The struggle will only get harder

Night along northbound tracks. Less than three weeks and all this roaming will be substituted by long silent days of writing and spring. For the moment though I am still on yet another X2000 service, heading up to Stockholm to join a planned mass protest against Lex Orwell.

“The struggle will only get harder”, not an encouraging thought but probably true as we look ahead over the coming decades. While securing environmental sustainability and climate stability may be our foremost duties from a survivalist point of view, the preservation of democracy has turned out to be a far more urgent task than we had reason to believe only ten years ago. The West has to be reignited if it is to radiate the growing authoritarian darkness, both here at home and abroad. One cannot underestimate the “pull-factor” of freedom. I believe that if democracy is ever to become universal, our example will be crucial in the process. Thus, there is no room for negligence when it comes to the protection of privacy, the integration of ethnical minorities or our commitment to free trade and solidarity with the wider world.