EU Election Anxieties

When I sent off my absentee ballot to vote in the US elections last Fall, I devised and enclosed a self-addressed stamped postcard bearing the message that my ballot had been safely received by the Florida officials. They sent it back to me! Another feel-good moment in the November 2008 US elections!

This week, I’ve been reminded that election ballots can be fearful to behold: the Dutch version of the ballot for the EU parliamentary elections features 289 candidates representing 17 parties, as depicted on the sample ballot you see above. A resident of the Netherlands, I can vote if I want to: I’m a dual national. The non-Dutch side of my dualism tells me that before voting I should know something about all of the candidates, but of course I don't, so there's some tension in this pre-election phase.

(The European Parliament in Strasbourg unites over 600 elected officials from all member states. Most of the electorate has trouble measuring the impact of the huge EU bureaucracy on our lives. But urgent issues abound: asylum-seekers + anti-asylum-seekers, undocumented workers + people smugglers (for the sex industry or agricultural work – recently a Dutch asparagus farm was busted on charges of holding Roumanian workers as slaves), angry farmers + inhumane animal transporters, environmental sustainability, trade, defense, terrorism, etc.…)

There are a couple of parties I won’t vote for: not on the European level, not in the Netherlands. And now one of those groups has become an EU ‘list-partner’ for the party of my initial choice, which makes it no longer my choice. The party which is no longer my choice is led in the Dutch Parliament by a man who first drew my admiration when serving the Dutch government in The Hague as ‘Reform and Kingdom Relations Minister.’ (Kingdom Relations refers to the former colonies in the Caribbean) At the time he was labeled ‘disloyal’ on more than one occasion, including the Fall of 2005 when he accused the Dutch Prime Minister of scare-mongering with constant warnings about terrorism. Then he ran media gauntlets after describing the political climate in The Hague as ‘filthy and nasty.’ He was supposed to deal with reform, but no one expected him to start talking about that kind of reform.

If I eventually do understand why his party has teamed up with a group I cannot support, a feel-good (or not quite as bad) moment might be closer by. Explanations have been circulating for weeks, but I'm not buying them.

Your Daughter is with Us - Pt.5

When asked why I choose to live in Europe rather than in my native North America, I have on occasion been known to reply:

Things didn't work out that well over there. We're all coming back.

Just kidding! Some people laugh with me. Others are alarmed. Let's face it, this is basically an out-emigration continent, and it can take a while for both immigrants and natives to adjust.

An update from friends a few hours down the road in France: Hua was nine years old, an undocumented resident of Paris, when police picked her up in the metro and took her into custody a couple of years ago, triggering a recovery effort by French neighbors and social activists who succeeded in reuniting child with (undocumented) parents before the day was done.

Episodes 1-4 about Hua’s life in Paris are here:

Pt 1 - May 31, 2007
Pt 2 - June 25, 2007
Pt 3 - September 14, 2007
Pt.4 – July 21, 2008

Hua's release, on that first frightening night, became possible when the Chinese-made document declaring little Hua to be living in the company of her legal parents was declared acceptable by the French authorities responsible for minors. The 'document' was certainly as valid as the flimsy ‘lease’ provided by the French landlord. Nevertheless, when the landlord decided things were getting too hot under his feet, he forced Hua, a new baby brother and her parents out of the shack under the stairwell of the apartment complex.

It would have been hard to relocate to something worse. And indeed, they moved to a place with more light, and then moved again, to a place with two rooms, allowing the parents to rent out one of the rooms to a single Chinese man. Hua continues to attend school and her French has improved enough for her to describe her displeasure with the fact that she is now, at age 11, home alone in the afternoon and evenings (her mother works until late in the evening and the father has been hospitalized), taking care of her baby brother while in the company of this male lodger. She doesn’t like him very much. She didn’t say why.

Meanwhile, my friend, who still lives in the building where Hua and her parents lived until the baby was born, has befriended a pair of little Chinese boys who live upstairs in an apartment with windows opening to a view of my friend’s door below. The boys have discovered that they can come and chat with her if she is at her ground-floor window, but more importantly, that she will help if their drunken father begins to beat up their mother. My friend once called the police on him, and believes that her presence might not save the mother from beatings, but it might keep her alive. The boys no longer feel trapped and alone upstairs when violence breaks out – they can fling open their window and call down to their new French friend.

