Switzerland embarrassing fatherland

I feel embarrassed about Switzerland. The country in which I grew up, which was the world champion in exports, which produced the best technology and even led the world market in some future-oriented sectors, is no longer the same. Its development is stuck in the 90's, its production outsourced, its potential sold to China, its infrastructure obsolete, its rail network rotting and its highways miles of construction sites where nothing is progressing. Why? Because even then there was no strategy, just complacency. Because you didn't have a plan for a tomorrow when the world would change, but rested on today, when things were still going well. And saved. And managed. And did nothing.

I feel embarrassed about Switzerland. Its population, once said to be industrious, inventive and disciplined, has become self-pitying and easygoing, jealous and irritable, and has long since sacrificed its cohesion to self-interest. Its dynamism has given way to stagnation, its innovative power to a sluggish, unimaginative portfolio management. And the aesthetic framework that this country gives itself is also unimaginative. In the neo-proletarian contempt for formal standards, every quality of life, every style and everything beautiful disappears, the defiant and yet only apparently individualistic self-assertion against every supposed rule creates the total uniformity of a shabby sneakers-jeans-hoodie society in which diversity and variety are indeed preached, However, differences are denied and ultimately even fought.

Its government also suits this country, a petty corps of officials that unimaginatively works through ready-made protocols, has no vision, does not see a big picture and always only reacts instead of acting, which knows no deviating from the beaten path, shies away from any risk and never boldly breaks the rules dares where the situation calls for it – narrow-minded administrators where open-minded doers are needed. They maintain their bureaucratic mentality instead of relying on simplification and acceleration, they invent new laws, push over-regulation to ever new heights and coerce the last vestige of entrepreneurship out of us where freedom and trust would be our only chance.

Switzerland is becoming embarrassing to me and I am increasingly outraged and straining my tolerance as a citizen, entrepreneur and father – in my everyday life as well as in the civil service, which administers us to death, burns our money senselessly and does nothing. And I say that out of love, out of an unexcited patriotism and the ardent, unconditional desire for a good future worth living in for this country, everyone who lives peacefully in it, and our whole wonderful world.