Unscene Berlin

Nuit Debout. Wikimedia Commons photo Maybe it's because I smile a lot, but Germans seem to enjoy telling me, with near-zealous amounts of fatalism, that the world is going down in flames. And if you're in Australia  right now then yeah, that must seem pretty true. They must figure that I am oblivious to all of the latest apocalyptic news flashes - but nah, that's far from true. It's just that I look at the world with both eyes open: the one that sees the negative shit that is happening out there and  the one that sees humanity's equal and opposite reactions to it. Yes, I'm talking about activism. Again. The media pretty much always leaves activism out of the picture. It speaks about the concerns of the wealthiest 1 percent almost exclusively. Therefore, it sees everything with one eye closed, or one eye 99% closed at the very least. As everyone looks back on the past year and  the past decade, that tendency will surely be amplified.  So join me, if...

This past Friday, I went to a demo and then a party . At the demo, there were 50,000 people wearing different clothes, waving different signs, playing different kinds of music, making different statements and taking different actions. All of them were sharing the same space, the same venue, because they shared a common cause: saving the environment before it's too late. At the party I went to later, I saw hundreds of people wearing different clothes, playing different music, making different statements, performing different sets and dancing different ways.  Everyone I talked to there agreed the party was largely excellent, even if it wasn't 100% tailored to their personal preferences at all times. But when I turned the conversation the demo, their responses were roughly the same. "Oh, I would have gone except I didn't like the name,  catch phrase or the symbolism," "Oh, I don't think I'd like it, don't agree with a statement that a pers...