“Many Dutch people are too awkward for a crisis,” headlines Dagblad Fidelity Recently on the front page. It turned out to be the conclusion of a study by Ipsos I&O among almost 1,500 people.
I felt addressed. Because what turned out? That many Dutch people lack important skills for emergency situations. For example, more than 40 percent of the respondents had never provided first aid, and more than half had never repaired devices, such as a radio.
I only recognize that first aid from nightmares: that I am standing above the motionless body of a beloved someone and in vain on his or her chest, while I am desperately wondering: should it be harder or softer, or should it not be at all? At a distance my cat watches with rise.
Fortunately, repairing radios is not an issue, because I rarely listen to it. My technical problems mainly limit themselves to television. It will be a macabre coincidence, but shortly after reading the article in Trouw I dropped my remote control out of my hands.
Hat device burst open and spread his intestines lavishly over the ground. I had to reconnect the batteries – how do you do that again, the flat side against the feather, or the other side? It degenerated into a panic in half an hour, in which the television went to black. “God is great!” I shouted, because they also do that in Iran when the TV studio collapses with a bombing.
According to that wedding research, the Dutch are also not very self-sufficient in the case of a long-term crisis. Half of the respondents have never converted vegetables themselves, 85 percent did not know how to slaughter and prepare an animal. I sometimes think that cleaning vegetables is enough, I also refuse to keep myself busy with the renovation. As a city person with stones, I associate renovation, not with vegetables. I am not allowed to slaughter animals from my cat, moreover I know for sure that I would also fail to do so and to slaughter the roles would quickly turn around.
What, according to the indoor research, usually still succeeds, is cooking or repairing clothing. Unfortunately I even have to disappoint the researchers in this. Cooking is not good enough to guarantee them a pleasant meal. I once learned to stop socks in military service, but when I recently tried it again, forced by a shocking attack from the tax authorities, I did not do anything anymore.
What to do? Do I also have to buy such an emergency package in case Putin get Kamikaze tendencies? But a crisis expert already warns in Trouw: “People buy an emergency package as if it is a kind of insurance. (…) But you also have to know how to use those things.”
Precisely. And precisely because I will never know that with great certainty, I shouldn’t start it. I know a better solution. I have to emigrate to India. It is increasingly striking me that India is a country where everything goes wrong. Aircraft are inexplicable, whole terraces blow triumphantly from boats, trains derail as fatal love.
I belong in such a country. There I finally get lucky in an accident.