Humans

(It has been pointed out to me that my blog needs proofreading. That is true. The reason it was so screwed up is that I knocked down a glass of wine onto the keyboard with one of my crutches and my keyboard was acting weird...thankfully, it is healed now.)

Depite my slight disability, I went to the big annual fundraising dinner of the organization I am working at last night. It was a fancy affair at Chelsea Piers; some three hundred people came and paid a lot of money to be there: mostly law firms and other rich New Yorkers (including George Soros), some human rights activists and media people (Tom Brokaw was there as part of the show and Nicolas Kristof, the New York Times columnist), and other random, human-rights conscious celebrities like Suzanne Vega. Ludmilla Alekseeva, a sweet old lady, hero of the Russian dissident movement, and Dr. Ibrahim Mudawi, a Sudenese human rights defender, received awards from Human Rights First. It all went smoothly; the do was professional and well-organized. There were cocktails and wine, decent, healthy food, seamless wait staff, glossy, yet moving brochures, and just the right amount of talking about meaningful stuff to hold people's attention without boring them. They even made sure that the Americans don't tire their untrained ears, while listening to the heavily-accented speeches by the honorees -- these were "subtitled." (One of the speakers though, a young Russian human rights activist who presented the award to Ludmilla, did not escape sarcastic comments and laughs directed at her affected Russian accent...).

I did pretty well for myself as far as networking goes. I literally bumped into Soros and got his attention for about two minutes (the guy is like a rock star, while he was speaking with me people kept coming up to him from all sides in the hope of getting a sideways glance from him). After he looked at my name tag he knew right away that I must be "the daughter," and after telling him what I was doing here and that I was looking for a job he introduced me to "his good friend, Bill Zabel," who is the head of the board of Human Rights First and senior partner of a pretty big law firm here in New York. And off he went, to be accosted by more perfectly made-up (and face-lifted?) rich New York women and their men. The other interesting encounter I had was with the documentary filmmaker sitting next to me who kept explainig to me why animal rights are much more worthy of protection than human rights; his argument essentially was that animals are innocent and defenseless, whereas humans are fundamentally mean-spirited and reckless, and there is no redemption in saving them from mistreatment because they will just go on and abuse others if they get a chance to. So he was involved in saving pets after the hurricane because they were the truly abandoned ones. I remember seeing these animal rescuers on TV and being puzzled by why people would choose to focus their energy on pets when people are dying...now I got to meet one. I am still not convinced.