Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
Abraham Lincoln
Germany’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic is … well, not its finest hour. I wrote about it a couple of times, and yeah, from seeing Covid as a possible highly underestimated danger in March 2020 my estimation changed to it being dangerous to some individuals, mostly the old and those with vulnerabilities.
And yeah, sucks to be you, but this doesn’t mean a country should adhere to those who have the highest risk. After all, if all are on the same level as those most at risk … who exactly is going to help those people?
But unfortunately, we seem to be stuck in a strange kind of “solidarity”, where different rules cannot be used, even if people differ. Strange, a logical next step would be to punish all citizens if one citizen has committed a crime. Seems far off? How? After all, we have a democracy which imposes restrictions on when you may leave your house (between 10 pm and 5 am, to be exact), no matter whether you are ill or not. Or more importantly, whether that works to combat Covid or not.
And yeah, this isn’t exactly about organizing creativity, except, it is. When the country you live in turns into a strange form of procedural dictatorship … that is an issue.
Frankly, I have more respect for a “strong leader” dictatorship that what we have now. A true dictatorship is evil, everybody knows it’s evil, so at least it’s honest. But what Germany has become in the last few years is anything but honest. From delegating censorship to private companies under the threat of huge fines if something vaguely defined as “hate speech” is posted on social media (because the state must not engage in censorship according to the constitution), to prohibiting citizens to leave their residences when a highly manipulative value exceeds a certain value … dafuq?
The politicians of the CDU/CSU and SPD don’t even have the balls to announce a general lockdown. They just set easily reachable conditions when such a general lockdown takes effect. So they can say “We did not lock down the whole area, the numbers were just too high.”
Seriously, the one thing worse than a dictator is a coward using procedures and laws to make him (in this case: her) a dictator.
And as for the one in power, the chancellor of Germany, cynically speaking, I can understand that a chancellor looks back at her youth when she gets old and ready to retire, but girl, do you really have to go back to the worst aspects of the socialist dictatorship you grew up in?
Germany is better than that.
P.S.: If I sound angry and frustrated, that’s because I am. We are talking about constitutional rights here. These measures don’t even make sense, yet they are done anyway. How can that loss of freedoms not make everyone angry and frustrated.
