Fat

In recent history there have been moments when iconic images changed the course of events. Think about the picture of the little girl Phan Thị Kim Phúc which marked the beginning of the American withdrawal from Vietnam, or more recently, the photo of the little boy Aylan, flushed on the Turkish shore, which finally made the European leaders gather to discuss the migrant crisis.

I stopped following the news, so I did not know why all of a sudden last Wednesday the hashtag #Oranje and #dikkeBMW (‘fat BMW’) became trending on Twitter. At first I thought that #Oranje referred to the dreadful qualification series our national football team played and the upcoming 2 matches which are crucial in order to qualify for the European Championship of 2016. But no,  the hashtag referred to the little village with 150 inhabitants in the north of the Netherlands with the patriotic name Oranje (‘orange’). State secretary of justice Klaas Dijkhof came that night to that little village to explain why he decided that 700 mainly Syrian refugees were going to stay in a neighboring holiday bungalow complex. The villagers already had taken up 700 refugees and with the new 700 the total number would come to 1,400 refugees on a local population of 150. The fact that the owner of the bungalow complex, mogul Hennie van de Mos, made a lucrative deal with the city council about the exploitation, didn’t help neither.

Needless to say that the villagers were , to say the least, not amused. The evening went by rather tumultuous and when finally Dijkhof left after a heated debate, a lady blocked Dijkhof’s BMW and shouted angrily: “look, he has a fat BMW!” An undercover policeman pulled her away. The lady tripped, twisted her ankle, fell, and in front of the national press the woman was laying in a not very flattering position crying on the pavement.

Here history was being made, this was iconic footage. It was David against Goliath, it was Asterix fighting the roman occupiers, it was the unknown man in front of the Chinese tanks on the Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Well, they wished it was. Unfortunately this was Holland’s country side, where the people  with valid arguments like ‘the wifi channels are overloaded’ and ‘I have also two daughters’ try to keep off the refugees. The classical not-in-my-backyard syndrome.

My family is from that region, and I grew up in a village like that, so I know how things work in these kind of communities.  I had to chuckle when I heard the villagers talking with their, from me very recognizable, northern drawl. “And with all these strange religions, these migrants fight all the time!” For the sake of convenience they forgot to mention that a few villagers also kicked off the mirrors of Klaas Dijkhof’s fat BMW.

There is a lot to be said about how these haphazard decisions were made, and whether if it was a wise idea to put another 700 refugees in a village with 150 inhabitants which already had taken up 700 refugees, but as Dijkhof said: “sometimes reality forces you to take unorthodox decisions.”

A friend of my summarized it perfectly: “well well, an uproar in Little Whinging, Jesus Christ guys, it is 2015. Welcome to a globalized world.”