CRISIS IN PARADISE Don’t think Holland is permanent paradise. Comfort and success can lead to oversaturation, overconfidence and presumption, and make confrontations with reality on the ground too painful to acknowledge and manage. The national football team, once amazingly successful, lost its spirit and three matches. Every footballer in the country saw that the managers of the football association now appointed an old and saturated coach who was better in lobbying to get the job than able to inspire a team of lethargic stars. But failing managers, like failing governments, are produced by failing societies, so let us start looking at ourselves first. Admittedly, it is not simple to show how we produce failing managers and politicians, but it is easy to see how a vast majority of the Dutch show a monumental type of racism that they don’t want to acknowledge, let alone manage. Most of the Dutch parents are coming out with their wish to maintain the tradition of Black Pete in an unaltered way. They simply do not understand that this tradition reinforces racism, and that they, therefore, are racists themselves. They come up with a number of justifications, but avoid to consider that the figure of Black Pete, subjugated to the superior white Saint Nicholas, undermines the self-confidence of colored children right from their formative early years on. The Dutch may have a long away to go here. But perhaps it is just a forebode of larger wake up calls when confrontations in the wider world reveal how comfort and success have been leading us into overconfidence, self-satisfaction or even arrogance.
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 09:10:41 +0000
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