What kind of cat blogger are you?

I think anyone who has read this space more than once or browsed the forums on WordPress knows that I absolutely detest have a very low opinion of cat blogs, chief among them Cheezburger.

But as a guest blogger on Lorelle on WordPress shows: there are cat blogs, and then there are cat blogs.

If I may add an unneutered view to that list:

I’ve always thought blogging was CAThartic in a way.  Get the hairballs out of your system and onto the page.  Hit publish.  Sigh with relief.   Go away.

Repeat when the dam fills up again.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Even if I have no answers, at least I still have hope

I set out Saturday morning to take in a bit of the annual African festival which happens every year in my Hamburg neighbourhood. I had half a mind to go into reporter mode once I got there, ask people if they’d also been the target of racism here in Germany, get some quotes, take some pictures, write up a story.

I say half a mind because the other half said: it’s your day off. Enjoy it. Just take in the atmosphere, enjoy the feeling of standing on German soil surrounded by Africans, Asians, Greeks, Turks, Afghans, Iraqis, Spaniards, Portuguese…

So I looked through the tiny market stalls which were set up in the busy pedestrian area near the train station, peeked in at the women preparing food, the men setting up wares, the couples turning over items they might buy.

I remember thinking: why do people want to throw immigrants out? Can’t they see how much diversity enriches daily life?

Then I saw a carving which wrapped up what was going through my mind.

Our lives are intertwined.

I was going to keep posting about the racial violence and political turmoil that’s been happening over the past 10 days, but I get the feeling I could do that forever and not resolve anything.

Not that I think it’s hopeless, though.  I may not have any answers, but at least I still have hope.  Because like the folding of mountains and the changing of one type of rock to another, the transformation of society to one where - as a great man once said -  all people are judged by the strength of their character and not by the colour of their skin will be measured in generations, not from one election to another.  Our lifetimes are too short to see the changes, but if we keep the process moving - one life at a time - it will happen.

There’s no turning back the clock.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Germany’s hands are tied in its fight against racism

The racial mob attack on eight Indians in an eastern German town last weekend has renewed calls for the German far-right NPD party to be banned.

The NPD is Germany’s bugbear. Never taken seriously by the major parties or media, they are nevertheless extremely well-organised at the grassroots level and have managed to have a small handful of members elected to two eastern state parliaments. The party often sets up informal gatherings for kids and families in small towns to work the crowds one on one. It’s all very suble and low-key and never billed as a gathering of skinheads, but the goal is always the same: recruitment to the anti-immigrant, racist fold.

Those of us who want to protect democracy and free speech have a problem with banning this party.

Because they’re working more or less within the democratic system to gain a foothold, if you’re a true democrat you can’t be in favour of banning them because that would be undemocratic. Their ultimate goal, however, is the overthrow of the federal republic - and democracy - in Germany.

My view has always been: just stop and listen to what these idiots are saying and you’ll see them for what they are.

Case in point is their leader Udo Voigt, who coincidentally the very night of the mob attack nominated the late Rudolf Hess - Adolf Hitler’s former deputy - for the Nobel Peace Prize. An utter nonsense move considering Hess has been dead for 20 years and the prize can only be awarded to the living. Even if he were alive, who would award the Nobel Prize to a Nazi?

Publicly glorifying or justifying the Nazi terror regime is a crime in Germany, so for coming out with this bogus nomination the police have charged him with inciting race hate.

I get the feeling this is as much an attention-seeking move as playing to the faithful at a Saturday night piss-up, so charging Voigt with race hate - especially now with these recent attacks gaining worldwide attention - is playing right into far-right hands. Should the charges stick and their leader go to trial, party members and sympathisers will make him into a martyr, a victim instead of a perpetrator.

In this way Germany’s hands are tied. Ignore him and you’re accused of failing to apply the law of the land. Apply the law of the land, and you give him a forum.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Throwing money at racism isn’t going to stop it

The victims of Saturday’s racist attack in eastern Germany got a chance to tell their story today.

One said they all feared for their lives, some scurried to hide in the toilet or attic, and when it was all over, he was afraid for three days to even go home.

The German government’s first response now that the initial hand-wringing is over and the what now? stage has begun is to pump an extra five million euros into programs to combat racism.

No surprise there. They have to be seen to be doing something.

But if I’ve got a problem and money will solve it, I haven’t got a problem. That works for emergency taxi rides in the pouring rain, but for an ongoing plague like racism and xenophobia?

How can throwing an extra five million euros around in reaction to the brutal mob attack on eight foreigners last weekend do anything about changing attitudes? An ad campaign? Anti-racism programs in the schools? Worthy long-term goals, but how do you measure the results? Only 190 racist attacks next year instead of 200? One is already too many.

