People quickly make their judgments, according to the introduction of People watching Tuesday at the EO. An opinion is easily made, also about people we don’t know. I would say: mainly, but that might say more about me. The design of the program is simple. There are four panels of four – the mothers, the seniors, the tiktokers, the students. They are presented with a person unknown to them. The first was graphic designer Bappie, 32 years old, a sturdy man with a black beard, piercings and tattoos. They were not given any more information, it became guessing and gambling. To the sound of his voice, his second profession (he is a plus-size model), the furnishings of his house (Japandi – a contraction of Japanese and Scandinavian). It becomes really difficult to choose who his partner is. Man, woman, white, black? “He is a designer,” says someone on the TikTok panel. “They are all gay anyway.” All panels get it wrong when asking what Bappie thinks is his most beautiful part of the body. Not his beard, not his buttocks, but his stomach. Because, he says, it is malleable, warm and hairy.” Gadverdámme, says the seniors, the students and the tiktokers. Bappie and his girlfriend have no children, exactly what most people thought. But what no one saw coming: Bappie turns out to be transgender.
With person two, Esther of 58, all panels are on the wrong track. It was clear from her that crocheting is her biggest addiction, but everyone was sure that she would be husbandless, childless, and a librarian. She is a married mother of three and plays hip hop as a DJ in Amsterdam clubs. The more layers were peeled back from Esther, the more sympathetic the panels found her. “At first I thought: what a fool, but she is getting nicer.”
Well, moral of the story, not everyone is what they seem. I knew. Yes, I could have sworn that the teacher was the one One today argued for attention to the Second World War in secondary schools that themselves had a Jewish background. Only when his name came on screen did I see that it was Turkish. And I looked up at the unexpected fear in the eyes of the 21-year-old Dutch reservist Jishai in the Eight o’clock news. He left for Israel sooner rather than later to protect the country. But the mere suggestion that people in Gaza might die at his hands turned his courage into humility.
And of course I found all kinds of things when I arrived Four hands on one stomach Sixteen-year-old Aldinya was told that she normally has her period at the same time as her mother, except that time when she turned out to be pregnant. She was now 26 weeks along and a father was no longer “in the picture”. I couldn’t have imagined that you could be so ready at such a young age for a future that starts too early. She wanted to work for the police, but with a child the irregular shifts might become difficult. Being a primary school teacher seemed like a more practical option to her. If I were a personnel manager at the police, I would call her and offer exactly those services that she could combine.
Rutte-Derksen
Outgoing Prime Minister Rutte scored much better in terms of human knowledge than I did yesterday. He knew Johan Derksen well enough, he said, to know that he had made his statements Today Inside would take back from Monday. There Derksen had spoken about Hamas’ bloody attack on Israel, and said that “of course the Jews had asked for it a bit.” That comment went down badly, and not only with Rutte. Initially, Derksen seemed to deny Rutte’s faith in him by starting Tuesday’s episode by saying that he was “very satisfied” with his texts. Only, he said, where he said Jews, he meant Israelis. Stop the clocks. Jews, he said, was “too generalized.” Rutte had estimated him correctly after all. He took one word back.