| The Dutch Elections 2010 | |
| It is difficult to know and decide upon what I feel about these elections. My first feelings, as the results came in, was as primitive as the politics of the party whose success I am so upset about. I wanted all those who voted for Geert Wilders and his revolting hate mongers to be given the order they themselves would like to impose on Islamic immigrants. All racists and all people who exclude groups on the basis of a contradiction of the first law of our constitution should be shown the border and go and live in a large country with other self-satisfied, ugly bigots. I foresee a great utopian hell, a country, perhaps the melting South Pole, like Dante’s hell, where all these misguided embittered people, who have given themselves to their narrow mindedness and who have forsaken the responsibility they have to themselves, can happily vent their moronic hatefulness and receive poetic justice. Alright that was my first reaction. I hope you will forgive me for it, I am all too human. I then thought of John Rawls and became calm. Still, I am still seething with an anger that borders on the selfrighteous. I love Holland in all its awkward bluntness and funny humourlessness, but in the PVV and its politics a predilection for meanness manifests itself which I would gladly keep hidden in Pandora's box. But I must be careful that I do not go the same way; I feel thoughts coming up in me which confirm that I too am first and foremost a primate and that I have to dig deep for my humanity, just like the man whose silly hairdo stands as an emblem for the banality of his solution to the problem of society. His kind of sad tribalism-without-a-tribe represents our inability to overcome that which can make us into very unpleasant animals indeed. My neighbour at work, a lovely Iranian lady of sophistication and great intelligence, told me she wanted to leave the country she had escaped to in order to escape horribleness overrunning Iran. I understood and asked her not to: when the going gets tough the kind need to get going. We must not answer barbarism with flight or barbarism. We need to meet it with kindness, love and forgiveness and above all, exemplary behaviour, however difficult that is. We need to encourage these sad deluded creatures, who think so meanly and who have given themselves to meanness, to become different by taking their thinking seriously. Not by giving into it and allowing a hard society to develop, but by telling them why they are wrong and by respecting our own laws by implementing them in the spirit and letter they were composed. We need to show fairness and kind resolve. |
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