Wednesday night I ate an ice cream on a curb. In the time between taking a seat and the last bite, three people came by who asked in different languages for ‘a contribution for the night shelter’. I didn’t give anything, because I only had a separate debit card, but it sometimes happens that I don’t give anything even though I do have change. It makes little difference to the ball of shame that rolls around inside you at such a moment. The arguments that you repeat to yourself – you are already donating to an institution, you are not really helping someone, those who do give are maintaining a wrong system – are of little use; You’re ashamed of your ice cream and your inertia. But shame is insidious. It can make you feel bad and good about yourself at the same time. Bad about what you do or don’t do, good about feeling equally bad. You see: it really affects you, you see the sadness, you sympathize, really, but what can you do?
The degrading status quo that passes for Dutch asylum policy and which is currently just as primus inter crises, is reason for many people to exhaust themselves in reports about their internal shame management. Much more than some hastily applied emergency bandages do not produce such a collective belch of embarrassment.
The images from Ter Apel, Tubbergen and also the shocked testimonies from The Hague, in my opinion, say something more about the indifference that lurks under the shame and discomfort.
This week, protesters in Ter Apel chanted ‘Nice camping!’ to people from whom the most basic camping equipment is taken, people who fear that they will endanger their possible residence permit in the event of the slightest revolt. It’s less than camping, it’s less than nothing, but concerned citizens have no need to imagine that. For people who only reason from their own point of view, degrading reception conditions for refugees exist without any problem alongside xenophobic protest marches against the reception of the same refugees. Of course there have always been people who thought that you can afford everything with regard to asylum seekers, but rarely will those people have felt more empowered than when they saw the images from Ter Apel, yet proof that the Dutch government is essentially don’t think much else about it.
Medical student Motaz from Yemen put it this way in this newspaper: ‘We are spectators of nothing.’
In the Netherlands, the deep, rarely pronounced but often vibrating idea that the world simply consists of lucky and unlucky people and that there is not much that can be done about it. The idea that it is justified to hinder people from feeling at home somewhere and to find fertile ground therein for your belief that they do not belong somewhere, that there is a we on one side of the bars and a side on the other. The idea that you don’t have to change or adjust something if you don’t feel like it, even though everything around you does change. Only when it is too late does it suddenly have to, and immediately. You can be ashamed of everything that is happening now, but as soon as that shame does not lead to a lasting change in (voice) behavior and ideas about humanity, it is in fact little more than ill-concealed indifference.