‘Don’t think about it, miss!’, Jip barks. ‘Do you know how many innocent people killed those barbarians? 35 million in India alone. And all the money they stole there.’ His eyes spit fire. ‘Then I must speak their language? Not really!’
Jip, the professor in my seventh grade, is only ten years old. He knows everything about the world. ‘I am vegan and my favorite subjects are anthropology, philosophy and history,’ he said when we met at the beginning of the school year. His main life goal: to make the world a better place. The boy version of Greta Thunberg.
But he doesn’t want to learn English. “I hate those oppressors,” he said fiercely when this week in the youth news The death of Queen Elizabeth was extensively commemorated. ‘After my grandmother died, there weren’t people standing by the side crying with a Paddington bear in their hand, were they? And she was already 98.’ Jip shook his head. ‘Old people do die, miss. That’s part of life. Why all the fuss?’
Yes, why all the fuss? I’ve been wondering that all week too. Of course, the UK is an influential country and seventy years on the throne is a long time. Still, that Elizabeth lived so long can hardly be seen as her own merit. Moreover, rich people also live longer than poor people. Especially if you live in Buckingham Palace. Don’t worry about not being able to pay your energy bill. Or fear of an empty household wallet at the end of the month. This royal didn’t have to lie awake at all over a roof over her head. Enough houses.
Now the most filmed queen in the world must have had a good sense of humor and a great sense of duty, but there are so many old people living on our globe who work themselves to the bone to their death. Under much less favorable circumstances. So why the ‘about-the-dead-nothing-but-good-news’ show? That she endlessly looked after her favorite son Andrew — a welcome guest in Epstein’s young girl harem — at the very least calls for her merits to be put into perspective, rather than blind queen glorification. Just like the lack of apologies and reparations to former British colonies. But no, ‘Don’t touch our Queen!’ Worrying arrests of peaceful demonstrators with innocent lyrics like ‘Not my king’ and ‘Abolish the monarchy’ killed the scant counter voice. Even Lubach knew. Humor is the exclusive domain of the English.
In a letter sent in, a Volkskrant reader rightly writes that showing all that news about the Queen is also not showing other news. News so painful that we would rather worry about the well-being of a deceased British queen’s pet dogs than about 500 lone asylum seekers without a place to stay, tens of thousands of vulnerable children in need due to failing child protection services and 1.3 million people living under the poverty line, including more than three hundred thousand children.
‘What language do you want to speak?’, I ask Jip when he has calmed down a bit. ‘German Teacher, that is the language of science. And Dutch of course!’
I smile. Time for a history lesson next Wednesday, when it’s Prinsjesdag after this turbulent Queen’s Week, and Jip hears why the Golden Coach of our own royal family remained in the garage.