That terrible ‘dot on the horizon’. Managers always want to see that. A lot of people have adopted that dot vocabulary,
I am now staying in a country where that dot is a real year: 2028, because that is when Suriname expects to realize its first oil revenues. That oil must come from the Block 58 field, about 150 kilometers from the coast, and the entire extraction operation is called Granmorgu received, ‘great morning’, or more poetically: new dawn. When I hear a name like that I immediately think of socialism of the democratic kind, of youth organizations from before the war. But the billions involved mainly awaken the capitalist in people. In Suriname, that ‘dot on the horizon’ is actually more of a ‘bank in the sea’, and the country lives towards the moment like a pregnant woman towards childbirth.
Money from the government, it is a universal dream. My Surinamese parents-in-law are eighty plus, and they, like other peers under the previous Santokhi government, received free money through the ‘Royalty for Everyone’ (RVI) program. As an advance, because they may not reach that new dawn. By the way, we have now ended up in a novel by Willem Elsschot with his ‘World Magazine.’
My Surinamese in-laws each received 750 dollars: look, that’s a lot of money.
I had already forgotten about it, but it happened by Max Pam in de Volkskrant reminded: Rutte promised in 2012 to “all working people in the Netherlands a tax benefit of 1,000 euros. So, daddy, in the hand.” But I don’t think ‘pop, in the hand’ is a tax advantage. Too abstract. My parents-in-law each received $750: look, that’s a lot of money. The intention was to serve other age categories in addition to the over-80s. But if Santokhi had thought: ‘I will win the elections with that promise’, he has failed, because Santokhi’s party is no longer part of the newly elected government, which immediately stopped the royalty program.
But still: Suriname lives eagerly, with great expectations, while the Netherlands and all of Europe have languished under the threat since the Russian war against Ukraine, which promises us the worst. As NATO Secretary General, Rutte said that we must be prepared for a war on a scale that our grandparents and great-grandparents experienced. Add to this the crumbling of the West as a political idea, now that the United States under Trump is operating as an internet troll in geopolitical relations. And then there are the antidemocratic forces within Europe, which are working hard to dismantle the legal-political system. For some time now we have not been living with ‘a dot on the horizon’, but with a black hole on the horizon that is swallowing up the future.
And so much can be broken in the Netherlands, because there is obviously so much. I have never seen dead dogs lying on the side of the road, completely bloated from decomposition, ready to explode at any moment. I have been seeing it in Suriname for decades.
But all that misery is put into perspective by this long-lasting, secular Advent: Saint Nicholas does not come, even Jesus Christ takes a step back; the oil comes. In 2028. Hail and blessings.
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