Friday, November 14, 2008

Saturday, November 8, 2008

We protest!

Ok...

The situation is getting both surreal and chaotic at the same time. People are protesting every Saturday and the number of protestants grows by hundreds as the weeks pass. But it's not really clear to me what is being protested against. A bit like a case of the windmills. Protesting against everything at the same time.
The leader of the national bank, corruption, dysfunctional politicians, dysfunctional government, high interests, a currency that seems to be worth about as much as monopoly money...

And the government is silent. There are no concrete answers about anything. Nothing is clear. There has been no real drawing of the worst case scenario and there is no real picture of what would be the best thing for us to do in this situation; How much money we need to dig us out of those problems and how this is going to directly affect the common Joe? No answers.

Solid businesses are going down because they don't get cash to secure the stash and even though the town is full of tourists willing to spend money, shop owners can not get new goods into their shops... everything is frozen. Meanwhile a few hundred loose their jobs every week and unemployment is predicted to rise to 10% in the next year. This means that about 18.000 people will be unemployed out of the 180.000 who are on the job market.

Personally I don't really know what to make of all this and I am not sure about what to do about it either. This feels like a waiting period, everything is still in the air, nothing is clear, a whirlwind of snowflakes in a ball. We have to wait for them to fall down in order to be able to make the next move, or even get an idea of what the next move will be.

I picture a Scandinavian Murmansk during the next ten years... but truly hope for something better. And meanwhile I wonder where the exit is.

ps.

Tonight I met a guy who has just arrived from Nepal. He told me that everyone in Nepal were aware of the bad situation we have up here... Now what does THAT mean? :)