When Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc along the Gulf Coast, the world responded brilliantly: more than one hundred countries pledged more than $1 billion in aid, fuel and medicine. The donors included not only the world’s wealthiest nations, but also those who had little to spare – countries like Sri Lanka, only months removed from its own terrible disaster. In addition, the United Nations dispatched disaster relief experts to aid Katrina’s survivors.

For me, the message was clear: America’s good deeds – our generosity and kindness in times of crisis – do not go unnoticed by the rest of the world. As UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan put it so well, with America having been so generous so often, the time had come for the world to respond. And to his credit, President Bush recognized this, using his speech before the General Assembly to thank those who had come to America’s aid.

The international response to Katrina decisively disproves the argument that the United States should or must do it all on its own. In today’s interdependent world, no one country – not even our own – can solve all the planet’s problems. From terrorism to climate change, from democracy promotion to disaster relief, we need the world and it needs us.

The same goes for the UN. Just as the UN can not be the institution it needs to be without America’s help and support, the United States cannot achieve its foreign policy objectives without an effective United Nations.

Yet there are still far too many Americans who think poorly of the UN. Part of the problem is that much of what the UN does well takes place off-camera. From feeding the hungry to keeping the peace, its successes happen in far off places, ones where American television networks hardly ever go.

But there is another reason as well. To most Americans, the UN has little or no resonance in their lives. It isn’t concrete. It has no tangible meaning, no visible reality.

It wasn’t always that way. When I was a kid, the UN meant one thing: “trick or treat for UNICEF!”

Every Halloween, I walked around Saginaw, Michigan, asking my parents’ neighbors to put a few coins in a small orange box. The next day, my friends and I would gather at school to figure out how much we had raised. It was fun, it was cool, and it was almost always a competition to see who could raise the most money.
We didn’t know it at the time, but we were also helping UNICEF provide food, quality health care and education for the world’s children. Equally important, we were making the UN real for average Americans.

You don’t hear much about UNICEF anymore. But it continues to help save the lives of millions of children around the world – kids little different than the one I used to be. And UNICEF is not alone in doing extraordinary work that garners little attention. The World Health Organization helps prevent outbreaks of deadly pandemics like SARS and Avian Flu. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis distributes mosquito netting and medicines that save countless lives. The UN Development Fund helps poor people help themselves. And the UN Fund for Women helps women in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan stand up for themselves and against violence.

The contentious negotiations leading up to the recent UN Summit, along with the sobering findings of the Volcker Commission concerning the Oil-for-Food scandal, have made it clear there is still much work to be done to make the UN a more effective institution, one capable of responding to the threats, challenges and changes of a new century. But the media focused only on the negative side of the story – bureaucracy, corruption and stalemate – and not on what the UN does well.

So for a change, let’s focus on the good stuff – the many reasons why the United Nations is worth saving. The UN helps people. It saves lives. And like it did in the case of Katrina, it pitches in when it is needed most. Isn’t it about time that some of those stories made the nightly news?
 

Updated October 6, 2005