"One hell of a photograph"
A little while ago, I decided to change the brand of toothpaste I was using. I had used the old brand for ages, but its price kept going up. At some stage, they decided to shrink the size of the tube instead of increasing the price (which obviously was just another price increase). One of the reasons why I had stuck with that particular brand was the fact that I dreaded the idea of picking another one: each brand has dozens of variations of toothpaste. How do you pick something?
Whenever I go back to Germany, I'm reminded how insane some aspects of the US actually are. At times, I've run out of toothpaste in Germany. At a drugstore or supermarket, I always ended up being confused about having so few choices -- until I realized that you don't actually need 50+ different types of toothpaste to choose from (50 is probably less than what my supermarket here carries: there are at least five brands, and many of them have over a dozen variations each).
Also, if memory serves me well, having too many options to choose from vastly increases people's unhappiness. This turned out much too easy to find: "Research shows that if you’re surrounded by an abundance of options, you typically end up less satisfied with your final decision than if you’d been given fewer options in the first place."
At the supermarket the other day, I was unable to remember which specific type of some other brand I had bought before. So I went with the cheapest option. As far as I can tell, it works perfectly well, and it does all the things it's supposed to be doing.
What I hadn't seen, though, was something that has kept me amused for days now. On the tube, it says "Great Regular Flavor". This is incredible, isn't it? To begin with, if you buy the cheapest option of this well-known brand, there's no official flavour ("Mint" or "Spearmint" or whatever else). It's just "regular" (which, as it turns out, is mint after all).
But while it's just "regular" flavour, it's not any "regular" flavour. It's "great regular" flavour. It is as if they couldn't help themselves: while they don't want all those cheapskates like yours truly to buy the cheapest option (which tastes just as good as the options that cost a solid $2 more), they also want to make sure that said cheapskates know they made a "great" choice, their cheapskateness notwithstanding.
By chance, I came across this video which has 172m views. It's a video promoting tourism for the area. You can watch it easily: its actors speak English (and it features Japanese subtitles). How or why this is promoting tourism escapes me (I write this as someone who enjoys watching Godzilla movies).
Here I am, writing about toothpaste and tourist while the world is on fire (in some locations literally so). I feel like I'm whistling in a dark basement to keep my own spirit alive.
Over the course of the past weeks, the thought has lodged in my head that I just witnessed how something monumental irreparably broke. What exactly that "something" is I don't know.
All indicators are flashing that we're living through a vast crisis, which for the most part is either ignored or maintained solely for political purposes. I probably don't have to tell you about climate change. We all know what needs to be done, and nothing is being done. That train has now left the station.
Every once in a while, a picture pops us that illustrates the cruelty that's forming such a large part of our crisis (see Adam Serwer's The Cruelty Is The Point). Poland's far-right government enacted a state of emergency at its eastern border so that there are no new pictures of migrants stranded between Polish and Belarussian soldiers. The US has not done the same, which just resulted in one of the most horrific photographs I've seen in a while. You might have seen it (if not, now you have); I'm presenting it here with commentary by John Edwin Mason (from his Twitter feed).
I don't know what to do with any of this.
My only hope is that starting out with basic decency at my own personal level somehow percolates out into the world. My hope also is that speaking up will do the same (even as many others decide to remain silent).
It might or it might not.
If you have any ideas how to deal with this all, feel free to let me know.
As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg