Our author walks through the week with a farmer, a punk cow, and thoughts about October 7th. The only thing missing is a big green vehicle.
Citizens are impressed: farmers protest in Berlin with their tractors because they have a lot of time Photo: Christoph Soeder/dpa
I was recently in the stable with cattle farmer Matze Everinghoff in beautiful Emsland. I lost my professional distance in the first five minutes. Cows are so adorable that the word “cute” escapes you without you being able to do anything about it. The punky tuft of hair between the ears, the bulging eyes with long eyelashes, the soft nose. And when it came to the calves, I had to ask the farmer to stop his sermon because I couldn't hear him anymore.
Farmer Matze understands these feelings perfectly. Then he introduced me to his favorite cow, Annie, and her three sisters.
So it took a while until we finally got to the tractor he always uses for blocking, of course also this week. When you stand next to the two-meter-high tires, you immediately understand why the farmers' protests are so powerful. If nurses had tractors, they would probably earn twice as much.
In any case, Farmer Matze said a phrase that I remember: “How can you be so stupid as to announce cuts in the winter when all farmers have time?” One explanation could be that members of the federal government think they are cows. When you see them, everyone thinks “cute” and can't concentrate on the content anymore. Or they are actually a little stupid.
Another possibility would be that Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck doesn't know as much about “milking chickens, pigs and cows” as his enemy Annalena Baerbock once claimed during the election campaign. He may know more about things like international law than about agriculture and the seasons.
In any case, Baerbock does not have a tractor and that is why peace does not come. In fact, the Foreign Minister wanted to speak in Djibouti about the security of the shipping routes in the Red Sea. Houthi rebels in Yemen are attacking merchant ships that are part of an imaginary alliance with Israel. However, Baerbock's important mission failed this week because they forgot to get the government plane a flyover permit for Eritrea. This would not have happened with a tractor.
If I had a tractor, I could have driven to a new restaurant south of the Jordanian capital, Amman, this week, unloaded Annie and her sisters, and given them some pep talks to help them digest their food. The snack bar is called “7. October”, a date that represents the worst mass murder of Jews after the Holocaust.
People like UN Secretary-General António Guterres and other Hamas supporters naturally have fundamental doubts about whether “7. October” is actually a vile message of hate. Could it be that October 7th means any date or the owner's wedding anniversary? Or Vladimir Putin's birthday? And assuming it is indeed a hate message, shouldn't it be seen in context?
No you should not. What would be the reaction if a restaurant called “Butscha 458” opened in Berlin, after the place where 458 Ukrainian bodies were found after the withdrawal of Russian troops, 419 of them with signs of torture? It is not only about the number of victims, but also about the bestiality of their murder.
In view of the numerous crises and wars, it is not surprising that more and more people in Germany are withdrawing into their private lives and that less than 40 percent are no longer regularly informed about world events. At least in this sense, there were other positive points this week in the form of demonstrations against the AfD. However, there was one thing I was missing from these protests: tractors!