Politics

The birth rate is falling. Everyone talks about money and housing. That is true. Still, it does not get to the core. The Core Is Fear People are not having children because they can no longer imagine the future. Because they believe they must be perfect to be parents. Because one mistake today is enough to be disqualified. That is how it feels. It suffocates. What I have learned as a person of faith: God forgives. God even wants us to make mistakes, so that we learn from them. That is not a weakness. That is the ground on which a person can live at all. ...

Herbert Kickl is calling for a “healthy slap” for children. The adjective is a rhetorical trick. It is meant to turn violence into medicine. As if there were a sick slap and a healthy one. As if the boundary between discipline and abuse were a matter of dosage. It is not. Children can never help it. They do what parents, surroundings, and culture have taught them. Every “difficult” behaviour in a child is a message about the system in which it lives. ...

At the Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, an older gentleman sat quietly upright and ate his burrata. Shots. Panic. He stayed seated. Bad back, he said afterward. New tuxedo. Dirty floor. That is cool. It is also an image for something larger. “Thousands from the journalistic and political elite of the country have now experienced what countless other Americans have had to live through in their schools, offices, shopping centres, and churches.” ...

This manifesto grew out of a conversation about a music box. Someone walks through Feldkirch at medium volume and wonders whether that is a good idea. From that question came three articles and one insight: Austria does not have a volume problem. It has a permission problem. I. The Diagnosis France has written into its constitution that resistance to oppression is a fundamental right. Austria has written into its culture that one should not stand out. ...

In France, resistance is not a disruptive factor. It is a civic duty. This attitude is not a whim, not a national cliché, not a matter of temperament — it is the result of a history that has consistently repeated itself over centuries. Whoever wants to understand why millions of French people take to the streets for weeks over a pension reform, while in Austria a letter to the editor is at best what gets written, must know this history. ...

Follow-up to: “Rebellion as Civic Duty: What Austria Can Learn from France” The first article was about the streets — about the difference between a culture that understands protest as a civic duty and one that perceives it as a disturbance. But rebellion does not only take place on the streets. It takes place — perhaps even first — in the media. Or not at all. The question is not only: who takes to the streets? But: who tells the story? Who decides what the public learns? And who pays for it? ...