I guess FFVII owns me again

If I'm writing an e-mail to someone whose name or gender I don't know, would "Dear Sir or Madam" or "To whom it may concern" be better?

When I went to school in the 2000s, my (british) english teacher taught us that "Dear Sir or Madam" was the proper way to begin a message, but the style guides on the internet seem to consider this outdated. Personally, I find "To whom it may concern" sounds a bit ... cold, if not rude? As if I don't care whom I'm writing this too?

(This is all very doom & gloom, so please don't read this if you're already having a bad time)

Hey, remember how annoyed I was by all the "lol, boomers are ruining the world" memes?

Well guess which party got the most votes today by the 16-24 age group for the EU-parliament in Germany. The AFD. Which tracks with some other statistics I've seen in the last year. Often, people in the 60 or 70+ range were far more tolerant towards minorities (foreigners, pocs & LGTBQ groups) in these than the under 30s.

Why couldn't I be born twenty years earlier. I want the analogue world back - or at least the early 2000s internet. Living in an age where right-wing parties are on the rise, creative jobs are being ruined by AI and social media is brainwashing people, is not what I signed up for.

Spoiler alert: Read a fucking history book. If you honestly believe that voting for this party is the right decision because you're mad because more than two black people are now allowed to be part of the german media landscape* at the same time, think again. Will you be safe forever? What if you get disabled, what if you get sick? What if you get old? Is your family-tree pure German for the last three, four generations**? You may be straight, but is your sex life completely vanilla? Have you ever committed a crime, even something pretty harmless as a dumb kid? Could your posting history ever be used against you?

These are the kind of questions that could come up if these people ever get into power, and the first rounds of "remigration", or "cleansing" (or whatever stupid made up word they'll use) of "others" are done and they want a reason to get rid of parts of the native (originally German) population that are against them or not fitting their picture of an ideal human. People have lost their life or freedom in the past because of these factors, at a time when the Internet didn't exist, and people didn't share private aspects of their life for everybody to see on platforms, that don't give a shit about their users or democracy and only care about money.

I'm not depressed, I'm just angry. Rant over.

*This is based on a real conversation I had with somebody. The increasing amount of black people on TV both in acting, advertising and entertainment was weirding her out "because that's not reflecting real life, isn't it?" I had no idea how to react to that.