I had Covid

Yes, I had a confirmed Covid infection to cap off this lousy year. It is unclear where I had contracted it and no, I had really followed the rules. Nevertheless one can get infected and that is why this disease and the pandemic as a whole is so treacherous. I found some of the comments from friends ("What kind of things you do!") a bit strange - as if the illness was my own fault. This encourages stigmatization and can lead to people hiding their infection out of fear.

Of course, there are the notorious deniers who are more likely to get sick - but the vast majority of people catch it unknowingly and through no fault of their own! My course was fortunately relatively mild and yet the short fever was fierce, the limited loss of smell and taste was stressful and I am today after 4 weeks still not in top form again. But now this damn year 2020 is finally history and I wish us all eagerly as never a better new year!

2021 will remain stormy and yet I personally hope to at least finish my book. In December I had planned to contact publishers and agents with an exposé, but due to illness this is now my January task. As always, here is a small reading sample that focuses on the core of my work as never before - the Collapse of the Old Order, the collapse as a sense of time of our Millennial generation:

The fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, Brexit and Trump - under the pressure of digital globalization, the old order is collapsing at a rapid pace, and the Covid pandemic is dramatically accelerating this decay. Failing states and civil wars, corruption and natural disasters, every day our world is turning more and more upside down.

We are stuck in a postmodern crisis of singulation - the individual is everything, society nothing! For decades, the new-liberal creed has been demolishing any collective stronghold, leaving billions of people worldwide in existential distress. Despite the explosive global question of security and community, market fundamentalism continues unaffected to shatter the last institutions of the Old Order.

From their wreckage the ghosts of the past crawl everywhere, luring with false promises and selling their nostalgia dearly to the most suffering. Their right-wing folk tales conjure up the good old days of nations and borders - a time that's up long ago. An epoch whose demise we all feel every day.

Now even Angela Merkel, the pilot is leaving the ship; without our Millennial chancellor, my unsettled generation is only threatened with more chaos. Born as the last ones into a still partly sound order, we have been in free fall since our youth. We long for stability and clarity, for shelter in the Bio-Biedermeier, and look melancholically at the abandoned places and ruins of the past. The eternal chancellor was our last certainty, the bulwark against the world of yesterday. Everyone suspects: Here in Germany, too, the way is now open for a shift to the right.

All of a sudden a new generation, a new hope is entering the political world stage. The Globals are the first to grow up in chaos and no longer know any order. Marked by Trumpism and the pandemic, their future existentially threatened, they organize themselves into structures of solidarity and assume collective responsibility - for themselves and the entire globe.

From Chile to Hong Kong, from Sudan to Sweden, the youngest movement the world has ever seen is rising up. To survive, they are the first that must now find global answers - climate justice and anti-racism, global democracy and political freedom. As 'Fridays For Future' and 'Black Lives Matter', as 'March For Our Lives' and various democracy movements, they are fighting as passionately as hardly any of us Millennials dared. United behind the science, the Globals are the embers of the next enlightenment, the fire of transformation. They have nothing to lose, only the future to gain.

A frontier decade has begun. The old has not yet entirely perished and the new is literally still in its infancy - this decade will be crucial to the survival of human civilization. Under the pandemic shockwaves, past and future will brutally collide: fundamental conflicts, continued collapsing and accelerated chaos. And in the midst of it all, we Millennials who actually just want our peace of mind. 

The 20s become our greatest imposition. First the unprecedented Covid restrictions and finally the all-decisive climate crisis - also in future we should get used to putting our egos, our private happiness aside for the common good. If postmodern singulation does not end, then every single one of us will end. We have to leave our comfort zone permanently, take sides, and yes even commit ourselves - exactly what we have avoided all our lives. Because peace and security, stability and order can only be found in the collective, in the society, in the future.

Crisis means decision, the clock is ticking! For us Millennials, the time has come to decide - between national and global, between nostalgia and hope, between the world of yesterday and the world of tomorrow. The globals are our second chance.