Dispatch from the Major UN Summit Last Week

POCK 28, the annual international summit on the Prevention of Child Killing, held this past week in the world’s largest candy, knives, and arsenic factory, received mixed reactions from the global community. There was controversy from the start, in part due to the choice of venue, itself the site of the regular mass slaughter of children, but also because the president of the summit and the proprietor of said venue, is in fact publicly known to be an unabashed professional mass-murderer of children. Some critics expressed concern that this made him an unusual choice to lead the conference, given his reputation as a proud profiteer of the murdering of children. To his credit, he put those concerns to rest by saying that just because his livelihood is dependent on the very thing that world leaders were meeting to prevent, he’d not let that get in the way of the summit’s purpose. He also pointed out that as a prolific child-murderer, who better to give their expert perspective on the murder of children and thus give insights on how to prevent it?

Some further controversy was stirred when the summit president made the claim that there was no scientific connection between the slaughtering of children for pleasure and commercial profit and recorded rates of children having gone missing and presumed murdered. This disregard for demonstrated facts and basic rationality wasn’t enough to lead to the president’s ouster or derail the summit, however. The nations of the world were, ultimately, able to draft a plan for addressing the problem.

There was, unfortunately, some consternation with that initial plan. Despite the purported intention of preventing the murder of children, the draft proposal did not in fact include those words or present concrete plans for their specific prevention. The draft had some inventive notions for dealing with the issue, such as using new forms of measurement which will make it appear that fewer children are being murdered, as well as constructing towers that emit a specific radio frequency which reduces the inclination of a person predisposed to murdering children from doing so, or at least not doing so quite as much as they’d enjoy. Though the proposed technology does not yet exist, it is promising, in the sense that its promoters promise that if it did work it would work relatively well. There was also the proposal of selling credits which allow purchasers to kill children without guilt, consequence, or any record of said killings having occurred. This proposal was very popular with wealthy nations whose economies are largely dependent on murdering children, but less fortunate nations felt left behind. Not only do they not have the funds to buy these credits in desired quantities, centuries of exploitation by wealthier nations have left them with less stock of children to murder themselves.

In the end, a compromise was reached. It wasn’t the solution everyone was hoping for, but it was progress. The nations of the world agreed that they would “make efforts to start reducing the number of children that they murder.” Granted, there won’t be a system of accountability to ensure that they follow through on this intent. It’s more of a gentlemen’s agreement, between gentlemen whose existence revolves largely around the murdering of children, agreeing that they’ll try to cut back a bit. But, we are told, it was the best we could ask for. After all, they concluded, it was unreasonable for the people of the world, let alone children, to expect them to actually stop murdering children en masse. We are lucky that they have agreed to say that they will think about trying to make an effort to murder fewer children.