Member-only story
In my kitchen, looking out into my little garden, I suddenly felt a tremendous emptiness rise within me. The world slides gently past me. I understand that world less and less. I can no longer follow the world. With every incident that reaches me through the news and other media, that emptiness in me grows larger.
I look with incomprehension at countries such as Poland, Hungary, Italy, Germany, China and the USA where dictatorial structures reappear. In which populists promise paradise to the people. Perhaps I am forgetting a few more countries.
It is now almost 79 years since the WWIl came to an end. During that past time, organizations were set up, which were supposed to prevent a repeat of it. All that is now being undermined. The old mistakes of the pre-WWIl period are now being neatly repeated and copied. The brewing racism and anti-Semitism is catching fire again.
Has been able to fester under the surface for years. We have learned nothing but nothing from this. Dictatorships invade other countries to consolidate their power. In the current chaos, it is almost ideal to seize power. Populism reigns supreme again. Half of the population runs blindly after it, without any self-reflection.
We are the worst students in the animal kingdom. My emptiness is almost impossible to fill. I look outside distraught. My studio is untouched. My hands still hold the coffee cup. The coffee in it has gone cold. The world is a hopeless nexus of power struggles and endless manipulation with huge amounts of money. The feet of world leaders have lost contact with the earth’s surface.
Because of that emptiness, I lose my feeling. My feeling is lost. I am thrown back and forth between anger and fear, I would like to scream in the ears of those dictators and political manipulators, “Think of the people of this world, think of the animals, think of the beauty and solitude of this planet!”. It will be shouting to deaf ears. They are unreachable to these cries of powerlessness, which they see only as a weakness bid.
Europe does not want to be confronted with the reality of wars and impending EU divisions. The emptiness of reality is sometimes shocking to experience as an artist. An artist grows in the dynamics of a culture that surrounds him. An artist stiffens in all those threatening and manipulating…
