Are You Also Welcoming the Winter? Let’s Talk About Social State
It’s 13 degrees outside and raining. I couldn’t be happier with the weather.
It was a hot and a dry summer over here in this part of the globe. I have been longing for a bit of precipitation and coolness.
As I welcome the coming of colder days, I also can’t help but think about the heating crisis that we may face this year.
I am grateful for having a roof over my head and feeling the consequences of the inflation less severely in comparison to lower income households where every cent counts.
We are living in increasingly individualised societies, especially in big cities, and are losing our ability to empathise with each other.
I don’t even know what to do anymore when I see the 5th homeless person in a row trying to sell me a magazine in exchange for a few Euros.
I don’t know what I should feel or do.
My brain tries to make sense why and how this person might have ended up homeless.
Maybe it’s the elderly pension not being sufficient for maintaining a dignified life.
Maybe it’s a person with a mental illness who didn’t have a chance for actual treatment of their condition and couldn’t hold on to life.
Maybe it’s someone with a drug addiction. That’s it…It’s probably the drugs.
The problem is structural. The problem is not in my hands. This is a public policy matter.
Exactly this way, I externalise the problem out of myself and stop feeling bad about my own responsibility about it.
But I am responsible in the way that I have to say something about it.
Not that I don’t actually believe it’s a policy problem. It is.
I don’t understand why, despite relatively high taxes in Germany, there is still not enough social state and still so much poverty.
Does it really have to be in the hands of a few people working on a voluntary basis or those who like to “spread” their version of God to help the freezing and the starving outside?
Who would be against the government putting more budget and workforce into providing more shelter, hygiene facilities and food for the homeless this winter?
Who would disagree with increasing the preventive measures so that people don’t fall into old age poverty, life-ending addictions and end up sleeping on the streets in the first place?
I still find it difficult to know how to feel, what to feel.
I feel sorry.
I feel anger and disgust. In our selfish society. In greed. In those who earn their living by bringing misery to other’s lives.
Selling drugs that ruin people’s lives.
Selling weapons.
Selling lies.
Charity is not the answer to the problems in our society.
Charity only makes sense for those who believe that poverty is inherently normal. That the faith of the poor should be in the hands of the benevolent richer ones who help them out. When and if they feel like it.
Charity disgusts me.
Everyone has a right to shelter, to water and sufficient nutrition. Just because they are born and exist on this earth.
This is not questionable to me.
This is neither communism nor socialism.
This is building and living in societies that are not rotting, not degenerating and that are not anti-social.
It’s not my duty to provide for every single homeless person.
But it’s my duty to elect politicians who have the view that every person deserves to live in dignified conditions.
It’s my duty to remind them what to do with the power we lend them and where to put the taxes they collect.
I am hoping and calling for more solidarity, less greed and lots of empathy this winter.
Stay warm and healthy.
