frost on the ground

 

Today just after 9 am, the sun was just coming up from behind the hills in the east, the temperature was -8 Celsius. I was cycling back from a doctor's appointment with the icy wind in my back, thankfully. Back home, it took close to an hour to regain feeling in my fingers. There was much howling and gnashing of teeth while R dipped my hands back and forth into warm and cold water the way my mother did when I was a child. I never liked the cold. And I had slept badly with weird dreams, there are a couple of medical tests ahead of me that I try - not always successfully - to keep cool about. 

Meanwhile. Thoughts.

All these angry recreational activists who take themselves so seriously and think they have to be angry all the time get on my nerves. Nelson Mandela was not angry. He said that the moment he lost compassion for his guards was a difficult moment. He always remained human, even in prison. Many activists today no longer understand that. They think it's enough to be upset about something. It's a huge misunderstanding that activism is all about the activist's state of mind. Anger can be a driving force, but otherwise it tends to get in the way because it clouds the view.

Düzen Tekkal

When you think of it, my brother told me on the phone, things in Europe have been positively medieval in recent years. We've had the Plague, the death of a queen, rising bread prices, now the peasants are revolting in Germany, religions battle against each other,  if we don't watch out, we may have to go to war against Sweden for 30 years again (the Thirty Years' War was a series of wars fought among numerous European powers in the 17th century, caused, inter alia, by peasant uprisings and religious dissent with the Swedish ruler Gustav Adolf a main driving force).

I think it's important to remember that a decisive factor for the functioning of a democracy is the opposition - inside and outside of parliament. The challenge of democracy is that even those who would have voted for a different party, wanted different decisions or different personnel remain loyal to the collectively binding framework, the constitution, the legal rights of citizens. Loyalty does not mean agreeing with everything, it means recognizing things for what they are: politically legitimized decisions against which, if you disagree, there are ways of taking action, at least in democracies, both inside and outside parliaments. We can vote, we can take to the streets, we can argue, we can write, we must do all of these. Early on, when I was maybe 12 years old, my father explained to me what he called the cycle of power. A democratically elected government enforces decisions, applies them administratively, is reflected in the effects of these decisions and has to work its way through them. In an autocratic state, the power cycle runs on privileging certain groups and on violence and intimidation. In Roman times - and my father was a fan of early democracies - there was the Forum, an important public place for debating and arguing during democracies - and for hangings during the times of tyrants and dictators, no less. And before the Romans, the Greek had the Agora, same thing, a central public space for all to debate, buy and sell their goods, make art, share ideas, test theories, explain and teach (never mind the public role of women at the time). Novices in Tibetan Buddhist monasteries must learn the art of debating and listening. You can watch them here. I, on the other hand, simply post something on a social media channel and think I have made a serious contribution to world peace.

And after all that, I was foolish enough to go out again into the freezing cold because R insisted. The light, the light, he called out to me. We walked uphill this time, real snow on the ground and caught the last bits of sunshine way over the hills to the west.