timing of this particular event was unusually bad. When U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan invited his 48 official "messengers of peace" and good-will ambassadors to assemble, for the first time ever, on Oct. 23 to discuss "celebrity advocacy in an age of cynicism," he could hardly have foreseen the ironic conjunction of events that would transpire: On the same weekend that the solemn messengers of peace converged on New York, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak called a "timeout" from peace efforts between his country and Palestine.
Major local newspapers didn't even report the U.N. meeting. No wonder the sense of futility was palpable. Yet perhaps participants were too quick to express their frustration and the media wrong to absent themselves. Maybe the U.N.'s celebrity shock troops are not such a bad idea.