Making Light has discovered Dutch politics again. Since its audience is largely Anglo-American, it’s been interesting to see its response to the quite weird Dutch way of doing things (weird, that is, if you’re not used to it). It’s always interesting to see your own country described through strange eyes, especially when it’s portrayed as positive as Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s vision:
I think I first started thinking along these lines while you, Teresa, and I drove across Flevoland when we visited you last Spring. An entire province made of new land raised from the Zuyder Zee in our lifetimes. Watching the geometrically-regular roadside tree-plantings fly past the car windows, I began to feel I had some idea of what the inside of a terraformed generation starship would feel like.
The Netherlands aren’t just an intensely built environment–I live in one of those myself. They’re an intensely built environment in which one can discern, in social attitudes, political assumptions, ongoing social arrangements, and current events, constant signs of a common-sensical attitude that hey, we’re all living here together in this gigantic machine that we’ve built over the last thousand years, and however much we disagree about other stuff, we’d better cooperate enough to keep the machine working or we’ll all drown.
No, I’m not idealizing modern Dutch society; yes, I know they have plenty of problems; nobody needs to jump in with a post setting me straight on this point. But yes–there are ways in which the modern Netherlands feels, to an American like me, like the setting of a very interesting and well-worked out SF novel. And nothing about this fact is uncomplimentary to the modern Netherlands.
Patrick is right about the problems facing the country: the economic crisis, supposedly over but which left us with a budgetary hole of some 29 billion euros. Then there’s Wilders and the larger problem of racism and islamophobia here, not to mention the current law ‘n order/back to the fifties fashion amongst certain politicians. But when you look at the big picture, the Netherlands still is an incredibly rich, prosperous country with problems that many would envy us. Every now and again we need to understand how lucky we are to have been born into it.