7 may

On Antje Drijver, a local heroine

I believe that nobody wants to be like the two old guys of the muppets show. Always at the sidelines and always complaining. Yet now and then, I believe that one should allow oneself at least a moment of complaining, of simply badmouting some annoying shit. So here mine, one article just to complain without being constructive in any way. 

As it happens, I live at the side of a very beautiful park. In the twenty-few years that I have lived here, I have got to know it well. I walked with my baby wrapped around my chest there, my mother walked with him later, I have run my 5k inside, and in these days of closed dojo, I even practice some kendo under the great trees, as old as they get in this city. The park was partly created for the amusement of the workers of a long gone local fabric, and using it, I feel a little bit a descendant of those old workers. I have organized political meetings there, and I have walked along with friends, enemies and allies. You could certainly say that this park is build in my dutch life. It even has a community centrum of sorts, the Antje Drijver Pavillion. Aside the children’s playground is the little building, with a little cafeteria that sells few sandwiches and coffee, and has a little and pretty meeting room, available for the community. I have always liked it, and I have been always delighted by the fact that its name is a woman’s name. I assumed that she was some sort of local community organizer. And I feel good about it. 

Till today, when I picked up a folder telling me about the heroic deed of  Antje Drijver-Huizinga. 

I still don’t know who she was. The text named her the Queen of Zuilen, the area that surrounds the park. In the first paragraph of the folder I learned that she was active in several neighborhood associations. I am not a royalist, but ok, she was active indeed as a community organizer. Yet the remaining 4/5 of the folder described in detail one of her actions, which I suppose is meant to describe why she was indeed the Queen of Zuilen. The tale is that every years, around the first days of january, she organized a central and public bonfire with all the used christmas trees. But in the nineties the city stop granting permission for bonfires, due to environmental considerations. So she called the recently designated mayor, invited him to the bonfire, so that a permission was obtained. Voila! a local heroine had done her heroic deed. And act of pure rebellion against the oppresion of the powerful. 

I guess. 

I am actually upset. For all I know, Antje Drijver was a wonderful organizer of the people, a binding factor of her community. But the way that my fellow citizens in 2021 decide to describe her value, is by once having opposed environmental legislation, and have successfully and bravely overcome it... by a phone call. 

Really.

So now that millions have died in a pandemic and the government is about to vaccinate you for free, now that many believe that said government is a crypto-nazi conspiration for having forced you to wear a face mask, now is the moment to call rebellion by... calling the city mayor by phone? I don’t know if to laugh or to cry. I think that Modi, Trump or Bolzonaro would approve of my neighbor’s folder. I suppose then that such is the wet dream of my fellow citizens, or at least some of my fellow neighbors, to live in India, or in the USA, or in Brasil... and get any of those presidents on the phone, so that they would have reversed all the vaccination programs and the lockdowns and the masks... and the pandemic would have never existed, and they would have been for ever remembered as the queen or king of whatever neighborhood they happened to live in. 

Way to go, people, way to go.