Especially this latest one. Just read the letters to Der Spiegel from India calling for a boycott of Germany as a tourist destination, a reminder that India is a huge and growing trading partner, and you see the politicians at least have it right for once: this is already very damaging to the country’s worldwide reputation.

Germany has ignored this problem and focused on the wrong things long enough. Read through those Spiegel letters - which echo many comments left here yesterday - and you’ll come to an American who gets to the heart of the matter.

The one by Carl Bruhn of Lakewood, California says: German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble should worry more about right-wing violence, and less about taking more and more civil liberties away in order to fight perceived terrorist threats in Germany. The far right parties are a much larger threat to Germany than the imagined terrorists.

Sounds like something I might have said.

© 2007 lettershometoyou
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This isn’t the Germany I know

This is written especially for people from outside Germany: This isn’t the Germany I know.

In the Germany I know, people don’t go chasing dark-skinned people through the streets in a raging mob and beat the crap out of them yelling “Foreigners Out!”

In the Germany I know, people are on the lookout for racists. They’re looked down upon. They’re a reminder of darker times I don’t even need to mention, they’re so notorious.

I remember once on a packed commuter train some 15-year-old kid was playing music from his cellphone for his 12-year-old friend. I couldn’t make out the lyrics because they were raspy and garbled, but a woman stood up and said in a voice which rang out clear across the car: TURN THAT NAZI SHIT OFF or I will march you out of the car at the next station and have the police lay charges on you!

But those aren’t the kind of stories which make headlines.

Sitting here in cosmopolitan Hamburg where tens of thousands of Turks, Africans, Asians, and even the odd Canadian live peacefully alongside the majority German population, it’s easy to roll your eyes and think, “those damn neo-nazis in the east again. So hopeless.” Because although the proportion of foreigners there is lower than in the west, it always seems to be the states of the former East Germany where this shit comes from.

But no matter how much I say that, no matter how often I tell people that Germans don’t deserve a blanket reputation of being unfriendly toward foreigners, it will always come off as an apology full of lame excuses.

It’s all the unemployment over there. They think foreigners are taking German jobs.

It’s because they grew up under a dictatorship; they don’t know what democracy means.

They’re lost and looking for something to belong to, anything.

Then I wonder if I’m living in some sort of bubble, that I don’t feel racism because I blend in with the majority, that if I were to slip into the skin of an Arab and walk around Hamburg, I’d have a completely different story to tell. Maybe not of being chased by a mob and beaten up, but of a daily grind from subtle put-downs to outright rejections.

Beyond the intial shock and disgust at this weekend’s attack itself, it’s disorienting and upsetting to find yourself confronted with this.

Do I really know this place? Can we afford to be smug and say it’s only in the east?

This would seem like a classic motherhood issue: racism is bad. Racist attacks are horrible. We have to stop racism.

But it keeps happening.

© 2007 lettershometoyou
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What’s public and what’s private these days?

When I first started blogging I didn’t really know what I was doing beyond writing stuff down. I had only a vague idea what was out there, didn’t know that there were about 100,000 new blogs every day, didn’t know that some people were putting even their most intimate thoughts and experiences on line for all to see.

Well OK, I did know that much, but I’d never really thought about it until about three weeks in when I stumbled upon a blog written by a woman who had just left her husband and was starting a life on her own with her six-year-old daughter. She wrote well, so I read through it all. It was fascinating reading, but also very personal, and I remember thinking: this is WAY beyond my boundaries. What if her ex-husband were also reading it? How would she feel?

So I asked her that in a blog comment. What I got was a testy comeback, not by the woman herself, but by her tech-savvy niece who’d set up the blog for her. Her niece asked: how could I risk upsetting her auntie at such a delicate time in her life? How could I discourage her blogging? Her ex-husband doesn’t even own a computer and don’t I know that there are blogs out there where people talk about a lot more personal stuff like their entire sex lives? (I’d send you the link to the woman’s blog, but it’s been taken down.)

I responded with: OK, if she wants to spill out her trauma and turmoil for all to see, she has to accept the fact that it might be discovered by those she might not want to read it. I could be some bored journalist sitting in Leeds with a deadline in two hours and an empty space where a column should be. I spy her blog, write my column about blogging using hers as one of my examples, her husband reads it and there you are: private thoughts in the public sphere. Chances are slim, but stranger things have happened.

If this were 1987 and blogs didn’t exist, would she have headed down to a neighbouring village and tacked up her diary on a lamp post?

Where does it begin and where does it end?

If you’ve thought about this before, and want to help out a study looking into these questions, you can take an online survey. Doesn’t take long.

