Good Night and Good Luck
The more concrete the incident the more intense is the impact, no? If all people ask you to be aware and take care of a matter, but you just deny that it is relevant at all or declare the irrelevance of your concerns, the higher you fall when it turns out that you were wrong, I’m mean really wrong. Didn’t my mother tell me that mademoiselle will break my heart, and I didn’t believe a word? Yes, she actually did. Didn’t Mother Merkel tell us, we shouldn’t worry a thing… you know the rest of this ridiculously cynical story.
We, some of the 60 people writing here, gathered earlier this evening. Since I had to catch my flight to London I was the first one to come and to leave (first time Easy Jet and other than usual I was there way too early fearing some cheap airline escapades which actually didn’t occur at all, however, the narrowness of the seating as I see now is really insane). Anyway. Funtime. We talked about so many things in such a short time. Also, briefly about the fact that the worriless time of the internet is over. Like in the movie Awakenings where neurologically damaged patients regained consciousness for a short time due to the mercy of an overdosed medicine feed by a dedicated doctor, but then fell again into the coma of unconsciousness all of a sudden. And then, everything seemed like a dream that wasn’t real. This is how the internet feels now to me. There is in fact no freedom anymore. Any tenderness is under threat because you don’t know what the predator is up for and, even worse, who is sitting on the other side of the screen.
But all this started actually offline, and being airborne on my way to London right now, I still wonder why this happened to my dearest friend from Istanbul whom I know since we’re three years old. It must have been 1985 when he did his first trip ever abroad because he wanted to upgrade his English with a two weeks course in Cambridge. He, Istanbul born, Armenian origin, is literally the most peaceful, caring and shy person I know. He would spend nights in his workshop and built small models of old houses or ancient Christian churches that are under the threat to disappear underneath one of the many infrastructure projects in modern Anatolia. When he entered British soil, the border police asked him right away into a room where they interrogated him for about eight hours. Travelling abroad for the first time, he was so traumatized by this experience that he once permitted even refused to enter Great Britain, and returned right away to Istanbul. His English didn’t improve much since then I found out this summer.
People can overcome their trauma to a certain extend I guess, which he did. Collective traumas are different I think. They’re like cancer, once it starts, hard to control. In the contrary it takes control over everything else. I think this is the case now: The great trauma of 9/11 seems to be way out of control, and what ever was there in that stupid London data base that captured my friend without any cause, is nothing against what might overcome us, because the net is the perfect host for the virus of cancer. I still can’t grasp what’s happening. Mother net has a chronic disease that won’t heal, and mother Merkel thinks kids like us like good night stories. Good night, we’re landing.
