Life is like a plane taking off down a runway. As you get older, there's more runway behind you than in front of you. It's inescapable. You see it when celebrities you admire, who are your own age, die. Like David Bowie or Johan Cruyff.
When you see a picture of Harald Schmidt and he looks old, but happy -- and when you're writing about it you pause because you can't remember the name of his funny partner.
There's not so much time left. That's so true.
What's also true is the great song that The Supremes sang in the sixties. You can't hurry love. It's a game of give and take, somehow between the two forces, life happens. And then you take off for the skies.
Greece is becoming a “human skip” into which the EU is happy to dump countless refugees. It is like a giant Gaza Strip, teeming with people who want to move, but are not allowed to. And what is the cause of Greece’s problems? German policy over which the Greeks and the rest of the EU have no influence.
Germany wants the rest of the EU to take it's “fair share” of what many EU countries see as Germany’s migrants. Germany invited them in, so many European countries are saying: “You deal with them, they’re your problem.” This division is particularly stark between the central European, former communist countries and Germany.
Immigrants, by definition, compete with the poorest local people in the job market, in the housing market and for access to health and schools. This is a fact. Economists tend to miss the central point. While the economy might get workers, society gets people.
But for the relatively wealthy, immigration is a boon. There are more taxi drivers, more cleaners, more shop assistants, more nannies; in short, the service economy, the one that services the relative wealthy, booms. The relatively wealthy don’t have to worry about immigrants pushing up rents because the immigrants can’t afford to live in posh areas, so they compete for housing not with the relatively wealthy, but with the relatively poor.
Immigration is a class issue, and the richer you are, the greater the luxury you have to pontificate about immigration because either you are not affected; or if you are, you are affected positively. It is completely unclear how the experiment will end that the German chancellor has forced upon the European Continent.
I thought I was retired. I thought retired people were bored. I recall being bored for half an hour once, in (I think) 1967. Whatever the opposite of bored is, I am. Bootstrap isn't going to help with that.
Roll with the changes!