© 2007 lettershometoyou
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Keep moving unless you’re headed for a cliff

Felt like a deer in the headlights for a sec or two yesterday. Cycling home from work and I’m thinking about death, thinking about serious bodily injury, a life without cycling, never playing sports again, living out my days in a wheelchair.

Crossing a busy intersection I’m suddenly confronted with a white van - why is it always a white van? - screaming toward me. I think: he hasn’t seen me. Danger.

But instead of speeding up, I freeze where I am. Maybe not so much like a deer in the headlights, because I let out a huge yell. It feels as if everyone around has turned to watch what will happen next.

He hits the brakes, but the ground is still wet from a recent downpour. He skids on the pavement, finally stopping right by my left leg. He’s looking straight at me, starts to roll down his window to say something, but I shake my head and start on again. What’s the point of telling yet another driver to slow down and look out for cyclists?

Besides, if I’d just kept going instead of hitting the brakes in a panic, I would have been past him, even if he’d never seen me and never braked at all.

Just keep going: Why is it that we sometimes forget lessons we thought would stick with us for a lifetime?

When I’d just turned 20 I stayed up partying with a friend for two days and two nights. We both had good-paying jobs with the railway, had been in the bush for a while, had finally got some days off and were determined to have a good time. Late in the evening of the second night we tried to convince a couple of colleagues to cover our shifts the next morning, because we’d somehow ended up about 500 miles away. No way, they told us. You show up at eight in the morning, or else.

So Mark and I were forced to drive back all night over a lonely road.

After a few hours at the wheel sometime just after dawn I remember thinking: I’m getting pretty tired. I think I should get Mark to drive for a while.

Next thing I hear is Mark screaming: Eeeee-Yannn! WAKE THE FUCK UP!!!

I turn around and Mark is in mid-air, on the way back down after getting bounced up and off the ceiling.

I turn forward just in time to see a tree - as perfect as any Christmas tree - being flattened under the hood.

We’re in tall grass and boulders headed for the toolies and I’m being screamed at.

I guess my brain figures it’s OK to keep going since we’re not headed for a cliff, so I hit the gas, tromp on it for all it’s worth and swing the wheel to the left, 10 feet up the bank and back onto the road.

We get out to look at the damage. Bits of bark and evergreen tree in the rental car grille, some scraping on the undercarriage, but nothing a wipe or two won’t hide.

We walk a hundred feet back to look at the start of the long, lazy curve, the tracks in the gravel leading down the bank the straight and perfect proof of my falling asleep at the wheel.

I could have panicked like I did yesterday and hit the brakes. But that would have meant hours waiting for a tow truck, police reports, six demerit points for driving without due care and attention, a hassle with the rental car company, missing our shifts, maybe even getting fired. But I hit the gas instead. I kept moving.

Always keep moving ahead unless you’re headed off a cliff.

Didn’t impress my friend Mark though.

He says: Give me the keys. I’m driving.

© 2007 lettershometoyou
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German Chancellor Merkel’s hot air melts Greenland glacier

One of the things that irks me the most about the theatre which is modern media is the photo op. Some politician laying a wreath, visiting a disaster area, shaking hands with accident victims, what have you. It’s a win-win for both sides. The editor gets some easy filler to illustrate an on-going story and the politician gets to say they’re actually doing something meaningful.

But if you take German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s current trip to Greenland as one example, the photo op can go to extreme lengths to make a point.

Frau Merkel, instead of flying all the way to Greenland in an attempt to give the impression you’re actually doing anything concrete to combat climate change, why not save the carbon, stay at home and announce the following:

1. A country-wide speed limit of 100 km/h on the Autobahn

2. A carbon tax on airline tickets

3. A hefty tax break for those who cycle or use public transport to commute to work or school, and higher taxes for those commuting with only one person in the car.

I realise that not one of these modest proposals is ever going to be implemented. They’re just too politically unpopular. Even though it’s been proven that driving more slowly and at a steady pace is more fuel-efficient, long stretches of the Autobahn will still be left without speed restrictions. Some guy named Otto Lobby will see to that. Cut-price airlines will still be able to offer ridiculously low prices for flights so that many travellers will opt for flying instead of taking the vastly more fuel-efficient train, and as for cyclists? Who needs them? They pay nothing for road upkeep anyway. All they do is bitch and complain anyway.

Let’s face it. Any politician who stands on a glacier spewing hot air about efforts to combat climate change is doing more harm than good.

And come next election, if you hear any of them discuss anything meaningful toward finally driving a stake through the heart of the petroleum-addicted vampire which is the world’s economy, have a good laugh.

I’m no anarchist, but I do believe this: if politicians and elections really had the power to change anything fundamental about the way we live, they’d be made illegal.

© 2007 lettershometoyou
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