What would my maternal grandmother and my only nephew actually have in common?

As they never met, you might think that the answer is “Not much!” Well, they would have shared the strong believe that there is a higher power and force we can’t control. My nephew, born in 1991 and raised in Berlin, loves to discuss climate change with the same fervor that my maternal grandmother, a devout Catholic born in West Prussia the first year of the 20^th century, used to ask me if I still believed in the Lord the few times I saw her after she moved to Schleswig-Holstein in the 1970s. In both cases, I felt a little uncomfortably and tried to avoid a concrete answer.

Ultimately, and well into the 21^st century, religion is still relevant in the West. This new doctrine of salvation just doesn´t call itself “religion” and their saints might also be as short-lived as the holy Greta Thunberg, the pitiable Swedish girl with Asperger syndrome who, pushed by her ruthless parents, became a goddess for so many mislead young people in the West. As a very human reaction, that’ not really surprising. Even my very pragmatic and areligious father used to say that you have to believe in something: if it’s not Germany, then it’s God or something else, maybe the Deutsche Bank. It just makes your life easier.

Don’t get me wrong! I’m very concerned about the environment and have been recycling my garbage since 1985, when I began to study at Berlin Free University, and try not to waste energy at all or buy goods packaged excessively. I have never had a car and take public transportation as often as possible, anywhere, even at night. But that doesn’t mean that I have to take an obviously deranged teenager seriously, presented to us by biased media as the world´s savior, or accept being called an evil person because I doubt their version of the story. It’s not a coincidence that she was well received by former US-President Barack Obama, the Redeemer! He should actually be remembered as the King of Drones, with an undeserved Peace Nobel Prize in his pocket even before he started his presidency, and another good example of what unconditional support can do to push somebody smart, but unscrupulous. But will little Greta also have a place in history books? We will see! For the moment, she has disappeared from our screens due to the epidemic and hopefully is back in school. A climate-related saying goes: every cloud has a silver lining!