In 1985, I was completely addicted to a song called “19” by Paul Hardcastle.
I liked it because it sounded so different to the other synth-pop hits of the time. But also because it was the first time I had heard a club song that I could dance to, and that had such a powerful message.
The song was all about the horrors of the Vietnam War and the psychological scars it left on the young men who fought on the frontline, only to return home to disdain and disapproval.
Somewhere in the middle of the song, one of the narrators talks about having his shirt full of the brains of a fellow soldier who had had his head blown off.
He then wants to know how something like that is supposed to not affect him for the rest of his life.
The title of the song is about the fact that the average age of the American soldier in Vietnam was 19.
In fact, in most wars, the foot soldiers are almost always young men, used by their commanders as loyal, yet expendable cannon fodder.
I can’t not talk about Russia’s military action into neighbouring Ukraine last week.
I have taken some time to try and understand the socio-political context of the invasion and the cultural history of the region.
But I don’t think that matters to us, as the war is very far removed from our own realities and I get the sense that most people couldn’t care less about a conflict that doesn’t feel like it has any impact on us whatsoever.
Firstly, we should care, because now that the biggest country in the world is at war, there will be ripple effects felt across the globe for some time to come.
This will be mostly felt in the prices of things like petrol and grains.
But I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about the human cost; the fact that wars quickly become an umbrella term that desensitises us to the fact that bombs are being dropped on real flesh-and-blood human beings, slaughtering them by the dozens.
I want to talk about the fact that most of the soldiers doing the killing (and dying) are doing so with very little understanding of the political agendas that motivate the orders that they are following so diligently.
Their supposed patriotism blinds them even to the empathy and compassion they may otherwise have felt for their neighbours.
And many of them are not much older than Paul Hardcastle’s protagonists.
I would venture a guess that most of them are even younger than 30, which means they were born after 1991, the year in which Ukraine declared independence from Russia.
That means they don’t have the emotional and historical attachments that I suspect are driving their grave-dodging leaders to war.
And this in an era when the world is progressing further and further away from the savage self-destruction of the 20th century.
On the frontlines will again be invincible young men looking for some action, and finding only brutality, gruesome death and lifelong trauma, while leaving deprivation in their wake.
What we need to counter the decrepit old war mongers, is another song like “19” to speak to the current generation.
Since the youngsters are so easily influenced by what happens on social media, what we need is a viral TikTok that speaks to them directly.
The soldiers are already using the platform to taunt each other, while Russians soldiers are reportedly using Tinder to chat up Ukrainian women.
I know it sounds like I’m making light of a serious situation, but I am not.
We have seen hundreds of popular online trends having real-world consequences.
Here’s an opportunity for it to stop a war from destroying another generation on both sides of the fence.
And that’s really all that should matter to any reasonable human being living in 2022.
Young people on the internet have often come together to do the right thing, and I hope that they manage to do so again.