I haven’t written anything in a week. Well, I’ve been working, but my client’s enthusiastic announcement for their new game feature hardly seems significant, considering everything else that’s been going on, now does it?
Usually, I don’t get anxious reading the news. There is nothing I can do about it anyway.* But just looking at the unfathomable footage of the burning Amazon, the events unfolding in the UK, the US, and Germany, reading statements and comments, leaves me stunned, unbelieving, overwhelmed. What has gotten into you people?! When have we, as a species, descended into this kind of madness? Aren’t we supposed to be the smart ones? When have we decided to abandon all reason? And for what? A treacherous illusion of happiness, meaning, fulfillment? So we can live out our days gluttonously, comfortably and in what little comfort we can amass? Just so we can feel good about ourselves — or rather better than everyone else — we blindly believe those who offer easy solutions for complex problems, not realizing — or worse, accepting — that they are just as mad, just as scared as we are?
Seriously, what’s wrong with us?
Five minutes really isn’t a long time, but this had to be said nonetheless…
*Strictly speaking, that’s not even true. Vote. Sign petitions. Protest. Boycott. Donate.
[217 words]
(c) Anett Enzmann 2019
five stray minutes 
It took me years to take control of the “angry young woman” within me. In recent years, it seems necessary for her to return as a means to survive in a world with precious little time for peace, love and understanding.
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I (rather shamefully) have to admit that I never was the “angry young woman.” I still am not. I’m just simply overwhelmed by the sheer stupidity (pardon me), and/or ignorance around me. Hardly a day goes by when I am not thinking: it cannot possibly get any more bizarre or outrageous than this. And then…it does.
That, which is considered “normal”, has shifted so far in the recent years that I am sometimes feeling as if I had entered some sort of bizarre mirrow-universe. A lot of what is happening or even being said these days would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. That’s what I find so unfathomable.
There will be more peaceful writing in the future, though. It has just been one of those weeks… There is a reason why I am not (ever) doing politics on social media, for instance. I find it just too tiresome or painful or pointless – or it simply gets lost in the echo chamber, anyway.
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Anett, I’m from another generation and I lived through some scary times already. I must admit I’m easily scared. Blame it on my upbringing. For my tenth birthday my grandfather gave me Anne Frank’s diary. My mother got mad at him because this reading made me wake up at night screaming. I was afraid to get deported and send to death. Today I’m grateful nobody tried to console me. My immediate family seemed to think that get deported and send to a death camp could actually happen. I went to demos against the arms race. Like many others I felt the atomic holocaust was something to be reckoned with. I still think it is. This leads me to the times we are living through right now. Now I’m really scared. I remember the night of the Brexit referendum. I went to bed and the last news I heard that it probably would not happen. Next morning I woke up and it has happened. My first idea was:” And now Trump will become president.” Unfortunately I was right. From this day on things have shifted. There were scary times before but there still was a kind of logic; a logic of horror but still a logic. Now all over the world plain irrationalism seems to reign. In Germany Nazis are creeping out of their holes. Brexit, Trump,Johnson, Bolsonaro, Salvini. In Germany we have the socalled Reichsbürger who believe the Federal Republic is not a state but a company owned by American millionaires and they admire Putin. Just like you, Anett, I have no words.
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Thanks, Karin (and sorry for the late reply!)
I agree, things are getting scarier by the minute. Actually, over the last week alone things got a LOT scarier. Seeing my country and the one I feel clostest to descend into idiocracy is really hard to take. I only vaguely remember the Cold War (I was born in 79), but I was part of it on the other side of the iron curtain. Sometimes it feels as if the last thirty years never happened.
I also remember that on the US election day in 2016 I got a text at 6 a.m in the morning that simply read.: “Now we’re all f***ed.” If only we had known how much.
On the day of the Brexit referendum I spoke with a British friend, who said, he was gutted. He sounded so devastated, it was gut-wrenching.
And following the state elections in Germany last Sunday was simply too much to take.
I think I’ll go to a news hiatus again. Pretending to live in my own little bubble might be better for my mental health.
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