Even though there is a record number of parties involved in the elections, there is really not so much to choose. Strongly reduced, it involves two scenarios: the short term and the long term. Some parties represent the short term, others the long. Between those poles, we'll be.

In everyday life just as. Our brain allows us to react decisively to acute situations while at the same time making plans for the distant future. Only in general there is a more powerful enchantment of the short rather than the long term. Tomorrow's day is better conceivable than the year 2050, fast profits all too often go over sustainable investment. The scary heart of consumer capitalism recognizes only one time: the. It has to be now, I want it now. No past and no future, only the immediate, covant present.

We know that our actions in the now can have far-reaching effects in the future, but do not act sufficiently.. The greenhouse gases we emit today continue to haunt the atmosphere for decades to come. The ice plate the size of Utrecht that broke off last week in Antarctica is no longer growing. “What's happening now,” said David Attenborough at a UN Climate Summit in 2018, “and in the next few years, will have profound implications for the next millennia”.

Philosopher Roman Krznaric comes in The Good Ancestor, his newly-published book on the short and long term thinking of our species, to this crushing conclusion: “The time is ripe, and especially for the people of the rich countries, in order to open our eyes to a disturbing truth: have colonized the future. We treat the future as a remote colonial outpost where there is no soul, where we can take technological risks unhindered, dump nuclear waste freely, go beyond ecological degradation and plunder to our heart's content”. (Translation Henk Moerdijk.)

We behave as if in time after us there will be no more people, as if our children and children will not inherit the earth we leave them. Since we can't imagine the people of the future, we do not imagine. But they will be there. Perhaps decimated in number, but they will be there. It is not even the question of what kind of world they will walk around if we, people of the 21st century, continue on the same foot: we leave them a scorched earth, largely ferocious and empty.

If, in the climate crisis (long term), we had only half the effectiveness of the coronacrisis (short-term), it was still somewhat hopeful. But again in the Netherlands we will be saddled with a VVD-dominated cabinet, the party where they make the political break-bone Mark Harbers say things like this about the climate: “I really think we can benefit from peace: let us take a few years for the measures that we already have have taken. Not every time hurriy-over-behavior.” Go to sleep peacefully.

When I was growing up, I wrote no future with black marker on doors and train benches. Our hopelessness was about high unemployment and nuclear threat, and even though the report The Borders to Growth of the Club of Rome had already appeared, climate threat did not yet play a major role in our consciousness. We had real concerns, but the no future of the youngest generation of earthlings extends infinitely beyond ours at the time: their house is on fire, just as Greta Thunberg says.

Perhaps we should consider our actions that are strictly self-interest and short-term, as warlike towards future children; perhaps World War III has already begun: now against our children and children and the earth itself.

These things are about these elections, even though it's hardly about.

Tommy Wieringa

The war against our children