June - already

It has rained and it is getting hot.  In other words, summer.

lily season

This afternoon, I sat in the auditorium of a concert hall and listened to 500+ primary school kids, aged 6-8, sing their hearts out. Not only did they sing, they used sign language and various percussion instruments incl. their hands and feet and heads and it was a most joyful afternoon. This choir is part of a local initiative to bring together children of all backgrounds and nationalities in about 25 different primary schools in our city. In the end, we all sang - three times! - Beethoven's Ode to Joy in German, Kurdish, Arabic, and Urdu. Imagine standing and singing "Alle Menschen werden Brüder" (all people become brothers) surrounded by 500 small kids and try not to be moved.

As I cycled back home in the evening sunlight, my mind was a whirling mess of thoughts. All morning I had heated debates with R and a couple of friends and family about recent political events in Germany and while we are nowhere near the US scenario, there are signs of clear danger and we are experiencing the first open and brazen illegal actions by the government, copying what others so openly do.

It seems that wherever I look, in countries near and far powerful people believe that the best way for them to hold onto power is to hurt other people. And their logic appears to be that the more all of us are afraid of them and of each other - our shared humanity - the more they win. Seeking to dehumanize marginalized communities and anyone who opposes them, attempting to outlaw our active civil society. 

So where do I stand? First, I know that what matters is solidarity. Personal networks, personal relationships, community. Always has been what kept me going. 

And deep down, you can see it in every crisis, in every misfortune, when someone stumbles and falls on the street and someone will run to help. Because we do not believe that this person deserves to have stumbled and fallen, and it doesn't matter whether that person has paid their taxes, how they make a living or whom they love, and if we like them or not. A person who needs help is helped. Big or small. This for me is humanity, this is what I call socialism. We need to make sure that we dig out this humanity again, that we stop people from being turned into wrecks, into ruins by fascists and neoliberals. How nice it would be if we simply lived in a human future.

A lot gives me hope. so many people just get it, so many people show solidarity, are co-operative. If you let people be, nobody wants to be mean to their neighbour. I don't want to come across as naive. But in evolutionary terms, this has been the survival strategy of the human species.  It's not so easy to stop people from being that way, even if it has been successfully attempted, by neoliberalism, which pushes us away from any form of community, and by the extreme right, which pushes us away from any form of trust in other people. Either way, we would be doomed. I think all fascist movements thrive on that death wish anyway but that's another story.

There is a video making the rounds where a mother reads out the first half of sentences she was told by her parents when she grew up maybe 30-40 years ago and asks her kid to complete the sentence. The one that made me cry was "As longs as you put your feet under my table . . " - the eternal threat shouted by my angry father when confronted with yet another teenage behaviour he could not tolerate - and today's kid replied ". . . you are safe."

Also, spelling is really necessary when dealing with AI.