It started in a sod hut. In a peat colony where you worked your lungs out for far too little pay.
Where you stacked pieces of peat for hours on end on a drizzly November day, your hands sore and gray from the cold. With your six children at home who were not allowed to go to school, with not enough beans to cook a meal for everyone, with old people who could not sit in a rocking chair, they just died. You looked with envy and also fear at the rich farmers who managed the land, who were well off, or at least better off than you. And there was no way to change that, to make it a little better for you. Until that change was suddenly possible.
Domela Nieuwenhuis and Piter Jelles Troelstra
It continued with Domela Nieuwenhuis and Piter Jelles Troelstra. Those from Harlingen and Leeuwarden fought for universal suffrage for everyone so that something could change. They fought for benefits for the sick, for benefits for the elderly when they could no longer work. They spoke passionately to barons and gentleman farmers and counts and rich children in packed parliaments about the horrors that an ordinary worker had to endure to earn his daily bread. Of course, those barons understood little of this, but when universal suffrage was introduced, the votes for the socialists poured in. Especially from the North, especially from people who understood what hard work is.
Strawboard Old Pekela
It resulted in the strikes in the strawboard factories near Oude Pekela in 1969. A strike organized on three upside-down buckets, in the summer while picking beans. The factories were dangerous, many accidents occurred on the large machines, where tired men did not have time to eat their lunch and therefore did their work in silence between lime baths and straw bales with light heads. It was so humid in the factory that you went home after a shift soaking wet, on your moped with a huge risk of pneumonia. Along the deeps that smelled of chemicals, where you shouldn’t throw a match because then the water would catch fire.
And the water no longer burns. The last turf hut was demolished in the 1960s and the great socialist leaders are long dead and buried. Life has become better, step by step, through votes and not through a major revolution, for a lot of people whose father or mother, grandfather or grandmother, great-grandfather and great-grandmother were still having a terrible time.
Continue the fight
There are elections this week and every Frisian, every Groningen, every Drent has only one question to answer in the voting booth: does my parents’ struggle end with me? That fight for a better life for everyone, the fight that my grandparents and my great-grandparents fought with so much dedication, is it ready for me? Or do I continue that struggle so that others than myself, even people I don’t know or don’t understand, who don’t look like me, will get better? The choice is yours.