The Theft Of Our Dreams

I’ve decided to take some time out from worrying about all the things that pain me so. I have no idea as to whether or not I shall ever write again extensively.

Some comparatively good news. Yesterday I received a letter confirming my acceptance for a vacancy now available to me at a factory on the outskirts of Bad Homburg. The job requires of me repetitive work, stacking automobile parts for Opel and BMW.

The factory, designed to help early retirees and the disabled, is run on a strictly commercial profit-basis. The new laws in Germany state that the chronically ill and long-term unemployed are entitled to earn an extra one euro per hour if they work for a minimum of thirty-eight hours a week. Because I’m only fifty, I do not receive a full pension, but only the social minimum, which, after deductions for water, rent and heating costs, comes to just over sixty euros a week.

Over two thirds of the “Hartz IV” one-euro jobs are taxed at source, leaving recipients with a maximum of twenty euros a week. Because I suffer from fibromyalgia, CFS/ME, IBS and a myriad of food intolerances (just some of the many autoimmune consequences of an influenza vaccine administered just prior to my marriage to Helen in December 1993), I am only able to work for half a day and can expect little more than a supplementary ten euros. I’m entitled to this exemption because, after seventeen years of having my condition ignored by the health authorities (CFS/ME is not recognised as an illness in Germany), autoimmunity is now finally regarded as an officially-listed illness.

Nonetheless, lunch at the factory is free and coffee costs only fifteen cents a mug. Perhaps the time will come when new painkillers will allow me to work much longer. I usually take Ibuprofen and large amounts of magnesium citrate, the latter of which is extremely expensive but at least absorbable. It really is a miracle mineral, but media talk of withdrawing it from the market has unnerved me. Magnesium oxide and carbonate goes straight through my system. My body also rejects any form of calcium, which causes intense muscle spasms and cramps.

The painkillers kept me on my feet until relatively recently, but no longer seem to work. When I was earning handsomely at a time when my health insurance cost more than my rent (480 euros a month), I could always afford to purchase the best painkillers on the market. Recently, however, most of these medications have been withdrawn from the so-called ‘Red List’, and are no longer affordable for folks on low incomes. Generics are available, but no longer on prescription.

In a sense, I’m one of the lucky ones. Although I’m a well-known troublemaker in Friedrichsdorf (I was illegally arrested last April during a heated town-hall discussion concerning a Tel Aviv-based property developer that attempted to screw the local taxpayers for two million euros), the local authorities have done the best they can to help me. I have no idea why. Perhaps someone ‘up there’ likes me.

By the way, witnessed by a huge crowd of citizens, I read the cops the riot act in the best German I have ever spoken in my life. The senior commandant of the paramilitary ‘Krippo’ (they must have thought I was a violent skinhead instead of a professorial Englishman) lost the support of her fellow officers. I quoted constitutional law, letter by letter, and destroyed the lady on the spot. I won a standing ovation. (I’m by no means proud of this. The commandant was a very attractive, extremely intelligent red-haired policewoman who gave me the fight of my life and it still hurts me to think that I had humiliated her in front of her colleagues. She fled in tears and anger. If I could only trace her, I would apologise. I was far too aggressive and came across as a merciless lawyer. If she had been a man, I would not harbour these feelings of guilt. Sometimes, winning ain’t everything.)

I was fast-tracked for the factory job, for which the waiting list stretches to a minimum of two years. Soon I’ll be able to eat properly.

Still, few British or Americans have the slightest idea about the severe degree of poverty abroad in Germany. The notion that this country is some kind of generous welfare state is completely false. I’m opposed to international socialism, but I do believe that indigenous peoples have a right to a welfare safety net.

Let me make one thing clear. I may be a compassionate racialist (recognising and accepting the differences between all of our kind), but I am not a racist. Although I have met many ordinary Germans suffering untold degrees of deprivation, I also, despite my lack of cents, will always buy a croissant or hamburger for any non-German who I perceive is starving.

I now live on a so-called sink estate. Single divorced men are a rarity here. Most of my neighbours are either widows, young teenage girls with fatherless children, the unemployed, physically handicapped or immigrants who can hardly speak a word of German. But I tell you this. The one man I admire most on my estate is an Afghani called ‘Assidi’. He lives in the apartment directly above mine. He has six beautiful, big brown-eyed children with milky white skin, jet-black hair and smiles that melt my heart. Four daughters and two football-obsessed sons. Bright, happy, healthy and full of love and life.

I sometimes fall into my nightly slumber listening to the patter of tiny feet, the laughter and joy of children living within the bosom of a loving family. Last week I heard them all sing “Happy birthday to you”, in English, of course.

I’ve grown weary of seeing the unemployed and dispossessed rummaging through trashcans for empty, redeemable cans of ale and bottles of juice. They are all middle-aged men. They scavenge bins by stealth of darkness. They live in the twilight zone of a poverty well hidden by the fascist-Bolshevik statisticians who inform the economics of a nation indentured to international usury.

They are the Great Invisibles. They do not exist. Living apologetically on the margins of a society obsessed with status and the selfish accumulation of wealth that serves no purpose other than the aggrandisement of egos that feed on the torment of a greed that eats at the very heart of humanity and which propels the world toward bankruptcy, economic collapse and senseless wars that make Shekels out of the blood of little children.

I cannot avert my glance, though they turn their faces away in shame. Grown men, once vigorous and proud, seek their sustenance in the trash discarded by those fortunate enough to work as tax-paying slaves to a state beholden only unto the thieves of all our dreams.