H. P. BAXXTER: Life is not meant to be fair

#MerkelStreichelt is trending, as the moderns say. Merkel strokes.

It refers to the incident this week when Angela Merkel took a question from a Palestinian girl during a discussion for teenagers at their school in Rostock entitled ‘Good Life in Germany’.

The young girl’s family had arrived in Rostock from Lebanon four years ago.

Reem (she’s now a worldwide celebrity, in the manner of all things Twitter), told Merkel, “I have goals like anyone else. I want to study like them… it’s very unpleasant to see how others can enjoy life, and I can’t myself.”

Merkel responded by saying she understood, but that “politics is sometimes hard”.

“You’re right in front of me now and you’re an extremely nice person,” she told the girl, “but you also know that in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon there are thousands and thousands of people, and if we were to say ‘You can all come’… we just can’t manage it.”

Reem began sobbing, and that’s when the incident went viral.

Not for the first time, I’m going out on a limb. Merkel was absolutely right. And Reem’s sobbing is the result of the 21st century’s misguided view of life.
We all wish we could enjoy life. Hell, I wish I was born German. But I wasn’t.

Life is unfair. We are told a load of rubbish about how we can ‘be what we want to be’. We cannot. There are rules, there are circumstances beyond our control, there is bad luck and very often there is nothing we can do about it. Tough.

Now I’m all for having a legal framework for refugees. But since when has refugee status been about enjoying life? Or even about improving one’s prospects, as opposed to merely avoiding death, unjust imprisonment, persecution or violence?

Young people’s expectations have now been set so ridiculously high that they cannot distinguish between rights and privileges. Refugee status is, in a very limited set of circumstances, a right. But staying in Germany just because you’ve been there for four years, is not a right. It is a privilege.

Geographical and financial stability is a privilege. Goals are a privilege.

There’s more. We all know the refrain about how each personal story is a tragedy. But politics is made for large numbers, not for personal stories. Germany has welcomed more refugees than any other European country. In the first six months of this year, it has received 450,000 asylum applications.

Last week, the state of Bavaria alone took in 5,000 irregular migrants. They all need to be housed, fed, cared for and treated with due legal process. Their claims to refugee status, for those who seek asylum, need to be examined one by one.

The challenge of our time is large numbers of everything – debts, tonnes of concrete, vehicles, violent deaths and, quite simply, people. When politics comes up against personal stories the whole system seems to break down. Many of the eight billion people on this planet have personal grievances against the framework of rules by which they have to abide. I’m sure we all have goals. But we don’t all have the benefit of media exposure.

The decision to deport Reem’s family has not yet been made. When it is, it should be made according to existing rules, not according to #Empathie for the personal story of one girl. Or according to the degree of worldwide support for yet another internet celebrity.

Life is unfair, and a lot of us fail to reach our goals because we find ourselves shafted by the system. But that’s politics. The alternative is a return to self-contained tribes of half a dozen max. We tried it, and it didn’t work.

NB – It has since been announced that Reem and her family will not be made to leave Germany.