How World Peace Is Ruining My Life

There's a lot I could discuss about the UN General Assembly that was held this past week. The controversial Ahmadinejad speech at Columbia University: Should they have invited him? Having invited him was it appropriate for PresBo to excoriate him in his opening remarks? The anti-George Bush protests: Can activism ever be effective when the movement doesn't have a leader with the oratory skills to whip up a crowd? The stupid-ass global warming meeting W held in DC when all the other world leaders, not to mention President Clinton and his gang of billionaires, were meeting about it in New York: no comment. The Senagalese president: Why didn't he honor his commitment to meet with a group of Senagalese citizens living in Harlem?

But those are questions for another blog. This is about me, and my pain.

What I want to know is not why security has to be such that the stretch of Lexington Avenue from the mid-50s through the mid-40s has to be barricaded and surrounded by police, funneling vehicles through one lane and diverting all east-west traffic to my street -- after all, there are world leaders staying in those hotels, any one of whom could be the target of an assassination attempt (except maybe Norway's Jens Stoltenberg; no one would want to hurt the leader of the most peaceful country in the world, right?), so while it inconvenienced me greatly, I can let it go and think of the greater good it's serving.

No, the worst of it was this: our cable television was out last night, and when I called Time Warner to find out whether it was just us, or the entire neighborhood, I learned that the security equipment in use because of the UN meetings was so substantial that it was interfering with the cable signals in the area. Can you imagine? No television?! Oh, the humanity.