Paradise lost, the videos we need

So, with confusion in my head and a smile on my lips, here I sit again, 45 minutes away from what many would define as paradise. So did a certain german world traveller, who, after 10 years on the road and the planes and the ships, settled down on Olango Island. He also voluntarily died there.

His vinyl collection includes Wolfgang Ambros ("irgendwaunn bleib i daun durt") and Ludwig Hirsch, Die Schmetterlinge and other stuff from that period. Strangely enough also two plates with "Fideler Volksmusik" (Austrian/Bavarian marching bands playing marches). There´s something about that combination that makes sense, but too much of it doesn´t.

Hundreds of books line the walls where the guy known as Raimund spent the latter part of his life, Time Life collections, Brehms Tierleben (ironically, eaten by ants), a DDR tourist guide from 1990 (they included the information that, as the wall had just fallen, all the information regarding entrance to the DDR was no longer valid, open borders and all).

All this in the context of a yacht shipyard, which produced three yachts, of which two and a half were sold, and two still sit in that shed by the mangroves. Ants, bees, hornets, crabs, termites, all incessantly (and successfully) try to invade the human dwellings, and again I asked myself: Why try to preserve nature when nature will try to eat you with guarantee?

The final thought on that place on the island that was one mans dream, a dream I once shared as a boy: No more. Isolation in that sense is not at all what I want to do with my life, not even eventually when retiring. And Europe is the country where I belong, where I can do stuff that is actually useful to some extent.

To videos and their content:
What we don´t need are more images that tell you how lucky you are to be at the top of the food chain. We don´t need more videos of the fishermen, their ramshackle houses, and the mansions of the landowners right next to them, we all know these images, we know them by heart. We don´t need more pictures of children in torn and dirty clothes begging for money on the street: We know all that, we know.

The elites here in the RP, that see these images every day, don´t care a bit more for their country because of them (A politician here in Cebu had a great idea for alieviating poverty: He actually put up christmas lights in the slums, so the people don´t feel so poor). And the people in Europe are powerless to change anything, clueless about the sort of change they could effect, and are simply paralised in their ikea chairs, without any possibility for action.

But there are possibilities, my friends, there will always be. Escape to paradise is simply not one of them, confrontation with reality is the only prerequisite for all the others.