I dunno, I hear stories from my coworkers about how bad East Germany and other former Soviet states were in the 80s/90s. It depends a lot on where you were fortunate enough to grow up.

Progressive tenses don’t exist in German but „gerade“ is used to indicate it happening right now at this moment. „Wir schützen gerade eure Kinder“ would work for instance but it contains it to this moment of time rather than indicating a general state of being.