The new year is only one day old, so I can still wish for something for 2022: normality! I would never have dreamed that I would wish for them so dearly.
“Normal” – doesn’t that generally mean boring, dull, average? If one color were normal, it would be beige. There is nothing surprising, unique or sparkling about it. According to the lexicon, what “the general opinion imagines to be the usual, correct” is normal.
But after two years in the state of emergency corona, many do not long for surprises. We have seen enough of that since the beginning of the pandemic. Bad surprises. Many people want back what was once normal.
So the right thing.
It would be normal if you didn’t have to pay a fine for your savings in the bank, but instead received interest.
It would be normal if you didn’t have to pay half of your net income for rent, but only a quarter.
It would be normal if you didn’t have to take out a loan before refueling because the fuel is so expensive.
It would be normal for emergency doctors, paramedics, firefighters and police officers not to be threatened, spat at or beaten while on duty.
It would be normal to travel again wherever you wanted and with whom you wanted.
It would be normal to call a tradesman again who simply had time – and not in three months.
It would be normal for companies to produce as much as they can sell.
It would be normal for the children to play together again and learn without a mask.
It would be normal for the young people (or I, too) to be able to dance until seven in the morning in the disco.
It would be normal to make an appointment with the specialist for next week and not for next summer.
That’s why for me normal the new is great!
It is also normal that the traffic light government, just three weeks in office, will soon have to show much more than mere corona crisis management.
Then a Karl Lauterbach will also become less important, as unimportant as the Minister of Health used to be. (Do you remember Daniel Bahr or Andrea Fischer?)
And then we will have to talk about money – the uncertain future of pensions, the high inflation that is galloping through the country, and housing construction, which is supposed to help stop the rental price explosion not only in the big cities – and about financing the enormous care costs, who will make millions of Germans poor.
I wish you, me, all of us a normal year 2022!
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