Originally posted in the Sydenham Town Forum, 30 June, 2013
Last week’s uncharacteristic radio silence was thanks to cycling round Normandy. With my rusting French revived, I came across an interesting article in Le Monde on the way back, dealing with a report into the sorts of people who in 2010 gave German this new ‘word of the year’, and is now in official dictionaries. I know virtually no German, so I’ll have to go via the French to give the literal meaning in English as “angry citizens”, but on reading the article, it becomes clear the cultural meaning is NIMBY. For these
are not the young of the various Occupy movements and protesters in Turkey, Egypt or Brazil, but “they are for the main part people without children, working part time, with good school backgrounds, teachers and above all, those approaching retirement and the retired … More than a half say they are non religious, and a large majority say they don’t think Germany is a real democracy”
So – what to they do? Well, stop the redevelopment of the area round a station in Stuttgart, limit night flights in Frankfurt, and a new runway at Munich, stop proposed long term storage for nuclear waste by chaining themselves to railway lines, stop the electrification of the Munich-Zurich train line, get in the way of the high tension cables needed to bring electricity from wind farms in the north to the south, even get in the way of creating a national park in the north of the Black Forest.
Seems to me, these are just Germany’s Baby Boomer “usual suspects”, with too much time on their hands, and used to being able to get their own way, and for whom a real democracy is a system which delivers whatever they want.
