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One group appears strangely seldom in the many discussions, especially political ones, about the corona pandemic: those affected.
I don't mean restaurant owners or retailers, artists or students.
I mean the dead, the seriously ill and their families.
Christian Stöcker, arrow to the right
Photo: SPIEGEL ONLINE
Born 1973, is a cognitive psychologist and has been a professor at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW) since autumn 2016.
There he is responsible for the "Digital Communication" course.
Before that, he headed the Netzwelt department at SPIEGEL ONLINE.
In Germany, hundreds of thousands of people mourn relatives, colleagues and friends who fell victim to the virus.
Thousands of mourners join in every day, because hundreds continue to succumb to Covid 19 illnesses every day.
There are now 70,000.
Soon one in 1000 Germans will have died from or with the corona virus.
But German politics prefers not to talk so much about the dead and the mourners.
There are reasons.
Death is independent
US President Joe Biden, on the other hand, held an official mourning ceremony this week for the more than 500,000 corona deaths in his country, lowering the flags to half mast.
Some Republicans interpreted this simple and appropriate gesture as a partisan act.
But death is independent, and catastrophes are not a question of political orientation.
In Germany, too, there are politicians who would like to classify existential crises as a party-political issue.
This week, for example, Florian Hahn, the deputy general secretary of the CSU, and Alexander Lambsdorff, the deputy chairman of the FDP parliamentary group, each made a tweet: Both criticized the ARD for starting a new Instagram channel on the topic of the climate crisis .
The CSU and FDP men agreed that this was "campaign support" for another party, namely the Greens.
A representative of the AfD federal board also agreed with this assessment.
The disaster has long been underway
The disaster has undoubtedly been underway for a long time.
And the fossil fuels that they fuel have long been killing many millions of people each year, also in other ways.
So if German politicians are of the opinion that the coverage of the biggest and most dangerous crisis in human history is an election campaign for a certain party, it only means that their own parties do not think their own parties have any election-relevant answers to offer to this crisis.
You could call it egocentrism in the face of disaster.
You can only negotiate about goals and paths
In essence, natural disasters are not politically negotiable issues.
If the earth warms up at the same rate, it will soon have serious consequences.
And if you are infected with Covid-19 and belong to a risk group, there is a real risk that you will die from it or suffer permanent damage.
The high-risk group alone includes over 20 million Germans, over 36 million have an increased risk.
Only two things are politically negotiable: Concrete goals, with all their consequences, and the ways to achieve these goals.
The dying doesn't seem like a strong lobby
The specific consensus goal on the climate crisis is set out in the Paris Agreement: limiting warming to well below two degrees Celsius, preferably 1.5 degrees.
It is already clear that at least the second goal can hardly be met unless something fundamental changes very soon.
Politicians prefer not to talk about that too much.
Because then you would have to talk about the paths that you have to take to achieve this goal.
There are also two politically agreed goals on the subject of Corona: to keep the number of deaths as low as possible and to prevent catastrophic excessive demands on German hospitals.
Neither is much talked about these goals, any more than about the dead.
The discussion about incidence values, "opening strategies" and other things has displaced the actual core of the topic.
The dying and their relatives are obviously not a sufficiently strong lobby.
The same applies to those who will suffer most from the climate catastrophe.
"Prevent life from happening again"?
Goals are pasted over with dimensions that are intended to serve as a guideline for their achievement.
And then these dimensions are discussed as if they were the goals themselves.
An incidence value of 35 or 50 new infections per 100,000 inhabitants is not an end in itself: The aim is always to prevent as many deaths as possible and not to overwhelm the intensive care units.
At the moment, these goals are in great danger, because the new, even more contagious Sars-CoV-2 variants are spreading quickly.
The Chancellor is already seeing the third wave.
As a reminder, the second killed tens of thousands more than the first.
But we don't talk about that anymore.
Armin Laschet, however recently said, "You can not always invent new limits to prevent that life takes place again," That's what he really said, the chairman of the Christian Democratic Union.
To prevent
that
life happens again
.
Wasn't there something else entirely that should be prevented?
Mysterious forces at work?
There is no discussion about how to fight the pandemic, but how to get rid of the measures as quickly as possible.
The fact that the pandemic will then get even worse is ignored for the time being, it is an election campaign.
Here, too, the process has long been under way: The Robert Koch Institute sees “clear signals of a trend reversal”.
Nobody wants to take the other point of view publicly, because that would be cynical: In order for the economy to start up again (when German politicians talk about "freedom", surprisingly often they actually mean "turnover"), more people have to die.
So that we can continue to build combustion engines, we have to sacrifice the future of our children.
An unnamed politician recently told SPIEGEL on the subject of Corona that the real question was how many deaths one wanted to afford, but that one could not say that in public.
You pretend to be talking about the paths
display
Christian Stocker
We are the experiment: our world is changing so breathtakingly that we stagger from crisis to crisis.
We have to learn to manage this tremendous acceleration.
Publisher: Karl Blessing Verlag
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Karl Blessing Verlag
Number of pages: 384
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On the fronts where the pandemic or climate catastrophe could actually be combated in a targeted manner - rapid tests, vaccinations, renewable energies, other forms of mobility - one is failing miserably.
When party politicians declare that it would be better to talk about something else while Germany continues to miss its own climate goals, that actually means: We have given up these goals, only the others, the political opponent, want to hold onto them.
We don't have anything clever about the paths.
Just stop talking about the goals!
Nature does not negotiate
Neither the climate crisis nor Covid-19 will go away if they are declared not that bad or less relevant for political reasons.
The people are still dying, soon possibly again in even greater, growing numbers.
And the climate catastrophe continues, even if the FDP, AfD and CSU prefer to talk about something else.
Nature does not negotiate.
Anyone who tries to ignore them will be severely punished.
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