Monday was the day the offended farmer would show how many divisions he had, and that was a bit disappointing. A battle for Schiphol was promised – battles (plural) for airports (plural) even – and one long traffic jam that would wind through all the regions, with the nose of the evening traffic jam getting tangled in the tail of the morning traffic jam.
They became distribution centers of supermarkets, and here and there a traffic jam. As a result, the just-in-time delivery concept fell into disarray, but there are no pussy’s in the boardroom at Albert Heijn, Lidl and Jumbo, so we have to look forward to claims for damages for the damage suffered.
There will still be a lot of nitrogen whirling through the air before it becomes a France, where whole areas are besieged and factories are shut down for a longer period of time. Protesting staff are not only prepared to die (up to a single hunger strike in protest against the corona vaccination obligation in hospitals, just think about that here), but also without borders. Remember the poor manager at Air France who had to jump over a fence with the remains of his torn shirt fluttering around him to escape the clutches of his violent employees.
On the side of the police, incidentally, the beating is considerably harder there than here. Here at the Marechaussee they say things like ‘we must not make this bigger than it is’, reported reporter Noël van Bemmel in a fine report from Schiphol. The most Dutch sentence from the report concerns the expectation ‘that a farmer will not risk his valuable tractor, uninsured on the highway, in a confrontation. He just needs that thing the next day.” Especially that ‘uninsured’ sounded convincing. Dutch people who do something daring without being insured against the risks are rarer than the dark pimpernelblauwtje.
As much as the leaders of the brown squadron in parliament would like to whip this into their long-awaited civil war, it’s not him. And as much as professional querulers and state leavers want to link their cause to that of the farmers: structural undermining requires a large, motivated mass that is willing to bear the consequences for a long time. Also uninsured. Even without subsidies. Even without the risks to society being thrown over the edge.
Would that crowd be there? Because the big mouth is remarkably often rewarded here by the authorities – a few death threats, park a tractor here and there, and you can negotiate with Johan Remkes – you would quickly think that the loudest screamers are right when they scream that ‘nobody’ who trust the people in The Hague more and that discontent is raging through the country like an Australian bushfire.
But that’s a bit disappointing. Peter Hein van Mulligen, researcher at CBS, once again drew attention to the data: in the vast majority of the country there is generally a stable and – compared to the rest of the world – fairly high confidence within each other, and in all kinds of institutions, from the European Union to the press. For the majority of people, the horny fantasies about civil resistance are completely ignored.
Even after we have been tested by corona, by serious administrative scandals and by dysfunctional government institutions. The Netherlands is a wonderful country, and that is it.