Pretty much everything changed within the last months.

One, I got rid of my job as a nursing assistant. I enjoyed working very much, but it was too stressful and too badly paid a job to keep it. Luckily, I received an invitation for a local law school and so there was little time to worry about what’s happening next.

Two, I started law school two weeks ago. It was a tough break, from medicine to law (and everything connected to and with it, like eg. the special kind of people walking around in law school…), and I had my issues figuring out if it was the right decision to switch subjects. It took a day and a half to forget completely about medicine and I found myself sitting in the library looking through criminal law books to find out which one would be the best for me to learn with. I found myself working through laws and enjoying it. I found myself struggling over certain terminology, I’m still a little unsure to differ between formal and material law.

Three, I experienced something I believed would just be possible in a cheesy romantic movie. Still figuring out why it happened the way it happened, I just sit here and think I must be dreaming. It’s been over 15 months now since I last felt that complete and happy and recognised. And there isn’t really much to it, in the end. Just talks, an exceptional dinner and a wonderful human being making me feel whole. Crazy.

Four, as the last two entries are political ones, I think I need to say something about our newly-elected government and the new-old chancelloress, Mighty Angie.
Weird thing about the elections from September 27 is that nobody stands up and says „I voted CDU/FDP (read: the self-declared parties for every German)“. Nobody. Everyone complains, wonders how that could’ve happened, what psychos voted for those two parties…

Astonishingly – and that is first and before all my opinion – the SPD (former government party) didn’t lose as many votes as I thought they would (and as they would’ve deserved, actually). Mind you, they are still in a terrible shade, but nonetheless they seem to not-really-get the situation. Like in those two earlier entries, though the topic is a slight different one.
You know, the SPD should use this chance to renew itself. Completely renew itself. Get rid of all those power-focused people on top, replace them by representatives with REAL ambitions and idea(l)s. In fact that is what whole Germany should have done when we started dealing with „The Crisis“. Renew ourselves. Get an attitude makeover. Find a REAL leader. Find someone who isn’t leaning left, right or into the middle just at will of the lobbyists and unpredictably changing his (her) opinion.
What are we doing now with the outcome of the election? We voted for a neo-liberal approach to economy, globalisation, here we come! We voted for privatization of essential parts of our social system. We voted for tax increases for blue collar workers. We voted for tax cuts or even refunds for the big companies and those rich guys and girls up there somewhere. We voted for – apparently – a new health system (again!). We voted for another support of those Hartz IV laws. We voted a queer foreign minister into office! A joke in Germany those days: Our reps won’t even be allowed to enter Iran because there would be a woman as the leader of the government and a gay vice chancellor. I like that vision pretty much. Angie and Drag Queen Guido.
Life will become less social here in Germany, though everyone connected to the government would like to tell you the exact opposite. Tonight in the news they said the tough part of the crisis is yet to come here in Germany. Our last minister of finance told us 6 months ago, Germany would not really be hit by the crisis because of our strong economy (now think about that!). Stupid as it is, Germany is relying basically on exporting goods from our country to somewhere else. If there’s no one to buy anything because there’s no money to buy something with, we’re grounded. Students learn that in class 7.

Sometimes I cannot get over the fact that our politicians must think of us as a stupid, dumbassed, consuming mass of tax payers.

Basic Law of Germany („Grundgesetz“), § 20 II: All state authority is derived by the people.

Really?

Today, after having spent some considerable time thinking about the issues mentioned in my last entry (here) and after realizing that our politicians still do their job the way they used to since the founding of the FRG in 1949, and nothing changed since the massacre in Winnenden last Wednesday, I am just puzzled.

Puzzled about the fact that, even after such a catastrophe, nobody really seems to care for what’s really important. Like I wrote earlier, politicians of every party of the Bundestag  blamed different people, laws or even the school for it. A German psychologist worries that the students are coming back to school too early (Hanover’s „Neue Presse“) and even that the school should be closed permanently for public schooling  - WELT online.
Is there nothing else they could wonder about? Is there nothing else that needs to be done? Is it not time to ACT, or at least RE-ACT after such a crime? Is it not time to CHANGE something?
But rather than changing, we Germans start what we’re second best at after complaining. Discussing.
Media started to cover that topic rightaway, showing every single bit of the „Last seconds of the Murderer“ and interviewed little school boys (thanks, YouTube) who apparently were absolutely proud to be on TV but appeared a little shocked nonetheless. They discussed it over and over and over and over, and everyone said basically, „There is no so-so solution for that problem. It’s many areas that would need a complete makeover.“
Great. Now, what do we do with that? Right, you guessed it already. Start discussing why there is no easy solution to that problem and who failed when to do the right thing so there is someone to blame and to point a finger at.

