Post photo: Hourglass | © Shutterstock
Without any ifs or buts, we Germans have a full-blown time problem and have had it for quite a while. Even if one or the other scientist assures me that time actually does not exist, it has proven to be the case, at least for us humans, that we use the time we create as sensibly as possible. I also include the speed, which at least for some people still results from the fact that you put a certain distance covered in relation to the time spent on it - and this has also proven to be a tried and tested means of shaping one's own life and the environment .
And both, time and speed, have gotten terribly mixed up here in Germany. I suspect this has something to do with the year 1945, when the rest of the world suddenly told us that 1 German years are actually only 000 years. And to this day we have probably not really recovered from this shock; our inner clocks are still completely confused today. And to complicate things even more, we've also added two different times to our own time zone: summer time and winter time. That's why it makes sense to work with the Zulu tense in more difficult cases and situations. And anyone who has ever seen an episode of Star Trek also knows the "Stardate" system.
Irrespective of these two facts, most of us are now so confused that in Heilbronn it takes a good 200 years to pave 100 meters of Turmstraße and we calculate it in eternities for somewhat larger projects, e.g. B. Berlin Airport. In order to get this to work, however, a single eternity alone is no longer sufficient for a long time, such as for example to hold democratic elections in Berlin halfway correctly. It is similar with the union with its Christian values, which will probably only be found in another eternity.
Even Telekom Deutschland has now adapted to this understanding of time and speed, and so we no longer have to be surprised about certain things. So get z. B. Customers with “unlimited” or even “unlimited” contracts add 500 MB every month, which actually makes me happy every month and gives me hope, because I can’t even roughly approach infinity due to the lack of wireless connections, let alone can then use the 500 free MB, will soon be upgraded to twice unlimited data consumption by Telekom — with a nice accompanying letter, I would now even run the risk of paying extra for this service. What does bother me a bit, however, are the regular — especially when they startle me from a deep sleep — warning messages that tell me that my data volume will soon be used up and I will need another, probably “unlimited, infinitely limitless, absolutely unconsumable" data package should also be booked.
That's why we no longer have to be surprised that our national soccer team recently traveled back to the year before 1945, or that the German nation is talking shop about armbands again. The current Pope of German football, Gianni Infantino has published the appropriate motto for the year, which was probably adopted by the German Football Association, at least they did not contradict: "Democracy bad, dictatorship good!"
And so many Germans are now making a pilgrimage to Qatar to celebrate the pre-democratic era and its supposed advantages, such as exploitation, oppression, murder and manslaughter. Once again, as with the "Putin Festival" in 2018 and soon with the Saudi Arabian mullahs. And if North Korea has also provided good hotels and restaurants by then, our national team will also play there, and I'm pretty sure that the armband problem will have been completely resolved by then - after all, we Germans can build on thousands of years of experience.
The Federal Minister of the Interior and Homeland, who can probably be found wherever there are good restaurants and helicopter flights, gave us a tip on this, because she traditionally wore an armband, which delighted even an Infantino, who immediately recognized that one Germans with armbands only need a brown shirt to show up in style at such celebrations.
And so maybe now is the time for us all to come to terms with the fact that the clocks are ticking the same for all of us and that we are all now living in the 21st century, whether we like it or not.
This could well lead to us taking time, namely our time and the resulting appointments, really seriously again and actually getting a grip on it. One advantage would be that we would no longer have to juggle with infinities outside of mathematics and that eternity would finally have something religious again.
All of us, even the die-hards, would have arrived in reality - in the here and now - and we could face the real challenges of this world together.
Let's start with punctual meetings, lectures or even trains! You will be amazed at how quickly the world is changing for the better — a real turning point!
