I rarely write about one particular person.
But her.
If it were just her own husband who was told every fourth day that NOW the relationship was in crisis again, and that he had better prick up his ears and pull himself together, I would leave it alone. Everyone has the right to burn themselves and their relationships at both ends. That is the freedom, and the responsibility, we live under here at home, and I don't meddle in other people's bedrooms.
But it isn't her husband.
It is us.
All of us.
And it doesn't stop.
Corona. Energy. Inflation. The Russians. The climate. The gas. The rationing boxes. The hackers. Greenland. The drones. Trump. Agriculture. Immigration. Artificial Intelligence. And now the alliance - “as serious as it can almost get”. Notice the little “almost”. That is the scale running out.
When EVERYTHING is the most serious EVER, then nothing is, and it isn't the citizens who decided that. It is the sender who has used the word up.
Is there really no one in there who can tap her on the shoulder and remind her of the story of the boy who cried wolf?
Because the fable, by the way, is not about the boy. It is about the village. About the grown-ups who ran up the hill the first time, and the second time, and who the third time stayed sitting at the table. Not because they had become stupid. Because they had become tired. The boy didn't lie about wolves existing. He just wore the word out until it could not carry anything at all any more.
And then the wolf came.
That is where I get serious. Because it is not unthinkable that one day something will actually be standing on the other side of the fence that is as serious as it can get. And then we will have a prime minister whose voice we long ago learned to turn down, because it has sounded hysterical, insisting on the most serious, every single time.
CRISIS IS NOT A DIRECTION.
It is a place name for where we do NOT want to be.
And you simply CANNOT LEAD a people to a place you have only described as the opposite of something.
"Where are we going?"
"I HAVE NO IDEA, but we have to get AWAY from THAT!!!"
Ok... Right. 😅🤷♂️
How about pointing to what works. What we want. The place where it ends well, and where the future looks like something you would want to go out and meet. Together.
Is that too much to ask - of a LEADER?
The one who can only point at the wolf has never told us - and is never going to tell us - where we are going.
Come on, Mette.
Put your Big Boy Pants on.
