ONE of the first things you notice on a visit to central Europe these days is the appalling state of many of its public spaces.
Memorial parks, kids’ play areas and median strips are overgrown to the point of being unusable. To read a plaque on a statue of Pope John Paul II in central Krakow, Poland, you need to walk knee-deep through grass and weeds. Not many bother.
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Play parks are empty, crossing a road is difficult – if not dangerous – and many otherwise beautiful public areas are a mess. And there are very few people using these spaces – something previously unheard of during warm summer days in Europe.
I initially assumed Krakow’s parks & garden workers must have been on strike – until noticing similar run-down public spaces in Slovakia and Romania soon after.
There couldn’t be a Europe-wide strike by all public-sector gardeners, could there? And surely the locals would do something to clean up their messy neighbourhoods? Where do their kids play?
I ended up asking a tour guide (an ex-pat Australian from Punchbowl, NSW).
Simple, he said, the European Union is paying off member States not to mow public spaces – to save the bees.
It’s a noble cause, but the consequences are destructive. Civic pride in these countries appears to be on the wane. They live in a mess, their kids can’t play normally and they are being told by EU overlords that insects come first.
Noticeably, a growing number of private gardens also look as unkempt as the civic spaces.
In Australia, an unattended yard usually indicates the inhabitants are either on holiday or on weed – a marijuana-induced permanent holiday, of sorts.
So why is the European Union doing this and is it only about saving bugs?
People with half a brain or more know that the United Nations’s global warming agenda is, at its core, an exercise in wealth redistribution veiled in feel good environmentalism.
Saving bees appears to be an equally deceptive program. One that masquerades as virtuously saving insects, while destroying national pride.
The EU Commission is strongest when nationalism is at its weakest. And, from an outsider’s perspective, this EU-sponsored bug love-in appears to be a well disguised power grab.PC
