Lyrics: “Once We Were Anarchists” ~ Frank Turner, 2007
Another post, not even half a day after the last one. Don’t get used to it. But I just need to get this out this morning!
Last night German government officials (state and federal level) met – not for real, but in a video call like the rest of us for the last year – and talked about stricter measures and plans and all that to combat the still ongoing and even getting worse pandemic situation over here. What can I say… it’s exhausting and frustrating to watch the inaptitude of German government these past few months. There have been so many good and more eloquent pieces written about it. They “agree” to test more and to close down essential shops for an additional day before the Easter weekend. And that’s basically it. Maybe people travelling from abroad need to go into quarantine. Maybe not. Maybe students and teacher and everyone else will have a chance to get tested more than once a week. Maybe not.
One year in and there is still is NO (visible) strategy. They don’t see the bigger picture, I’m afraid. We have 16 federal states and each of them wants to do things their own way. It seems that nobody wants to or is able to agree on anything and neither one does want to take responsibility for anything. It’s a farce by now. I felt so smug last year when it seemed we handled the situation so much better than the UK or the US. But now? Not anymore.
I was raised in a political family and due to that and and my own decades of experience of working in politics and being active in politics on local level, I have lot of understanding and empathy for politicians and government. I always firmly believed that in general – politician and unelected government officials – do the best they can with the best interest at heart. And still … by now even I am so fed up by the blatant inaptitude to actual govern! And a bit scared, because if even I have hard time seeing the good in politics and government anymore, I fear that so many other people, who never really cared much in the first place, are fed up and check out of democracy. And where will that leave us?
To end this post in a bit of less depressing way, here’s a photo from my latest “Fragmented Travel Memories”, which pop up in my mind at unexpected times these days. This one is from my trip around the “North Coast 500” in Scotland in 2016, I stopped by Lotte Glob’s sculpture garden. I used a bowl I bought there for my muesli recently and the memory of that lovely sunny afternoon popped up.
