Good Bye
17. Apr 2026,
So simple as this short word seems — its impact is extreme. Anyone who wants to say goodbye to someone — or has to — is closer to tears than to laughter. A person dear to your heart is setting off on a journey. That's a real cut into the comfortable routine of everyday life.
This year, some people I love dearly have said goodbye for good.
They didn't do so willingly, and certainly not with any joy.
No, their lives were simply and plainly finished, as the cycle of life dictates.
That's the way of time. And of dying.
"She parted from me." reads almost Shakespearean, yet it's merely a short sentence that arrives with salty tears and quiet hope.
A farewell before a journey is, in principle, a rather heartening thing.
After all, we're all travellers, somehow.
And when someone stands at the gate or on the platform, ready to discover this very world — what a joy.
Yet even here, people are left behind in the familiar world, reluctant to let the traveller go.
Parents watch their children set out, building their own families and lives — independently.
The advice, the support is less in demand. The time shared grows rare and rarer.
"They've said goodbye to their humanity." Ouch. These are the moments that surface sour, toxic, and incomprehensible. When a tendency toward violence, hatred, and incitement takes hold — one that seems to face little resistance — the times grow dark. And bitter. We've seen this before in the brief history of humankind.
And, how was it back then, eighty years ago?
Hey, why don't we simply flip the ugly side of human nature on its head? Let's say goodbye to tendencies like these.
Let's send all these strange ideas to board the train to Nowheresville. Thoughts and attitudes laced with fascist ingredients, with hatred toward minorities, with the urge to dominate women and children, with narcissistic behaviour.
OK, I'm sliding back into my hippie-esque dreams again.
And I love it.
Because right now, today, what we citizens, friends, neighbours, and family need is exactly this one thing — to say: "No, we do not accept that kind of behaviour."
So much begins with language, with rhetoric — how we ourselves develop mentally, and how our children do. And that very rhetoric is growing increasingly wild, defamatory, and contemptuous toward those who think differently, live differently, and act differently.
In German and in English.
Good grief.
Yet the hopeful signs are there, even in these times of violence. When people organize, come together, support one another, and show their resistance peacefully in the streets — hope marches right along with them. More than that. The protests are making a difference.
It's becoming more of a pleasure again to take in the news. Because heads of state in Spain, in Canada, and elsewhere are showing that resistance guided by reason can make quite a striking impact.
Saying goodbye to inhumanity is the welcome of a world worth living in.
Doable, wouldn't you say?