Now, it seems most of the happy discussion people found that certain something in blaming the – Internet and Media. PC and other Video Games, to be precise. Again, like everytime when a school kid kills other people in his education facility, the games most blamed where the same. Counter-Strike (I wonder if they still mean the original 1998 (was it?) version or at least the updated Source thingy…), Crysis (and, BEWARE, this was even developed in GERMANY! Can you believe it?) and UT. Why UT, you might ask? Yeah. Exactly my point.
Why not blame the likes of Doom, Quake, Stalker, even FEAR or Bioshock (hey, you can kill there too!)?  Anyone remember Cate Archer in the No One Lives Forever Series? It was a little blood there as well! And Hitman! And Lara Croft! And Super Mario! And Pokemon! You see, the perfect victim.

To come back to my point: Where’s the acting? Where’s the „We need to do something about this right NOW“-attitude? Teachers start complaining that they would consider being paid extra money as a reward to withstand the possible danger in class – here.
Politicians start arguing about whether or not Germany should implement a blocking system against child pornography.

The only thing you hear now, a week later, is: Don’t draw conclusions too fast, you might punish the wrong people. Says the Commisioner of Data Security of Germany, the politicians even needed to review the security laws made in the post-9/11 era.

Now how about raising money for educating the children better? How about spending some bailout (I love that word, you know^^) money on schools? Teachers? Kindergartens? Early Education Facilities (aka KiTas?)? Why not just let some bank get down?  Infrastructure investments? But alright. I’m just a normal guy knowing nothing of that stuff.

——

Our pope. You know Mr Ratzinger? Pope Benedict XVI?
He told the world condoms would increase the risc for AIDS. Come on. (tagesschau.de)
It would rather make the problem worse. Solution for it all would be a „healthy relationship towards each other in a trusty environment“. Yeah, right. Go ahead. Tell that to the people buying porn w/o condom (–>bareback), tell that to people who want to be devirginized by just some stranger, no matter what, tell that to guys and girls wanting to have a baby. Right.

So much for today.
Think about it, will you?

Thanks.

I feel like I really need to write some things about the massacre in Winnenden in south Germany.

CNN.com
„If an unassuming youth like Kretschmer can turn into a mass murderer, and if this can happen in a quiet place like Winnenden, it can happen anywhere in this country which, for two generations, has striven with immense success to recast itself as a peaceful democratic nation, but whose violent past still has echoes and still has the power to unsettle today’s Germans.“ <– is this the NEW view of Germany in the world? If so, thank you…

Youtube.com
Anyone able to understand German should (!) go through the comments. What’s it gonna be like to live here in 15 years? Who did fail when (not) doing what?

Politicians here, like always, are really fast at hand with some answers to my question. Action games (German: „Killerspiele“), social insecurity, no future for the lower-educated youth, immigration policy failed, parenting went wrong, I could continue this list forever. Oh, did I mention that the murderer was on psychiatric drugs the day he killed 16 people? So it’s the medicine, too.
In my opinion, nobody really knows what’s going on. At least and certainly not the people who could possibly change something. When was the last time those highly-paid politicians with all their extra salaries from lobbyist work took a look down at Mr and Mrs Ordinary? When was the last time they really cared about us, the PEOPLE?
Alright, we’re gonna make the sale of PG-18 games even harder.  Alright, we’re gonna be fine, just go and raise some taxes. Alright, give us the new all-in-one-wonder-card making it so much more easy to go see the doctor. Alright, go ahead and give us extra money to buy some cars and at the same time try to educate us about being environmentally cautious. Alright, come on, go ahead and give us some more Ritalin. We’re really in need.
Something’s going wrong here. FUNDAMENTALLY wrong. Seriously wrong.

Walking around in Berlin, you see a Turkish 10-year-old boy calling a coloured 15-year-old girl to go and leave his (!) country. You see other, mostly young people pondering the streets, molesting others, drinking, smoking and enjoying themselves by accidentally hitting  some stranger in the face because he took a too close look. It’s a fine line between being treated as not-existing and being THE hate object. You have to walk that line carefully these days, I can tell you.

Ever heard of the country of Hitler? Ever heard of the Third Reich? Yeah, that’s us about 70 years ago.
My parents weren’t born then, and I wasn’t even taken into consideration, I guess, but before Hitler came to power, we had a shockingly similar situation. Ever took a look at election outcomes these years, especially in the Eastern parts of Germany? Ever wondered why the extremists, left AND right, were able to regain some tiny, but saddening amount of power?
I don’t wanna say that it’s likely for another Hitler to come back. But it’s gonna be hard work for our society (if it is only a single society we live in, probably there are LOTS of them…) to regather and face the problems with unity and the strength we could find in ourselves.

Change we can believe in? Not in Germany, Ms Merkel, sure not. Unfortunately.

Fact-fiction.net