Boo who?

Around Halloween we were chatting about the UNICEF boxes, the cardboard boxes that some poor kids had to schlep around to go schnorring on behalf of the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund. I think I did it once. Sometimes in school they'd put the guilt screws on you, and you felt obliged to participate. Well, I figured that UNICEF boxes had gone the way of leisure suits and Pet Rocks. 

Nope.

It's back.

When I was a kid, living in the Five Boroughs, there were plenty of true believers among the parents. They had grown up under the threat of World War and nuclear holocaust, and they believed that the United Nations was an important means to bring countries together and do good throughout the world. Sure, the Communists were always on the march, and the UN reps were always fighting, but as long as the Soviets or the Chinese didn't actually declare war on the United States or Western Europe, then surely the UN was working. It was acting as a "cooling dish" to prevent hotheads from bumbling into war, and a meeting place to try to work out treaties in the presence of other nations, preventing a treaty-based honor system that would require half the world to go to war against the other half as in 1914. 

UNICEF was another helpful idea. It would show that the nations of the world could work together to help children, all children, everywhere, when disaster or famine or illness struck. The pennies, nickels, and dimes we collected along with our fun-size Krackels (yay!) and Hershey Special Darks (boo!) would help the UN perform this mission. 

I'm not sure where it really started to go wrong. Publicly wrong, anyway. It was as the Cold War was coming to a close. In 1988, the Nobel Committee gave its Peace Prize to the UN Peacekeeping Forces for "reducing tensions where an armistice has been negotiated but a peace treaty has yet to be established." By 1996 it had been noted that in half the nations the UN Peacekeeping Forces went, there was a "rapid rise in child prostitution".

Does anyone expect anything good out of the UN anymore? It seemed like its World Health Organization might be useful, but its reputation went in the garbage with just about every other major health organization during COVID. A genuine investigation into how the pandemic started and who started it would turn things around, but these groups would rather ride the train to hell than admit fault, rattle the Communist Chinese, or (worst of all) give the plebes any chance of vindication. All the UN is good for is condemning Israel and sometimes the United States, working with terrorists, and demanding that we beasts in the West take more rapists and murderers into our bosom (as if we don't have enough of our own). 

So no, I will never recommend anyone give to UNICEF or any other concern in which the UN is involved. I don't know how well UNICEF does what it purports to do, but the United Nations as a whole has never lived up to its promise, so why should UNICEF? There are better charities.