The recent NATO “Youth Summit,” even on double speed, is over an hour and a half on Youtube. I couldn’t watch it all, as it just made me feel old — so old that I can remember when people could feel shame about profiteering from mass killing or promoting world wars likely to end in nuclear apocalypse.
The summit’s “youth” participants appear to have met some requirement of being roughly younger than either Biden OR Trump — and there may have been as many as tens of them participating. Mostly they let us know how hip and with-it NATO is.
After a while, the “summit” did haul up onto the stage for a couple of soundbytes each, three winners of a contest who had to be between 18 and 35 years old and have proposed a brilliant answer to the question “What is your role in shaping a secure future?” The first young woman was proposing an app in which a friendly NATO soldier from your country would help you play video games, mostly fun murder-simulation stuff, but also propaganda lessons (“how to spot disinformation!”). Added bonus: the app would serve to collect data on its users so that NATO could send them important messages. The second guy manufactured drones and wanted militaries to buy them. So cool! And the third woman said she was promoting studies of Ukraine in Western Europe with a fun pro-war perspective to aid in understanding that everything is Russia’s fault.
After all that invigoration, the old people came back on to recommend that everybody prepare for war and not be scared of it. This is called — not being an idiot, but — being “resilient.” Noticing that the get-ready-for-war guy was going to drone on for quite a while, I began feeling as though my lunch might be resilient enough to come back up, so I abandoned ship.
I’m very sorry that over a thousand people have watched this amazing global “youth summit” but feel somewhat better knowing that your average Youtube of baby hippos gets tens of millions of views.