The Cancelled Parade

Over the last couple of days....Germany has transformed itself into a parade capital.  Various communities and cities have planned out for an entire year.....a parade.  In some towns, you will find dozens of people who meet monthly....get into the various details of the parade....plan the vision of the 'float'....agree to disagree on things.....and bring this all together to a major event.  In less than a month....most communities will start back up for the 2016 parade schedule and start the next planning stage.

Yesterday.....a slight change came to the parade business.  Up in Braunschweig (a town east of Hanover, Germany)....a town of 250,000 residents....the parade was cancelled.

What the cops will say is that a credible threat existed.....thus giving them a reason to cancel the parade.   They used the term 'Islamic threat' and just left the rest for your imagination.

The cancellation occurred approximately 90 minutes prior to the parade.  I would take a guess that 100,000 people were already at the starting point, or in the process of getting parked when the cancellation occurred.  Some journalists say the typical parade in Braunschweig  has around 200,000 participants and bystanders.

Hostility?  Yeah.  From the brief man-on-the-street type interviews....it was viewed as a frustrating cancellation.

Basically, some radical extremists forced Germans to cancel something that hadn't been cancelled since World War II.  Poor weather might limit the parade, but it wasn't ever cancelled.

So, this brings to this observation of reality now in Germany.  When you can't "BE" a German or behave as a German, or carry out German traditions.....what are you then?  At some point in the near future.....some Germans are going to sit there at a pub, or at some cafe, and ask some questions about what is going on here.  The questions will lead to a reflection, and possibly some dramatic change in life.  Frankly.....I just can't see Germans accepting this threat lightly or just giving in to some threat.  They aren't that type of culture.

In an odd way, the cancellation of the Braunschweig parade might come to be a major event in 2015.