When the king asks the people to show ‘resilience and togetherness’, 56-year-old Ursula Stas thinks: ‘Yes, bye.’ Because, she says: if he asks us to contribute, she can also come up with some stones that the king can contribute.
Stas pushes her 83-year-old mother’s wheelchair through the Batavia Stad shopping center in Lelystad this sunny Wednesday morning. Both are skeptical about the royal family, and the call that the king made on Tuesday. ‘Why doesn’t the king make one of his palaces available to refugees? And what would he do with such an expensive speedboat?’
In the speech from the throne, King Willem-Alexander called on citizens to prepare for major changes. ‘Because our current way of life comes up against economic, social and ecological limits,’ said the king.
‘Following the example of Den Uyl in 1973, we are asked to hand in something together. And to resist the uncertainties and trials’, says Hans Boutellier, professor by special appointment of Polarization and Resilience (Free University). ‘It is interesting that it is now said so emphatically that we are reaching the limits of our system.’
But what does that call mean for our daily lives? And are we still ‘resilient’? ‘I’m not really concerned with that’ is a frequently heard answer when you ask around in the outlet center of Lelystad. Some visitors admit that they are gloomy about the future, but that the current social problems do not affect them (yet). ‘As long as my fixed energy contract is still running, it won’t bother me much,’ says one. “If I also have to carry the worries of others with me, it becomes very much,” adds another.
Improvisational ability
Resilience is a concept from ecology, says Boutellier. ‘This concerns, for example, the ability of an ecological system to recover after a forest fire. Later the term was adopted by other disciplines.’
How resilient a system is can be deduced from two factors, says Boutellier: flexibility and diversity. ‘Take the example of a forest again. A forest with many crops is stronger than a pine forest. It is the same with an economy. And if a system has a high capacity for improvisation, it can respond more easily to setbacks.’
It is a ‘very relevant question’ how resilient the Netherlands still is after a pandemic, says psychologist René Diekstra. “And the answer is, we don’t know darn well. Because we don’t measure it. While there are measuring instruments.’
He mentions the Global Assessment Tool that soldiers in the US military use to work on their resilience. Diekstra: ‘It would make sense to set up a national program in the short term to investigate how resilient we are as a society and to train people to become mentally stronger. You should really see it as a vaccination program. People need to develop skills that make them immune to the fear that arises from the current uncertainties: an energy crisis, war.’
‘Cry of Despair’
The call for more resilience is almost like a cry of despair, Boutellier adds. ‘In essence, the message is that citizens should do it themselves if the government cannot get it done. When something requires resilience, it is often a problem that cannot be predicted.’
For Ans Grondman (75), resilience means: having to hold back. Together with her 55-year-old daughter Muriël, she kills time in the outlet center in Lelystad, while her husband undergoes a medical procedure in a nearby hospital. She approves of the king raising people’s concerns. “I also thought it was nice to see that Princess Amalia was not wearing a new hat, but one from her mother.”
Recently, Grondman has often thought back to the 1950s, to the family of eleven children in which she grew up. “Food was never wasted there, and when our kids were little we always insisted that they close doors and turn off lights to save energy.” Daughter Muriël paid less attention to this when her children were small, she admits. ‘I now realize how quickly we have become prosperous’, says Grondman. ‘It can’t go on like this. I think that is especially difficult for young people.’
Child of the account
Coen van Amerongen (21) and Michel van Dijk (23) think so too. The two students of commercial economics came to Batavia Stad to buy a shirt for Van Amerongen’s graduation ceremony. They think that the bill is too much placed on the young. A job? They don’t worry about that. But a house? ‘We still live at home, because finding affordable housing is difficult. And if you find one, you also have to sign a new energy contract’, says Van Dijk.
According to them, the Netherlands is now burdened by problems that are often caused by political choices. ‘The farmers have been kept in line for too long, the climate problems have been pushed forward and the housing shortage has not suddenly arisen either.’ They find the call to citizens to ‘show resilience and solidarity’ questionable. ‘Of course everyone has to do their part,’ says Van Amerongen. ‘But the solution to many problems starts with politics.’
He believes that a call for more solidarity would have been better than the call for more resilience. The king himself could do more in that respect, he thinks. “How cool would it be if the king said ‘no’ to his salary increase.”