Come on, Sense!

Every single bristle-strand lashed my face. From both sides, from above and behind, a torrent of water cascaded onto my body in sheets. My face, needless to say, got the worst of it.

Marching barefoot and fully clothed through a car wash: not an adventure. More of a punishment.

This wretched dream didn’t creep down from the mountains — it came straight from next door. That’s roughly what it feels like when I let the news pour over me for thirty minutes, morning and evening. My brain writhes in spasms. My feelings are outraged and livid.

So am I.

Things crumble and crumble apart when the headlines scrum for the favour of the frightful. When politicians medically prescribe themselves a long nose, short legs, and a body without a spine.

However fresh the morning, it is still a new day with war and drama at many corners of the world. Where has the normal gone — the humane, the civilised life?

The norm of reality in the political arena and at the centre of media attention was yesterday. Today, the absurd serves as a bitter side dish to daily life. Gladiatorial combat in parliaments crowds out any serious political climate.

Yes, the climate has already heated up. In heads and bodies.

The world has become incomprehensible.

And yet the comprehensible part of this ailing planet is still, in a microdose, hopeful.

Hope becomes an activist. That small, stubborn hope refuses to cede the field without a fight to the loudmouths and the power-hungry.

Throughout human history, the pendulum has always swung. A vast historical pendulum, sweeping one way and then the other. History may never truly settle — but the hopeful part waits for the moment when the pendulum swings back.

And then: movement. Real movement. When tens of thousands organise in Erfurt to disrupt the gathering of a party hostile to democracy. When courageous judges stir themselves to overturn inhumane laws. Or when artists and madpeople straighten the world’s more just vision back upright above the tip of the World Trade Center.

Come on, Sense!
Come around again, common sense.