Columnist Paula Dubbink wouldn’t call herself apathetic, but still she wonders why she isn’t more concerned about what happens in the world. What did happen to the cute idealism of her teenage years, the time when she would save the world?
On Sunday, around ten thousand people walked through Malmö in a long demonstration against the attack on peaceful feminist activists by neo-Nazis the weekend before. If I may believe the pictures and comments on my Facebook Wall, the atmosphere was great: people bonded in a peaceful but resolute way in their strife against Nazism, racism and violence.
But I wasn’t there. I stayed home. Of course I made up some sloppy excuse – thesis writing. But if I really cared about the cause, would a thesis with a faraway deadline have stopped me? I guess not.
Sigh. What has happened to teenage-me that would change the world? Around the age of fifteen, I read the papers as if they were the newest Harry Potter sequel. I hated George Bush with a passion that other girls had for Johnny Depp, saw wind turbines as the solution to all energy problems and counted the days until I would be allowed to vote for the first time. In my ideal future, I would study political science – the study where you’d learn how to become a politician, I imagined – and become Holland’s first female prime minister. Alternatively, I would learn Spanish, go to any country in Latin-America and overthrow some evil dictatorship.
Things didn’t really go that way and probably for the better. As a harsh comment of a political opponent would probably make me burst into tears, I am certainly not made for the political arena. And as I’m glad to come home after a long holiday, I would neither survive living on another continent for the rest of my life. Not to mention that my Spanish is very mediocre.
But sometimes I wonder whether on my trip from naïve idealism to realism I may have passed into slight apathy. Where is my real anger about the situation in Ukraine? About the ongoing atrocities in Syria? About discrimination and hate in a city just around the corner? About the content of the newspaper, in short?
This week, there are local elections in my home country. I hardly care that I can’t vote and hear myself say to friends “that all political parties are the same anyways”.
Wait. Have I become such a typical dissatisfied and disillusioned adult already now? I hope to say that I’m not. So I duly separate my waste, give some money to charity and write my signature under Amnesty petitions. Enough to clear my conscience?
Instead of studying political sciences, I ended up at the department of Religious Studies & Theology. There we study and learn about old stories, even older languages and old-fashioned traditions. Like keeping Lent – the preparation time for Easter – which actually takes place right now. Sounds scarily fundamentalist? It turned out to be actually about a question that everyone should ask themselves every now and then, religious or not: where have you set your priorities?
Well?
1 Comment
Zach
It really is crazy how much we change, not only when we grow older, but also as we move farther away from home. We are not the youngsters we once were.