We have an old friend named Rob who is American. Rob lives in the Midwest and looks like he could throw a lasso at a year-old mare with his right hand while rescuing a calf from a poacher’s trap with his left. But when he hears the word adventure, Rob doesn’t think of rodeo. But driving a car, “the German way”.
It works like this: turn off the air conditioner, lower the windows, let your elbows hang out. My husband showed him this years ago, somewhere in the Illinois cornfields. We know that from the past, when in Germany only company bosses drove around in air-conditioned cars and everyone else cranked the cranks in the heat. Our American friends have lived in a temperate world since they were children. Pretty comfortable. Pretty boring.
Our environment
But as the world around us becomes an increasingly unsafe place, the half-life of jobs and relationships decreases, and grandma’s house loses value, we succumb to a security cult that makes some surveillance states look old. We regulate offices to the same temperature from January to July and wear bicycle helmets ourselves on field, forest and meadow tours. We don’t even know how to make a trip into the blue anymore – the navigation system constantly wants to know where to go.
People with children are badly infected by the obsession with security, an entire industry lives from it: protective grilles for the stove, mobile phone tracking systems for the way to school, children’s full-body suits against UV radiation. No joke:
According to a recent survey, 43 percent of all mothers and fathers consider these sausage skins indispensable. Not on a trip to Australia, but in the outdoor pool in Flensburg. I already feel like a cross between a rebel and a bad mother when I let my children splash around half-naked on the North Sea beach. So that you can feel how it feels: sand on your skin , sun on your shoulders.
So that we understand each other correctly: Of course I am not against everything that makes our lives safer or healthier. My kids wear roller skate knee pads and high SPF sunscreen, I enjoy smoke-free bars. But a very small dose of carefreeness, that’s what I sometimes wish for. Especially in summer. Car window down without my inner parent-ego immediately yelling: “Child, you’re getting a train!” Strolling back to the hotel through some old town in the south at four in the morning, although the neighbor on the plane talked verbosely about her last pickpocket. Or let a bottle of wine circulate on the Elbe beach while the sun rises over the harbor cranes. Incidentally, Rob thinks the thing about the wine on the banks of the Elbe is particularly cool. That would be illegal in the US, and the beaches close at 10 p.m. If another one then approaches, a security guard with a flashlight will fend him off.
By the way: Everything is relative. While Germans wonder about anxious Americans, Spaniards shake their heads at Germans. A few years ago, when I grabbed the seat belt in a friend’s car in Seville, I got an offended look: “Don’t you trust me?” I buckled up anyway. But with the window down.
