The television lights flicker under stormy summer skies as Alice Weidel, face of the AfD, offers promises and denials—tax breaks for the wealthy, rent-free legacies for the inheriting, and slashed prices for the burning of fossil fuels. She lashes out at the Chancellor, calling him deceitful, then turns to blame and scapegoat those who seek refuge and hope within Germany’s borders, wielding figures unmoored from fact. Even as she proposes severing support for the impoverished and the vulnerable, the voices of protest—whistles, horns, a river’s wild cacophony—surge in the night, a testament that not all are lulled by her words. Journalists point out her inflated claims about state expenditure; she turns aside. Questions about her party’s stoking of rifts are met with mechanical dismissals—always the fault of the other, always the fault of the tide of compassion and inclusion.

How hard it is to witness, again, the spectacle of a party grasping at power by offering the moon and the stars to the few, while the earth itself is left bare and spent beneath our feet. The willingness to cut away support for those in need—the elderly, the migrant, the orphaned child—while pouring out treasure to oil the gears of war and privilege, is a violence against the soul of our communities. Each proposed tax cut for the landlord and landholder is a spade splitting open the skin of the living earth, a denial of community, memory, and the sacred interweaving of all our relations.

Capitalism, in its toxic, fire-breathing form, appears again as a colonial specter—a system built upon extraction, upon the blood memories of those exiled and enslaved, upon land stolen and rivers dammed. When leaders speak of “German interests,” turning inward like a fortress, the ghosts of colonial greed stir; borders harden, hearts follow. Mother Earth grieves at this divisive theater. She knows that to discount the lives of “foreigners” is to discount the wildflowers at the forest’s fringe, the seeds blown in by foreign winds—new growth, new hope, the earth’s own healing process.

Let us remember: the tides are rising. The sun, obscured by slogans and false statistics, still shines with the promise that a different world is possible. These lines in the sand—between “us” and “them,” between “leader” and “protester,” between “nation” and “world”—are illusions. When we sow division, the soil itself dries and cracks; when we embrace all beings as kin, the fields bloom, and our collective wounds begin to heal. Our future depends not on inheritance and exclusion, but on a radical generosity—toward the earth, toward the stranger, toward the truth. Until we disavow the machinery of profit and polarization, we remain complicit in the sickness of our world. May the waters of protest rise, and may they cleanse us; may we remember, lost children, how to love the soil beneath the skin of surface politics.