In recent years I feel I’ve been too hard on collegiate Model United Nations and the current culture that seems endemic within, with all its drunkenness and tomfoolery. Yes, I do feel that these elements ought to be excised, but I believe the value is still there. In being so singlemindedly critical I think I risk losing sight of what makes MUN truly wonderful.

As such, I write this for those in high school, and perhaps those in middle school who participate in such a thing. The problems of the collegiate circle do not afflict you, and such you need not worry.

When you took this up, you made a commitment to learn and to know about this tumultuous world we live in. You made the commitment to make sense of the world’s problems in ways that perhaps not even the global elites had considered, as they are beholden to vested interests, interests which remain constant whether they are in Washington or in Beijing or in Moscow or in London. You are free from those, which is a benefit for the debate in which you engage, and the language in which you do it.

You will be flustered by the toothlessness of the real organization, and you will hear the jokes about how your endeavors, even as a simulation, are more effective than the actual people who meet in New York every year.

You will be alerted to the fact that the United Nations cannot even ban people from smoking on its premises. You will be frustrated by how your resolutions can only recommend things, not compel things, but the fact you have idea enough to write such proposed solutions has educated you beyond most people your age.

The lack of proper education in our system about the international situation is one that puts our young people behind by default, and you have decided, consciously or otherwise, to counter that trend. You will learn to discuss the policy of countries diametrically opposed to our own government, and it does not matter whether there is a Republican or a Democrat in the White House.

You learn that American politics is not the be all and end all of the human political thought, and you will simulate, or interact with, Baathists and Communists and Bolivarians and all sorts of other ways of thinking that exist beyond our shores.

And what I find most admirable about your commitment to such a noble task is that you are bombarded by cynicism and fatalism by the news media and the chattering class. You are victims of a school system designed to foster complacency and teach docility, for it was engineered in the nineteenth century to create soldiers and factory workers. When you make that decision to go to a Model United Nations conference, you choose to spite the powers that be and dare to say perhaps you can do something.

So what I am trying to say is, thank you for caring.