That very last minute.

(I started to write this post on Friday and then other stuff happened…)

 

screenshot from Instagram

It is Friday, and the school children’s demonstration for a more earnest dealing with the problem of climate change in Berlin is probably still on. First pictures have been posted already.

https://www.bild.de/regional/berlin/berlin-aktuell/fridays-for-future-klimaaktivistin-greta-kommt-nach-berlin-60934686.bild.html

Greta posted a selfie on Instagram yesterday as she was traveling on the train. 

screenshot from Instagram

I had read somewhere that she had insisted her mother change her way of traveling for her career, i.e. that she give up flying, and when I heard that Greta was coming to Berlin I had wondered. Would she skip more than one day of school, or would she fly, or… But she seems to be very true to herself. What an admirable young woman!

I have been following this discussion about skipping school to demonstrate for action against climate change for a while. And my husband and I had a rather severe discussion about it last week, after the reports on demonstrations. Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier have spoken up on behalf of the young people taking to the streets. Despite the fact that they are skipping school in order to do so.

Because – as is frequently the case with “public debates” in Germany when there is a lot of broohaw going on about a ‘topic’, but really they are talking about a side issue of complete unimportance  -  many self-declared very important people (read: old male f****s) are speaking up against the fact that these kids are skipping school. To protest. Now, that cannot be allowed or tolerated, no way! They should abide to law and order, and that means they have to go to school during school hours.

(This is where I continue writing on Sunday.)

What the important people are not writing about is the fact that these young people have an issue at hand, and that they have all the right in the world to demonstrate for their cause. Forty years ago some of the people speaking against the young demonstrators today might have been the ones who were demonstrating against atomic weapons and atomic energy. They surely would not have wanted to have their elders tell them what is right or wrong in their mode of demonstration, nor would they have listened.

Yet these old people are also the ones who usually complain that young people are not politically aware enough, that they only care about their digital world and social media – and here they are, they are going to the streets, they are telling us what they are afraid about. They are telling us that our way of living is not good for the environment, that it is endangering their – and everybody’s! – future. What is more important – the future of the planet, or a few school lessons they did not attend? Where are these young people going to learn more important things for life – in the class room, or on the streets in a political discussion and activity?

In our paper I read an article about a young man who started as tree-planting society when he was nine years old, and that organization is still going strong, has grown stronger even now through Greta and her actions. 

 So their voices can be heard, their actions are important. 

My hausband is completely against the fact that the children skip school for their demonstrations. However, he is also of the opinion that they should not be punished for this (at least principals in Bavaria are handing out severe reprimands against the students for any day missed, I am not sure how it is being dealt with in other federal states in Germany). I think it is fantastic that they are demonstrating – and I think, they are only being noticed at all BECAUSE they are striking during school time. If Greta had stood in front of the parliament building in Stockholm with a sign “hej, rättar klimatet!” in the afternoons, nobody would ever have listened. So this strike is only being talked about because it affects school hours, and it is talked about as if it were only a school strike as for e.g. cleaner streets. The people who are against these strikes are – at least in Germany – not talking about the issues being raised. They are not talking about the fact that carbondioxide emissions have risen, despite all our grand intentions. They are not talking about the fact that airline companies still don’t pay taxes for fuel, which keeps airtravel prices at an unjust advantage to any rail travel (where it exists as a viable option).

If I were a teacher in a German school right now – or in any country, it doesn’t matter – I would dedicate Friday’s lessons towards the topic of climate change, political empowerment, political opinion building, anything that could be used as a justification to go and take the kids to a demonstration. If I were a headmaster, I would order the whole teacher body at my school to do that. And if I were a politician with anything to say in a government, I would listen to the voices of these young people and stop whining about saving banks, multinational corporations or other unhealthy concoctions humans have come up with and take every action needed and possible in order to attempt saving it all in this last and latest minute that we still have.

At least sociologists have started looking at who these kids are – but does that lead to them being heard and taken seriously?

However, the heading for this post wasn’t meant to refer to a political statement, really. I had wanted to write about was how this past week I managed to finish a quilt in that very last minute… I think I will leave that for tomorrow!

To Penis or not to Penis – is that really the question?

Currently there is quite a bit of commotion about censorship in the AQS show in Grand Rapids, Michigan, regarding the piece “I was not wearing a life jacket” by Kathy Nida, which is (a juried) part of the “People and Portraits” exhibition by SAQA. A detailed account of the proceedings can be found on the SAQA blog here.  Several entries on Kathy Nida’s blog   cover the development of the removal, and give a personal account of the distress she has been going through. 

I fully sympathize with Kathy Nida in this unpleasant affair and am appalled that a venue which claims to be showing art would be so inconsistent in their approach and withdraw a piece of art from a juried show just because one person insisted that this piece was an affront.

Yes, frequently art is controversial, it causes discussions, and it must stay out there for this purpose. (It might have been a way to ‘hide’ the quilt in a cubicle with signs around it saying “Danger! This piece is ruminated to depict a penis, although the artist maker says there isn’t one.” Or something like that. After all, there are breasts to be seen on that quilt as well!) Why go all the way to rob many many other visitors of the event of the chance to see this piece and come to their own conclusions?

Yes, censorship is terrible, and this was a case of censorship. In a country that holds pride on their tradition of freedom of speech. (And likes to go around telling other countries what to do, and how.)

But there is a completely different issue behind this whole affair, which I find even more troubling than the fact that a decision was taken to not show a piece of art in public. Because it was not the board of the venue itself that thought about and then decided on the potentially provocative or too liberally nude character of the quilt in question. This is a case of bad-mouthing a piece of art into a state of non-acceptability by a single person, and – and this is the real issue at stake – the maker’s statement that this is not the case is not being heard. That’s denunciation. 

Or, to put it into a biblical perspective, a breach of the eighth commandment that thou shalt not talk wrongly against thy neighbors. (Sorry – don’t know the exact English formulation as my religious education way back then was in German...)

Or, to put it into a political-historical perspective, a case of residue McCarthyism at its worst, alive and kicking.

We have had too many instance of this kind of treatment between people in the world already. To name only a few, Nazi-times in Germany, Stalin’s rule of terror in the USSR, in Iran during the years after the Islamic Revolution, and yes, during the times of McCarthy in the US. And I am sure one could name many more. The case at issue here is that an act of denunciation by a single person is being acted upon whereas the ‘culprit’ does not get a voice, is not believed, but punished.

Good for Kathy Nida that her work has received a lot of attention through this, I am sure this will help her career quite a bit.

But justice and democracy have suffered a severe blow. Because democracy also means that everybody has the same right to look at things and learn from them, come to an individual conclusion. If one single person cannot deal with interpretating a modern piece of art it is not fair to the others to prevent them from having the same chance. That’s fundamentalism in a severe case.