Tell them, my song.

Before you buy yourself a new toy for Christmas or spend your money on other useless stuff, you should think about the good that you can do with your money.

When I see how some people treat animals, it is hard for me to not hate my own species. I believe that abused and abandoned animals need your money more than international mega-corporations selling shiny toys, clothes, perfume or other luxury goods. It should also make you feel better to know that you have done something useful with your money instead of just feeding your own greed and boredom of which we people living in the industrialized nations all suffer.

If you cannot adopt an animal and if you do not want to give away money, then at least buy some dog or cat food and give it to one of the many organizations that try to help. There should be one very close to where you live. While you think about buying your next iGadget, those organizations are always in need of the most basic stuff and they might have to put another animal to sleep just because they ran out of space.

Thinking about it, you should also seriously consider becoming a vegetarian. Just look at how barbaric our meat processing factories are and you shouldn’t be lusting for steaks or chicken wings anymore. But it’s not only for ethical reasons that you should adopt a vegetarian lifestyle, there are also some pure economic reasons involved: It’s technically impossible to feed the world population with meat, plain and simple. Some brilliant minds have filled books with that topic, you might want to read up on it and adjust your world view.

I could link to extremely horrible photographs of what I am talking about, but I don’t want to cause you nightmares about the reality we live in. But I do want to leave you with a bad conscience the next time you spend your money on something that you do not really need, but just want out of the greed to possess something new:

You can always help a creature in distress.

In January 2011, the new “Jugendmedienschutzstaatsvertrag” will come into effect in Germany. It’s a law to protect minors, but it is also a law that affects me and thousands of other German bloggers, because it will make it necessary for us to either censor ourselves, have some external institute for high fees put labels on our websites for which age the published content is appropriate or we have to restrict the access to our websites with technical means and implement something that checks the age of the visitor and accordingly denies access to people under 18 years.

If you don’t follow these new rules, then you will become easy prey for fines, lawsuits and other legal discomforts.

To make it short: It plain and simple sucks and just shows what a nuthouse this world is.

If I find the energy and the motivation, then I might follow the example of several others and look for a web hoster that is not located in Germany and move my content there.

On the other hand, at this point, I’m not sure if I still care enough. I might just keep my domain for emails and shut down this blog.

But whatever is left of the rebel in me riots and has found a voice in the song “Ich bin dafür” from the German band “Dritte Wahl”:

Like they say in the song: Maybe it is time to show some people that we know where they live and burn some barricades.

“…damit sie unsere Wut und unseren Frust erkennen
sollen wieder Herzen und auch Barrikaden brennen
wir sollten zeigen daß wir wissen wo sie wohnen…”