Some started right away, but as a friend of the Society of Slow Progress, this is the first week of the year I can look forward. What’s up and what’s coming up? The inauguration of Obama will not be as emotional of an event as it was 4 years ago. Lance will lie. It might be the last year of Nelson Mandela. I can assure you these are not the most popular topics in my country, if you ask people what they think about looking forward. Nevertheless, these people keep tickling my mind.
In a world where information is
exploding and insecurity becomes the only security, it would be a big victory
for today’s propagandists to catch the hope for their personal hopeless vision
of the future. I can understand the skeptical position of the American public.
Four years ago, they chose Hope. Hope for
real change. And changes come slowly. So slow you might wonder if they are changes at
all or just adjustments. Adjustments of the
same idea: more competition, more ‘free market’, more of the same.
The good thing is that the world
will change and patience is a virtue. As Schoppenhauer
has written: ‘All
restriction makes happy’ and the Americans have to swallow their Qatarization. Whether they are aware of it or not, which makes appreciation of it a bit more
difficult. Aside from this, the Aaron Swartz
tragedy makes clear that changes must come within reasonable time. Otherwise, other aspects of life monopolize
the attention of the current events. Since everything is speeding up, let’s
also speed up the things that cannot wait.
Why I
write such an intro might be clear. In my little country of Holland, an identity
crisis of unknown proportions has been
taking place for a decade now. And I have to deal with it because I live here.
The call of George, Jr., ‘You Are With Us Or Against Us,’
made us choose ‘to takes the eggs for our money,’
as we say in Holland. It means we have decided what to do and cash in. By doing so, we ignore all the Dutch self-minded possibilities of
adding additional elements. With this, all the Dutch
ways of being reasonable and adding nuances,
which are so necessary in our densely populated country, were overruled. The Dutch people’s need to express themselves became
irrelevant and people failed to come out of their small environments. Also, there was this EU development and discussions, while Dutch politicians had no clue what to do. They were thinking about
Europe. The biggest EU opponent, Bolkenstein, became commissioner,
and they were thinking about more competition, economic growth and more of the
same.
There is a theory called the PP
reflection, where
politics reacts to the public, and at the same time but independently, the public
reacts to politics. They cannot meet if they have nothing to say, and they cannot talk to each other because they
do not meet. No wonder this leads to collective confusion. But ever since ‘the art of war’ originated (500 B.C.), people have
known that no matter what the strength of your opponent
is, anything you do will be a disaster, if you do not know yourself. So besides all the bitter taste, to admit you are
a hypocrite is progress.
I guess something like this is what
Lance Armstrong is going to say later this week. I
still don’t like him, I still do not love Obama,
although I have no problem being his friend on Facebook,
and I already miss the importance Mandela,
as if we wait for him to die, so we can
start remembering the good things he was speaking about. I support the idea to respect his examples of reconciliation
and reconsideration right now.
Before, there were always 3 choices:1. Agree;
2. Disagree; and
3. Pursue alternatives.
But now we only have one choice:
continue!!!
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