Clinch

I'm finally walking normally again, although my leg is still stiff. Hopefully I'll be able to start looking for a job soon.

This weekend I went to Ottawa to pick up some things that I stored with my cousin, Debbie. Things worked out quite well, as Katie, a friend of mine now living in Montreal, was driving to Ottawa on Friday night and coming back Sunday. This made moving much easier. For the first time in ages I have more than 3 shirts to choose from when getting dressed in the morning. After living out of a backpack for over two years, it feels good to be getting settled in to my own place for a change.

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Apparently the conflict in Lebanon has finally ended, at least for now. It's true that it went on much longer than it should have, and the U.N. has been rightly criticized for this. With the U.S. and France trying so hard to look after their own interests, it wasn't really a surprise that there was so much deadlock. Yet looking at it from another point of view, what would have happened if there was no U.N.? It seems that every time you pick up a newspaper, it's filled with editorials calling the U.N. out of touch and ineffective, sometimes even calling for it to be disbanded. Without it, though, it seems unlikely that this crisis would have been resolved at any point in the foreseeable future, and there would surely have been thousands more killed. For all of it's faults, the U.N. still serves a very important role. Yet with nationalism on the rise all over the world, it seems almost certain that future mandates will be significantly weakened, as countries are increasingly hesitant to hand over any authority to it. This is dangerous and short-sighted. Those who argue that N.A.T.O. could fill the void left by the U.N. don't realize how distrusted that organization is outside of Europe [excluding Serbia] and North America. The rest of the world sees it as little more than a tool of American foreign policy.