[ad_1]
Until I walk in and see the empty seats after the stores that did not cope with the crown crisis. Three went bankrupt in just one week. In one of them I bought a jacket on sale a few days before the end. The woman in the box, usually always so helpful and talkative, was quiet and discouraged, she knew nothing about her future, nothing about her colleagues.
According to Eurostat, 5.5 million people in Europe lost their jobs in the second quarter of the year alone, as a result of crown closures.
At a pawn shop in Milan last summer, I interviewed a man who mortgaged his wedding ring so he could buy food for the children. A woman handed over her watch to pay the bills. Her shame was almost as great as her despair. Both had lost their livelihood in the spring.
At his home in the childhood town of Falkenberg, a friend lost his job just before the holidays. You get compensation, of course. But I don’t have a job to go to in a long time, colleagues, community, goals and meaning are gone. The days consist of the sofa, the cell phone, the TV, the emptiness. His wife is worried, she says she lives her life through YouTube, she is apathetic, without faith in the future.
This is what is carelessly called “economics.” People and their lives.
So I feel a bitter aftertaste when a woman sends an email that says yes, of course she’s a bit sad about poverty and unemployment, but it’s probably something we “need to keep in mind if we want to save Mother Land”. At least he’s happy that dolphins have been seen swimming off generally overcrowded beaches, that the world has been given a break, and he really hopes nothing will ever be the same again. She is just one of many and I can’t help but be fascinated by the cynicism.
Who is not happy to see cute dolphins in clean water? But if you think a little further than the dolphin nose is enough, you can also see in front of you all these millions of people who have lost their jobs and their income. You can definitely think that the climate issue requires great sacrifices. But to think that others should be responsible for this is nothing more than pure selfishness under a false banner of goodness.
An acquaintance, who just posted photos on Instagram of her daughter’s birthday celebration with a gigantic cake and a lot of gifts, does not want to answer me if she herself is willing to sacrifice something of herself and the beautiful existence of the children. She avoids the question and only the parrots’ answers about “Mother Earth”. By the way, a Kumbaya expression reminiscent of Uncle Frost and Aunt Tö from fairy tales rather than serious debate.
A debate that would be as interesting as it is urgent, as complex as it is complicated. Anyone with the ability and the will to look up realizes that the crisis in the crown runs the risk of deteriorating our environment rather than improving it.
Those who cannot feed their children do not buy organic bananas or cloth bags. People who can’t pay the bills don’t donate money to endangered animals. Companies that go bankrupt cannot afford to think of green solutions.
That is the paradox; prosperity and development consume the earth’s resources. But it also creates the conditions for us to want and be able to think about the climate and not just our survival for the moment, in a world where we have only just begun to anticipate the extent of the virus’s real aftermath.
