In a romantic relationship you sometimes come to the sudden conclusion that enough is enough. What turns out to be ‘a process’ afterwards, you experience as a fairly spontaneous moment.
I had something similar two weeks ago. On the basis of ‘the numbers’ and a related edifice of considerations, the country had been put into an artificial coma for the umpteenth time in a Rasti Rostelli-like manner. After two vaccines and a booster, what could we do to get out of this? Just like for the Golden Coach painted with slaves, which, according to the king, may be allowed out of the garage when ‘the Netherlands is ready’, I had a gloomy view and that was not only due to the virus.
I had read a lot about ‘old politics’, but now I saw the administrative accident for which everyone and yet no one is responsible, happening before my eyes. The Dutch consider themselves individualistic but still like to be ruled by something higher. This is not represented by one person, as in France, but by a diffuse interplay of ministers, civil servants, experts, mayors, lobbyists, MPs and the media.
They form the crew of a kind of spaceship that once departed, it is difficult to receive signals from Earth. While the Netherlands longed for liberation from the despondent state of non-being for which I have no word yet, the spaceship was busy with ‘modelling’ by the RIVM around Christmas, which predicted that between a hundred (no problem at all) and 1,500 ( deep crisis) corona patients could end up in intensive care. And so everything had to close.
The fact that one foreign study after another has now shown that omikron did not make people as sick as feared, that IC doctors themselves begged for new considerations and that restaurants, shops, theaters and museums in other European countries were open, did not help. to the point.
Only when Belgium started to fill up with Dutch shop and restaurant visitors and mayors mutinied did the astronauts return. To find a country that has had enough. Due to the overwhelming focus on one group of vulnerable people, a lot of vulnerable people have been added. Leading the way are the people in their twenties who, just when the virus broke out, wanted to get acquainted with society. In the past year, the suicide rate among them has increased by 15 percent.
While they often took out high loans for their studies, they found themselves isolated in a room without education, sports and each other. When activists called for the ‘decolonization’ of higher education, university administrators were eager to produce hip brochures and ‘diversity officers‘ to set. But while this marketing machine attracts students and thus generates financing, the existential crisis of an aspiring electrician does not yield any returns.
And so the education administrators who talked about ‘identity’ and ‘safe climate’ were nowhere to be seen when students began to consider throwing themselves off the bridge last year. Just like the politicians who always claim that they are committed to ‘equality of opportunity’, with the education party D66 leading the way.
Young people made no apocalyptic predictions and presented no figures on the basis of which limits could be set. But meanwhile, the foundations beneath their existence eroded. They paid just as little attention to the spaceship as they did to the single mother who ended up on the tax authorities’ blacklist due to an incorrectly completed form.
The MBOs, HBO and universities will open again this week. But a life in which you can’t go to the café, the theater and the cinema, but you can go to the whores, since they fall into the category of ‘contact profession’, seems alienating for an 18-year-old. The Amsterdam debate center De Balie is trying to become a church in order to continue. The more ordinary you are, it seems, the less likely you are to do something. Unfortunately, most people are ordinary, and that is how the midfield is driven to the flanks.
As I write this column, protesters pass by my house. At first it was just the wappies, now my neighbors are also walking along.
Daniela Hooghiemstra is a historian. She writes a weekly exchange column with Erdal Balci.