Activists of the “Last Generation” obstruct traffic
Image: dpa
There are no signs that the climate protests could amount to terror. But a few good reasons to take seriously the anger and desperation of the younger generation.
Ethere is great anger these days; one feels a relentlessness against young activists – and if the Bavarian Prime Minister demands harsher penalties, imprisonment and preventive arrest; when the head of the CSU state group in the Bundestag speaks of “climate chaos” and warns of a new form of terrorism; even if the interior minister and the federal chancellor promise more consistent action and the justice minister threatens to tighten criminal law; when finally Markus Lanz, the somnambulist of the Second German Television, slaps a young woman from the “last generation” for her lack of confidence, which he only insinuates, as if she had skipped school, then one wonders why all of them are so evil: what have these young people done to them?
They smeared food on famous paintings, which, even though the art was protected behind glass, clearly constitutes damage to property. For months they have been blocking the freeway entrances in Berlin in particular – although when asked whether the cyclist who had been run over and died as a result of the accident could have been saved if a fire brigade vehicle had not been stopped by one of these blockades, it probably never was will give a definite answer.