Veto

The Secretary-General of the United Nations - a woman.https://odp.trafford.ca/4dcgi/inven/Save_Inventory.A4D

Pilar Marti is a UN bureaucrat who rises above her limitations to become a great Secretary-General, one who transforms the UN from inertia to dynamism, from control by five veto countries to a representative world body. Pilar grows with the job, becoming a take-charge person who breaks out of the church-like UN building and confronts the world's problems.

When the United States vetoes a food and water proposal for Somalia, Pilar calls for a Constitutional Convention to eliminate the veto and reform the UN. She attacks the veto with an unusual weapon - the American Constitution. What's good for America - democracy - is good for the UN.

With a devoted bodyguard and idealistic young people, she campaigns worldwide, but especially in America. A nervous CIA and a power-hungry Washington elite respond with intrigue, harassment, diplomatic maneuvers, and ultimately attempts on her life.

Also available from this author:
Prisoners of the Williwaw
Beyond the Vows

A lifelong student of the United Nations, Ed Griffin was initially inspired by the words of Pope John XXIII about the UN in his letter, Pacem in Terris. (Section 142). But, why hasn't the UN lived up to its expectations? What's wrong with it? What's missing?

Leadership, that's the key, Griffin feels. Too many smooth words, too many compromises that allow genocide, too much control by rich nations. Griffin proposes a woman who becomes a true leader - Pilar Marti, a UN bureaucrat who rises to the office she finds herself in. History often tells such stories - the haberdasher, Harry Truman, who became a great president; the schoolteacher, Golda Meir, who led Israel in difficult times; and the party official, Michel Gorbachev, who introduced wide reforms in Russia.

Ed Griffin teaches creative writing at Matsqui Prison, a medium security prison in Western Canada. He taught the same subject at Waupun prison, a maximum security prison in Wisconsin. His experience in prison led him to write Prisoners of the Williwaw.

He began his professional life in 1962 as a Roman Catholic priest in Cleveland, Ohio. There he became active in the civil rights movement and marched in Selma with Doctor Martin Luther King. Removed from a suburban parish for his activities, he served for three years in Cleveland's central city. His years in the Roman Catholic Priesthood are the subject of his novel Beyond the Vows. After leaving the priesthood in 1968 he earned a masters degree at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and was elected to Milwaukee's city council in 1972.

Griffin and his wife, Kathy, opened a commercial greenhouse in suburban Milwaukee in 1976. They lived where they worked and shared the joys of raising children and growing flowers. In 1988 the family, Ed and Kathy, Kevin and Kerry, moved to British Columbia, Canada, where Griffin helped establish a dynamic writing community in the city of Surrey. He is the founder of Western Canada's largest writer's conference, the Surrey Writers' Conference.

He has published poetry, plays, short stories and a newspaper column. His writing has won several awards and the American Humanist Society has honored him as the teacher of a prize-winning inmate writer. Griffin believes that all the arts, including writing, should be encouraged in prison. "As Aristotle said, 'art releases unconscious tensions and purges the soul.'"