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I’m a very political person. From a very young age, I was fascinated by political debates around the dining room table, watched parliamentary debates in West-Germany for hours, demonstrated, argued, joined a party, left a party, joined another party and left again. I stayed up all night discussing nuclear weapons, reunification, the Iraq war, financial crisis, Obama/McCain/Romney – and then we were silenced.

Just this morning, I wanted to tweet about the New Hampshire primary but I stopped before I started. Is it worth to tweet an opinion to a few people that care just to get trolled multiple times by the ones not disagreeing with me? The Twitterverse feels like such an unsafe zone, a dystopian world where the loudest screamers, the most effective bots, and the fiercest tribalist rule. 99% of the universe just shake their head and stay silent. Why bother?

I’ve had my share of political discussions on message boards and I know they are going nowhere. There’s always another fact, another source and one can argue until the cows come home without ever changing an opinion (including mine) or making an impact. And while we argue, we got more tribal and angry. In 2020, this goes way beyond politics. Any comment about anything or anybody can trigger outrage. Armies of latent outraged Twitterattis are roaming this silly space ready to attack at any moment. Giving all they got. Until they find a new enemy, a new source to feed their outrage even more. One would hope they run out of steam at one point. Not so. The outraged ones created the first Perpetuum Mobile, violating the first and second laws of thermodynamics. They work indefinitely without an energy source, just kept alive by their internal outrage about everything.

While they keep on roaming and attacking, we are tired. Tired of the outrage. Tired of the same boring discussions and arguments. Tired of the attacking threat. We just want to say we like program x of candidate x without being overrun by arguments why candidate x is terrible and what’s wrong with us?

Freedom of speech? Whatever.

This goes way beyond left or right, Twitter or Facebook.

Who let the dogs out?
Woof, woof, woof, woof, woof.

All I have left is to growl. And vote.