Feeling responsible for things you can’t control

It's difficult to read that and not pass comment. I travelled to a particular place in Germany pretty much every year between 2002 and 2016, and have watched the area I go to change, in my opinion for the worse, in exactly the same way I watched my own country collapse 30 years previously.

It really does appear like the same malign political influence having done my country (England) first, then turned it's attention to Germany!

Haltern Am See when I first went there was a high trust, clean and very orderly little place, like the Soilhull that I remember from the sixties.

In a nutshell, clean, polite and civilised. The whole place was easy on the eye, no graffiti, clean & well maintained streets with actual cigarette vending machines at the end of the street that were not vandalised AND the people seemed very invested in keeping it that way.

In short, I felt like I needed to up my own personal game if I was not to be a "visiting barbarian". 

Each time I went there (particularly in the early years) I took copius photos and you can see the year that the grafitti started to appear, when the roads stopped being cleaned to a high standard, when hooded and swarthy looking creatures who CLEARLY were not the good people of Haltern started to be seen prowling the streets at night and the shops started to up their "Security measures" and finally, the point where even the cigarette vending machines became uneconomical to operate.

I am putting forwards my own (very unpopular) observations, because whilst the first time I witnessed "the process of transformation" unfolding in front of me and sucking out the QUALITY from the society in which I was immersed, I was easily convinced by those who can function linguistically better than I can manage, that I was the problem, and that my vision was inferior to theirs. 

SEEING EXACTLY THE SAME PROCESS unfold in front of me as an observer in a different country, seeing the same arguments being made to push the agenda, and the demonisation of dissenting opinion, as both "quality of life" and "standard of living" plummet for the hapless indigenous inhabitants whilst their leaders deny, deflect & blamecast was too much to endure again, so I don't go there any more. 

Instead of being a unique and lovely place to go, as it was when I first went there, Haltern Am See became a lot more like the land I had just left, due to I have to assume, poor political leadership.Just as happened in England. 

We are being FORCED to transition from a series of European monolithic cultures into a different type of society entriely.

A process it seems, akin to taking down a thousand year old tapestry which depicts the history of european peoples and staining it a uniform shade of light brown.. 

The most frightening thing though, is that pretty much anyone who really tries to whomp up a better way of doing things, (Which is where an intelligent mind goes after realising that everything is getting messed up) runs up against the enormity of the problem. 

It's really, really easy to complain about falling social and living standards, but MUCH harder to work out what is the right path that you should be on.

Your much maligned "Alternative For Germany" party isn't having torchlit parades in the street, and it's leadership isn't wearing the hugo boss uniforms either, they are just a party that represents a section of the german population that likes and admires the orderly Gerrman culture and way of doing things that make places like Haltern Am See pretty and worth worth visiting...  

Thanks for your input (and please believe me that I really mean that and am sincere when saying this). I can, however, not agree with your view on the AfD. As a queer woman and someone who struggles with social norms, I am especially convinced that I will never support such a party. You don’t have to engage in torchlit parades to hurt the values of our constitution. Our government didn’t do everything right in the past, but many things were not preventable without going against those values, so I’d choose this part over a right one again and again. For context: There are several people in the AfD that show rhetorics once used by facists (e.g. Bernd Höcke), the party is under observation because of their actions and statements, they constantly spread blunt misinformation and there even was a scandal around a conference mainly visited by their members that was horrifically similar to the Wannensee-conference in its rhetorics and discussions (sorry for the drastic simile). 

Thank you nonetheless for answering, it’s important to keep an open dialogue flowing in every direction.

Any coherent society, that has a set of socially enforced shared values (whatever they might be) I have realised, is going to have people who are excluded from full participation because they simply don't or won't fit in with the dominant paradigm. 

My particular form of Autism involves a certain amount of "Mis-agreeableness" so I expect to have issues myself fitting in with whatever society I find myself confronted with.

We all really want to live in a "high trust" society simply because there's less car alarms going off, you don't always NEED to lock your doors, etc. or carry bunches of keys that a jailer would envy. 

A high trust society is SUPERIOR to a low trust society such as one might find in less civilised parts of the world. 

The question is how do we get there, (or maintain the remains of the one that we have) without being beastly to a sub group? 

Any coherent society, that has a set of socially enforced shared values (whatever they might be) I have realised, is going to have people who are excluded from full participation because they simply don't or won't fit in with the dominant paradigm. 

My particular form of Autism involves a certain amount of "Mis-agreeableness" so I expect to have issues myself fitting in with whatever society I find myself confronted with.

We all really want to live in a "high trust" society simply because there's less car alarms going off, you don't always NEED to lock your doors, etc. or carry bunches of keys that a jailer would envy. 

A high trust society is SUPERIOR to a low trust society such as one might find in less civilised parts of the world. 

The question is how do we get there, (or maintain the remains of the one that we have) without being beastly to a sub group?