Unhappy America

Eating Special-K and yoghurt at night. In not so many hours an alarm clock will sound and I will be leaving for Stockholm, this time through Riga with airBaltic. As many times before, Vienna has been a safe haven for me. I remember all those mornings at Wien Westbahnhof, returning with a night train from somewhere in Eastern Europe, the feeling of arriving in a timeless sanctuary, before heading over to Café Sperl for a morning coffee.

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This week, the Economist writes about “unhappy America”. I could feel it first hand this spring in New Jersey: how people were losing their jobs, the deep resentment about politics, and the overall malaise which someone expressed as “the slide is on”.

At the same time, 200 000 people gathering to listen to Barack Obama at Siegessäule in Berlin. And even as Obama occasionally may seem a little too keen on spin and flip-flopping, he clearly sends a message: the time for political idealism is not over. Hopefully, that idealism will be strong enough to convince also the American electorate to not turn the bad times into an international blame game but instead have the wisdom to learn from their own mistakes.

p.s. as I always been sceptical of alternative medicine, the arrest of Radovan Karadžić hiding as a new-age health prophet in Belgrade only adds further strength to my case :-)