May 9, 2012
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(written on 15 January 2013)
The picture is of two bridges that can get seen from our 26th floor office. The bridges are way east of Amsterdam (I think) but my camera manages to get them so close up that it seems as if I could step out onto them from the office.
But that's not today's news. Not at all.
I watched a German TV program today that I hadn't seen since I was younger. Much, much younger (as in: teenager.) The program is called Aktenzeichen XY Ungelöst, which translates into File Number XY Unsolved. It's a real crime program, produced in cooperation with German police, similar to Crimewatch UK or Opsporing Verzocht, the respective UK and Dutch equivalents. What struck me most tonight was how little Aktenzeichen has changed since I was a kid. The somewhat dry presentation (this is German TV, remember?) was there. The clearly not-media-trained police officers. And the of course also the ten minute video re-enactments of the crimes that they were trying to get solved. And you know what? Those videos were still as scary as they were all those years ago! The best thriller directors and actors must be involved in getting Aktenzeichen on TV. It was excellent! I was a bit disappointed with myself that it had taken me so long to watch Aktenzeichen, or German TV at all for that matter, again. I used to watch so much TV when I was younger, and a large part of the time spent watching that wretched thing was from watching German TV. But English has taken over my life to the point that I even think in English, and German, that beautiful and hugely undervalued language was moved to the backseats in my language brain. That's too bad, and in order to correct that a bit, I wrote a status update on Facebook in German tonight. That felt good. I can still do it.
The other big, nay huge, news this evening was President Obama's announcement that he has no objection to same sex marriage. For this man to make such a statement in a tense election year, well I thought it was amazing and I started applauding behind my computer when I read the news (I know, I know, nerd.) The Huffington Post delivered the news with a funny and very apt headline (I do!) and with that I created a picture that I put on Facebook to express my joy. Almost immediately my conservative colleague from our US office posted a comment ridiculing Obama's statement, saying that the President had only made that statement because it's an election year. My counter argument that that's exactly a reason why it was a courageous statement (going against public sentiment) led to a fairly nasty discussion with arguments for and against Obama, liberals, and conservatives all flying in all directions. It got so muddy that I regretted posting about my happiness in the first place. Most disappointed I was with Anthony who commented that "it had only been a personal statement from Obama anyway and therefore didn't count" because if you can't see the relevance and importance of the President's statement (most definitely with Ant himself being a gay Republican who got legally married to his husband here in the Netherlands) then you may want to assess your reasoning and your loyalties. Nevertheless, I was extremely happy with Obama's statement. It's baby steps till there will be complete equality, but that baby took quite a big step today.
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