I Grew Up Respecting And Admiring The Then Brand New UN

I always felt like I grew up at the center of the world, at least in part because the UN complex was a 30 minute subway rude from my house. Where friends of mine went to ball games and Broadway shows in the early-mid-60s, I went to the UN. Our brains treat frequently-seen things as meaningful. Seeing flags, diplomats, security details, uniforms, hearing foreign languages over and over trains you to notice the global patterns other kids never see. That repeated context must have anchored some sense of importance and scope. The UN has rituals— ceremonies, flags, translations, formal dress— that telegraph gravity and history. Rituals make places feel like nodes of consequence; a stadium is spectacle, a theater is narrative, the UN suggests decisions that matter to nations. Having that as part of my social milieu gave me a kind of cultural capital that others didn’t have, including Señor Trumpanzee who grew up as close to the UN as I did.

The postwar, Cold War, and decolonization decades meant major global dramas were playing out at the UN— newly independent countries taking the floor, crises debated in real time. Being there felt like watching history being written rather than a show being staged. Kids who gravitate to the UN are curious about ideas, power, language, policy… That curiosity turns proximity into engagement: you didn’t just pass the building, you absorbed it. That active learning deepens the “center of the world” feeling. Identity is often formed in contrast to peers. If friends measured weekends by ballgames and Broadway, mine were, at least in part, measured by plenary sessions and resolutions. That difference sharpens the sense that your world is broader— literally global— than theirs.

Yesterday, though, Señor T was at the UN and… well as one diplomatic put it to a reporter, “This man is stark, raving mad. Do Americans not see how embarrassing this is?” Ishaan Tharoor quipped that “The United Nations ‘was not created in order to bring us to heaven, but in order to save us from hell,’ the organization’s second secretary general once said. But what happens when it’s stuck in purgatory?… In his first term, Trump liked to grind his MAGA ax from the chamber’s dais, declaring year after year that the national self-interest of fellow member states must supersede the ‘globalist’ agendas of unelected bureaucrats. But only in his second term has Trump has brought down the hammer, cutting U.S. contributions to the U.N. and scaling back U.S. involvement... [T]he mood among U.S. Republicans has shifted well beyond their long-standing complaints about U.N. bloat and bias. In February, a group of GOP lawmakers introduced legislation to scrap U.S. funding of the U.N. altogether.”

“The U.N.’s decades-old, internal rot once again raises the questions of why the United States is even still a member,” said Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who introduced the bill in the House. “The U.N. doesn’t deserve one single dime of American taxpayer money or one bit of our support; we should defund it and leave immediately.”

Let’s allow Ron Filipkowski to summarize Trump’s UN outing in 7 stunning points:

Some of us went to the U.N. as kids and learned to see a bigger world. Señor T went to the U.N. as president and learned only how to smash the furniture. If the U.N. really is stuck in purgatory, it’s because too many of our own leaders are lighting the fires.