Immigration issues are sticky wickets all around Europe, and with elections for the European Parliament coming up soon, the anti-foreigner temperature is rising. On this blog, on March 3, 2008 (see: A Win-Win Situation), I stated that the right-wing Dutch PVV Freedom Party was losing some of its steam. I was dead wrong! A recent poll of political parties positioned the PVV as the FRONT-RUNNER, the largest party in the Netherlands. Polls can be off the mark, but few will dispute the staying power of this anti-immigration anti-Islam group. If the poll is accurate and if the PVV does expand to the point of qualification for inclusion in a government coalition - who knows what will happen? A number of (centrish and leftish) parties have vowed to never enter into a coalition with the PVV, the Dutch variant on anti-foreigner fevers registering throughout Europe.

If only there was more time. My native North America has its own new immigration problems to solve, but some of the old ones worked themselves out. If people just pile in decade after decade, stuff happens.

In New York’s East Village I lived on a Ukranian block where the women wore headscarves while scrubbing the front steps of our apartment buildings. Baseball games were organized during quiet hours on the street by the tiny Puerto Rican grocery store mid-block. We were all watched over by the self-appointed neighbourhood guards, the Jamaican Rasta’s, who scared off purse-snatchers and other ne’er-do-wells at all hours of the day and night.

These were old tenement buildings originally constructed without any sanitary facilities. Rodent control experts occasionally made the rounds. I was in a conundrum one day when I couldn’t get one such expert, a huge, friendly guy now living in a New York suburb, to leave, after he performed his anti-rodent duties. His reluctance to depart had nothing to do with me (or the mice) – he was overcome with nostalgia. The big man shed tears at my table as he described having grown up in a railroad apartment similar to mine, with the whole family jammed into two rooms. He came through the rough & tumble well and did what most do: he emigrated to a more spacious environment nearby, with an entire house for his own family, and a lawn to mow.

It's just not the same as being all close with your family and neighbors, all the time, and those stories of making do with less are not very interesting to my kids.

Maybe later on, when they’re bigger?

That, too, takes time.

English as Accessory

Learning Dutch involves making choices. Depending on where you live, you may or may not want to take on the local accent and vocabulary (regional dialects are another issue altogether). Differences in pronunciation can be significant – perhaps less for foreigners more accustomed to adjusting to new sounds than for, let’s say, Dutch TV-makers, who are prone to adding subtitles when non-mainstream native Dutch speakers are on screen.

Students of Dutch familiar with English, German, Swiss-German and Danish have a head-start in the language-learning process in the Netherlands, but newcomers who don’t speak English at all may be at a disadvantage. Knowing which English words or phrases to use, and when to do it, adds a certain je ne sais quoi to one’s Dutch.

Consider these few random examples encountered in recent weeks:

The nation’s leading evening newspaper, the NRC Handelsblad, stays high-brow in an editorial on Holland’s faltering judicial system by referring to something rotten.

Their morning tabloid edition targets the mobile generation with the name NRC Next.

The need for speed also peppers the speech of a producer of a jittery prime time talk show, where, as the producer concedes, haste can unhinge a script, but it’s TV and there’s never a dull moment.

Streamlined modernity shapes the program title InFocus (an example of how English words are sometimes combined into one for the Dutch variant) and its Update from the Muslim Broadcasting Company (in a system with Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Humanist and other secular broadcasting organizations).

A music sector network opts for misguided word play (that’s when it gets irritating) in framing their discussion Copyright or wrong… on authors’ rights.

Clearly a wrong decision was made when a woman named ‘Lies’ (Dutch pronunciation = ‘Lease’) created a store name by combining her own name with an English-language description of the business, resulting in Lies. For Kids. Good luck there!

I am, however, grateful to the Dutch journalist and author John Jansen van Galen who offers splendid isolation as an option for this country’s noisy right-wing PVV Freedom Party.