What do we really want from politics and politicians? Most of us think about having a reasonable cost of living that we can have from our jobs, and later from our pensions?
Money should be sufficient for the basics, a warm safe home for us and our family, sufficient food, professional healthcare, excellent education opportunities, and later honestly reliable care of the elderly. Money should also be available for holidays and hobbies.
We know that all of these matters depend mainly on our political leadership, with some 30% to 50% depending, at least, on our own efforts to have a reasonable or good job. If we use our time wisely and if we have good politicians, then our standard of living should quietly improve as we get older.
But most of us only consider our own home-grown politicians… we seldom think about how the leaders of other countries can affect us; and if you have never considered them as a threat then you had better be prepared for some bad news. We are now surrounded by some of the world’s worse leaders since Hitler took over the German Reich!
The question “Will they never learn?” is something that applies to a great number of our political leaders in the West and in the East.
In Germany and France, the two largest countries in the EU, we have two unpopular leaders – Scholz is too unsure to deliver weapons to crush Putin’s army in Ukraine, he, like Merkel, put selling Mercedes ahead of saving European democracy, and Macron wants to sell Louis Vuitton and Dior to China while he happily dumps Taiwan!
Trump… most readers will agree that this man is a huge risk to our democracy as evidenced by his support for despots and war criminals like Putin and Kim Jong-un! Biden has turned out to be a stronger leader, but any 80-year-old man should perhaps turn his thoughts elsewhere to other matters before it is too late…
The we have the Little Britain’s millionaire leader who tries to convince himself that living outside the EU is paradise, thoughts shared by the Italian lady who came to power aided by a delinquent Prime Minister who mixed up his own business with the country’s money just like Trump did.
… and in China we discover a man who thinks himself to be equally immortal, and is spreading the country’s money to parts of the rest of the world in return for delivering raw materials to China while worshiping him at his feet.
Finally, we have the Turks, the Saudis, the Iranians, the Indians, and a few other big countries that want to be friends to the West and to despots elsewhere…
It takes a lot of imagination to believe that we are immune to the influence of these men, (yes men, madmen!) whose actions have caused huge increases in the prices of food and fossil fuels. Nobody in Finland, or in other small country, can have much impact of what these men do next. We can only hope or dream that one day these people will be replaced by more sensible folk but waiting for that to happen may take decades… and meanwhile ice is melting faster than ever before, and many countries and big cities will be totally destroyed by floods. That will be something than many of you and your children will witness with the passing of a few decades.
