Buhlmann's Corner
“Tis the final conflict”
so says The Internationale. “Arise ye wretched of the earth, .... We have been naught we shall be all”
As I write this, entire peoples are on the move, marching towards the North and the West, fleeing grinding poverty and blazing warfare that organizations on the ground are powerless to halt and international organizations such as G7, G8 and G20 etc seem to be doing their utmost not to interfere with or forget about. We are witnessing a migration on an unprecedented scale that some people find scary. What we see of the entire humanitarian crisis, however, is only the part that looks like getting too close for comfort to us as humans.
Taxpayers’ money is frittered away building walls and boundaries instead of filling the granaries with food and nobody gets angry at such infantile behaviour. It is nothing short of criminal - we are all enamoured of the idea of being good people as we smother the answer to the problem under fathoms of red tape or, failing that, pass the buck to our neighbour. What kind of an idea is it to have the trains run all the way to Denmark without stopping. Or to be wilfully obtuse like England and France. And there are precious few red carpets and welcoming fanfares for refugees from Africa and the Near East in places like the former DDR where, by history’s cruel irony, the people were hemmed in behind a wall that stood for forty years.
Take a closer look and you see a gigantic economic promotion project afoot to benefit the target countries and keep the balancing act going by shoring up a state of affairs that is perilously close to collapse. From the responsible standpoint, it stands to reason that the economic drive generated must be channelled (as it should be) towards economic development in the countries being abandoned. If not, the world of the future will be a combination of endless tracts of uninhabited land and elsewhere masses of human beings living together packed like sardines. Make no bones, this is an issue that dwarfs EMEA and even eclipses the rejuvenation of the ageing cultures from Bavaria to Lower Saxony.
Whining, pointing the finger and intoning “Brüder zur Sonne zur Freiheit“ (a song written in 1895 in a Moscow jail and sung for the first time by political prisoners during their forced march to exile in Siberia) is not a responsible answer.
Shrugging responsibility off to someone else who in turn will pass it on – a nefarious irresponsible mechanism we’re all too familiar with (see asset management etc) is a sure fire way of ruining the future before it arrives.
Otto von Bismark famously remarked in the North German Reichstag in 1870 “fear of responsibility is a malaise of our times”.
From where I stand, behaving responsibly is having the courage and/or strength of bearing the consequences of one’s actions or convictions. To each his/her own and together for all.
If you come across someone who thinks the same let me know. That’ll make two of us!