By John Dunkelgrün.
As a Dutchman who was born in 1943, I can not personally remember a time as upsetting as this. When I was ten years old, a terrible storm broke the dykes in the Southwest of The Netherlands and almost 2000 people here died. It was a terrible disaster but it was local and short-lived.
Then there was the oil crisis when our then Prime Minister Joop Den Uyl declared a car-free Sunday to save our oil supplies. There were eerily empty streets then too, but again it was short-lived and didn’t threaten anybody in other parts of the country.
This time it is different. It is not as a Dutch saying goes a “far from my bed show”, it is right here, it is now, and it threatens us all. It took a couple of weeks before that knowledge sank through to everybody. The first weekend after the government issued warnings about keeping 1.5 meters distance, tens of thousands of people ignored it and went to beaches, parks or ‘gezellige buurtborrels’. Young people thought that because they were less at risk, they wouldn’t have to distance themselves, not thinking that while carrying the virus in a mild or even unnoticeable way, they would still infect other people.
By now, the penny has dropped. Almost all people keep the proper distance. Shops limit the number of customers allowed in and in the streets and parks, people obey the distance rules. But that is not all. The situation has brought out the best in many people, calling on the lonely, the sick and the elderly, offering to do shopping or cooking or just lending an ear.
Apartment blocks spontaneously organized help committees, sports clubs, and religious organizations of all denominations thought up creative ways to use their networks to help. A wonderful little initiative to engage small children on an outside walk without getting close to others is “spot teddybears” that many people have put in their windows. I know this is happening in the Duttendel and the Van Stolk Park area of The Hague, but I am sure many other places all over the country that do this.
Of course, there are exceptions, a few people who don’t give a d..n, some hoarders, cheats and price gougers, but on the whole people in the Netherlands and, I am sure, in many other countries are showing their best sides. And I mean people from all walks of life and not just the care workers who are putting themselves at risk while working incredible hours, ordinary members of the public are showing a wonderful sense of social cohesion.
Not long ago there was talk of a loss of our “norms and values”. What this crisis shows is that when push comes to shove, our norms and values are alive and well. It shows that -in the words of the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman- most people are naturally good.
