Our columnist Klaus Brinkbäumer is program director of the MDR in Leipzig. You can reach him at [email protected] or on Twitter at @Brinkbaeumer.
What are we doing there: with each other, against each other? How much, how long do we want to ignore reason and reality, how ineffective do we want to be, how long do we block ourselves, steal each other’s lifetime, how incapable of learning, how collectively stupid do we want to be? It is not abstract, it has consequences in the concrete, only life that we have.
Instead of ending the pandemic, we are arguing
H., 90, friend of my parents who had been vaccinated three times, died of Corona and should not have died. Is this second part of this sentence too harsh, unjust? In the first corona year we didn’t have vaccines, but today we have them and we could end or control the pandemic, instead arguing about sensitivities and not doing the actual thing.
We don’t want to end this pandemic, we don’t want it enough; if we wanted we would, do what it took, and that wouldn’t be much. What are we doing to each other instead?
[Wenn Sie aktuelle Nachrichten aus Berlin, Deutschland und der Welt live auf Ihr Handy haben wollen, empfehlen wir Ihnen unsere App, die Sie hier für Apple- und Android-Geräte herunterladen können.]
C., of whom I am proud every day, has her first permanent job and is a psychologist. 30 patients live on their ward, there are sad life stories there, the two pandemic years were lonely. The team in which C. works is divided into unvaccinated and vaccinated people; C. is vaccinated, what are the consequences?
If an unvaccinated colleague was in the vicinity of a corona patient, the colleague must and may go into quarantine for seven days, paid – the vaccinated C., on the other hand, has to break off her vacation and take over the work of the unvaccinated, in addition. What effect do we expect from such rules? That is Germany in 2021. What solidarity and what team spirit will we experience in the future?
School children, cultural workers and retailers are punished
In these weeks I am reacting increasingly allergic to corona but: Markus Söders sentence that nobody warned in the summer; or Heiko Maas’ warnings that those who have made us all their hostages (Maas did not say this) should not be excluded (but this). So let’s rather punish the less strenuous, the schoolchildren, cultural workers, retailers or my parents, who have missed their grandchildren for two years, don’t meet friends, what an end of their lives.
Only with a lot of coffee can I endure the rhetorical exhaustion of the Merkel government or the oath nonsense of the philosopher Svenja Flaßpöhler, who says in “Hart, aber fair”: “People smoke, end up in intensive care with lung cancer, they ride motorcycles, they commit unsuccessful suicide attempts, everything Possible happens, and it would never occur to us to talk about the fact that these people become ill through their own fault, end up in intensive care through their own fault. “
For Macron, vaccination means “responsibility and solidarity”
Yes, of course, that’s exactly what I got. And those people are still allowed to do all of this with their own lives, since land and life are free. What they are not allowed to do: speed through city centers, smoke in restaurants – because it would endanger us others. Which brings us back to vaccination, that freedom that for Emmanuel Macron consists in showing “responsibility and solidarity”.
Those who are tired hardly hear the same thing over and over again. In such a presence, Sascha Lobo writes a text that is pure enlightenment, word for word without irony, and explains to non-vaccinated people why vaccination is better: “You are less likely to get sick.”
We have a “bad Christmas” ahead of us
Lothar Wieler, RKI President, calls into this present and predicts how many of us will die of Corona, what cannot be changed, mathematics; “Bad Christmas” is imminent.
Important, always and at times like these, is a change in tone. And the shape. And the message. Then all you need is the audience to hear and read.
