Originally, Medusa was a fascinating beauty. Then she went and brought doom into the world.
The day before yesterday, I read a tweet by Uwe Hauck @bicyclist:
All this mania around me. You really wonder why not more people become psychologically ill because of this mania.
I find it easy to understand the author of these lines. Some way or other, everything seems to go wrong at the moment.
World Climate:
They have a world conference in Paris. But it is all just for show. Thousands of persons attend. The result is: totally unbinding decisions that are supposed to become binding at some vague time in the future. Or maybe not. Basically, who cares? And in the media, they actually sell this as good news.
Except: only a few days after the great Paris theatre, Australia approves approves the building of a controversial coal export harbour. It is a once-in-a-century investment. This is how the system reality reacts to nice words.
Europe:
Trapped in the EURO straitjacket, it has long ago become a mere bureaucratic farce. Now it turns more and more into the breeding place for a new nationalism and into a loose federation of anti-democratic national states, close to its own ruin. In the end, nobody will probably lament said ruin. Even the mantra-like confirmation of the existing “shared values” on paper will not help. On the contrary. All you feel is pain. The epoch of free movement of persons was nice, but what is bygone is bygone.
Refugees:
I am in favour of helping persons who suffer. I am also prepared to share and accept a change in our lives and country. After all, change is a very normal thing. And there are many things that have to change, anyway. But I have no idea how that is supposed to work socially. For instance, how are male refugees who have been socialized to be insane in the Islamic Northern African countries supposed to cope with our insane society without becoming even more insane? And vice versa? I have no idea how this is supposed to work. But perhaps they will manage? However, the only chance would be if everybody wants it and everybody is prepared to work towards it (and I mean work hard).
Africa:
After centuries of colonial exploitation (first brutally, then more subtly but no less efficiently), North Africa and probably almost all of Africa is dying. The much-praised “Arabic Spring” brought higher food prices (which in itself is already a terrible thing for the mostly poor people living in this region), war and instability. Poor countries like Egypt are more than bankrupt, the “rich ones” (even the oil exporting countries) have huge state deficits. And there is murder, robbery and arson all over the place.
USA:
They have the “lead” position in our “free value society”. Yet they get more and more corrupt. Policemen prefer shooting African Americans. Shooting people is a popular sport (more than 30,000 each year are killed). It is made possible by sacred weapons legislation, because weapons “protect freedom”. This is not the only reason why a high percentage of the population serve behind prison bars. The tendency is upwards. Of course, the percentage of African Americans is disproportionally high.
The death penalty is law. Penalty is often confused with revenge. Fighting terrorism has the highest priority and serves to justify all and – what a paradox – it makes terrorism even stronger. Religious fanaticism (creativism is not scarce in God’s own Country…) is fashionable and almost methodical; bigotry and hypocrisy are on the way up. The Republicans celebrate their original thinker Ayn Rand and discuss strange candidates. And soon they will elect a new President. And, in totally democratic fashion, the result will be that the one with the higher budget wins.
Problem Countries:
I will be brief, because otherwise this section would be endless. For me, all the BRIC-countries are problem countries: China, India, Brazil – which means a considerable part of the world population. And quite a few more. In fact, I do not at all understand how they can still function. Judging by what I witness whenever I go there…
Globalization:
Stranger and stranger extremely undesirable things happen. And it does not get any better. See also: TTIP. And at the same time, the travelling circus of exploitation wanders through the continents.
Capitalism:
Capitalism won over communism. The economy of the common good – as it has also been intended by the fathers of the Bavarian Constitution – struggles like a small green plant beside the road to survive against the concrete machinery of the big concerns.
Medicine:
The medicine industry is also a sector where turnover and results beat everything else. Patients are “the means to an end” and help to operate the machines to capacity. As long as the dividends of the high-society hospitals are high enough, nothing else counts. After all, they are the only thing you can still invest in today, aren’t they?
Witnessing how many elderly persons are subjected to all kinds of medical treatments shortly before they die and how they have to spend their last weeks on earth in inhuman and degrading circumstances increases my personal fear of death. And there are quite a few things no “patient’s last wish” will protect you against.
Mobility:
Attending our AktMobCmp on January, 4th and 5th this year, too, contributed to my growing belief that we have arrived at a total social dead end, and this is not restricted to mobility alone, either, where we give motorized individual traffic a totally insane right of way.
I could easily write a lot more about this. Instead, I will now write about a rather unimportant topic. Yet it is also a topic that, to me, seems to be symptomatic for the entire situation.
Association Football:
Even the nicest irrelevant thing in the world has become something that gives you nothing but a headache on all levels. The Fifa has turned into a corrupt enterprise celebrating its bribe money theatre. The “Summer Fairy Tale” was bought and you cannot get more bizarre than our village club 1860. And only a few days ago they reported another betting scandal (Wettskandal). It concerned bets about the third-class test match between SV Wehen Wiesbaden and Borussia Mönchengladbach II, played in Side/Turkey, where a referee gave two “slapstick penalties”. Nobody knows the referee, but there had been exceptionally high bets on this match with German clubs in Asia. Isn’t that absurd? How nice that the DFB has its secret weapon, the sport-radar company. It is the investigative weapon used for such purposes.
Only a small morsel of hope remains. I am sure we can still hope. That all will end well. And we must or should do all we can for this positive end. However, I feel so impotent that I hardly have any enthusiasm left.
Consequently, I decide to stop it all. From now on, I will ignore everything. And I will try and enjoy my life with relish. And I will go and have my own fun by being more active and doing “my own thing”.
RMD
(Translated by EG)
P.S.
I took the Medusa image from Wikipedia. It is by Carlos Schwabe, 1890.
(Quelle)
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