Once, when I was living in Buenos Aires, I got invited to a seemingly innocent luncheon, by an Italian friend of my father's who must have run out of people to invite right about the time we spoke on the telephone to exchange courteous smalltalk, resulting in my being his plus one.
The year was 2000 so I was about 24, and the place was an enormous conference room filled with tables, all adorned as for a formal party or wedding, white satin bows behind the chairs and all. I sat beside Stecca, my father's friend, and soon learned that nobody knew each other at any of the tables... not even people and their plus ones! We were all sort of suspended there, eating delicious food and wondering just why we were there on a metropolitan but sunny Sunday morning. There were formal attires of every kind and representative of every religion, there were businessmen, journalists, and spiritual leaders, families, even farmers dressed in elegant suits... we started listening to speeches which sounded like the typical peace and love speeches which open UN conferences, and clapped, and conversed with the perplexedly happy people in our tables. During a break, presumably for smokers to go out and smoke, I found myself speaking with a distinguished elderly man who simply said, ésto debe ser de Rosa Cruz o del reverendo Moon... I looked at him questioningly and later began to understand.
The master of ceremonies gently nudged us on, one course after the other, cups constantly refilled with bubbly champagne, and at some point we were handed small sheets of paper and small pencils, and were jovially instructed to discuss I no longer remember what aspect of peacemaking or conflict resolution in the world, with the other alcohol-drenched members of our tables, and to have one of us go up to the stage and present our guidelines... It was at that stage that I realized that this was a complex maneuver to identify possible key elements for their movement, which was, as the old mysterious man in the break had insinuated, nothing less than one of the Millenium World Peace Summits of Religious and Spiritual Leaders organized by Reverend Moon and his moonites, which was focusing that year on the themes of conflict transformation, forgiveness and reconciliation, poverty and the environment.
As it turned out, I was an instant leader at my table, and was the one to deliver a small speech containing the opinions of the 5 or 6 seated with Stecca and myself, and was at once flabbergasted and honored to be locked in on by the moonite scouts. Like predators, they tried to hold me down when I came offstage to thundering applause, and told me I had some serious talent. I never saw any of them again, but have remembered the incident many times. There are scouts and sharks everywhere, there are scouts and sharks and scouting sharks in your shoes and in the reflexion on your car window.
And today, some 15 years later, I was reminded of that singular luncheon with religious leaders who took it all so seriously, those promising prospects for my future as a public speaker and diplomat. I had just finished reviewing my translation of a video speech by a fervent activist and political thinker, Diego Fusaro, and thought to myself:
I'm good at this. I'm really good. The moonites were no fools to identify me.
