When I was young I saw the debate as a competition I had to win. I’ve become a little less fanatical, but I still don’t like to admit I’m wrong. I know, it’s not a pretty feature. Anyway, rhetoric was one of my favorite subjects in school. The discussions about this subject and also about social studies sometimes got heated in class. From time to time they were continued in the break in the cafeteria, where we gathered around tables discussing one part abortion and another about immigration.
In that respect, not much has changed since the late 1980s. I remember a boy from my class from one of those afternoons. He said he was a member of the JOVD. I didn’t know that, but later I understood that it was the youth section of the VVD. What he had taken with him from the first meetings with the young liberals was the ambition to later get a good job “so that I earn at least a ton a year.” A ton, I thought. That is quite a lot. I didn’t think I knew anyone who made that much money. Encouraged by the acclaim from the class (everyone wanted to earn a lot of money later, that much was clear), he moved his argument in one movement to his next position: welfare benefits had to be reduced. Because, he said, it wasn’t fair that some people worked hard for their money, while others were given it for free.
I don’t believe I went against him at that point. Despite my love for the debate. I was probably still too insecure to tell the children of wealthy parents that I knew from my own experience that the amount of benefits was not nearly enough to lead a normal life. How humiliating it was to get benefits in the first place. That the people in my ward who were lucky enough to have a job, worked themselves out, and still ran out of money at the end of the month. That no one dared to dream of a ton a year.
I haven’t seen the boy since our final exams, but his words, and his self-confidence, the way he, as a dark blond boy of thirteen, sitting on the table, his feet carelessly on a chair, with so much certainty these words into space swayed – that has always stuck with me. And I have to admit: in the decades between now and our high school, he has been proved right. The erosion of social care is now a fact. In Mark Rutte, poster boy of the VVD, I see the mature, cheerfully profit-oriented attitude of that boy from back then.
I always think of that classmate when I hear news reports about welfare mothers who are cut because they take a few tens from family, and the reports about top men with millions of assets who commit fraud because extremely much is not enough. I wonder what he feels when he reads the horror stories of migrants being forced to work 29 hours straight in Qatar for a salary of less than two hundred euros a month. Whether he still agrees with the Prime Minister who says that despite everything our politicians and even our royal family go to Qatar to encourage the football players, because we are not cheering for the stands but for our team. I wonder if he also hears what I hear, which is that we don’t cheer for the workers, because we never cheer for the workers anyway. Because we only cheer for the tons a year, the millions that we don’t need but just want.
And while I don’t know what his answer is, I still have to admit that he was right, in the cafeteria when we were thirteen years old. That it is indeed not fair that some are so easily given what others work hard for.
Karin Amatmukrim is a writer and man of letters. She writes a column here every other week.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of November 1, 2022