Politics

I've been here a bit over 6 months now, and have been noticing a bit of trend. With some elections around the corner and ramped up political grandstanding, some issues have too obnoxious to ignore.

I said in an earlier post that the Netherlands is much more supportive of immigrants, in helping most of them pay for classes to learn the language and the culture. The flip side, of course, being that non-European Union immigrants are required to learn the language and culture.

Despite this (mostly) helpful approach, there are some political parties advocating a less helpful and more punitive approach to immigration in general. The more (in)famous is the PVV, the party of Geert Wilders. The PVV was the third most popular party at the last general elections, and is part of the coalition government currently running the country, along with the two most popular parties. The major platform of the PVV is anti-Islamist - in fact, it was originally formed to oppose Turkey being admitted to the EU, due to being a largely Muslim nation.

Wilders is currently on trial for discrimination and inciting hatred (a crime here) against Muslims, basically for saying that Islam is facsist, Moroccans are violent, and advocating banning the Koran for being comparable to "Mein Kampf". His defense is that his statements should be protected as free speech. In addition to wanting to ban the Koran, he wants to remove the constitutional promise of equality under the law, replacing it with the cultural supremacy of the jewish-christian tradions. Some other gems he's proposed: no non-Western immigration for a while, preaching only allowed in the Dutch language, no new mosques or islamic schools, and special ghettos for "undesirable" people (and their families) to be forced to live in for a while. He thinks the primary focus of Dutch foreign policy should be the eradication of Islam.

The PVV has also come out strongly against non-Western immigration, more recently including Western European members of the EU in that category. He thinks unemployed Eastern European migrants that are legally in the country should be deported if they become unemployed, even though they have been paying unemployment taxes just like everyone else.

Unfortunately, there is a common Dutch perception that even the Dutch-born children of Dutch immigrants with full Dutch citizenship are still "immigrants" and not really Dutch - they are seen as outsiders. This causes some of the more idiotic Dutch to treat the children of immigrants as second-class citizens, something which those children know is wrong, but is still happening and mostly allowed. As a result, these children tend to either 1) rebel and get in trouble or 2) become highly educated and move to a country where they can get a job. Both results kinda suck, according to the politicians always talking about attracting and retaining highly educated immigrants, and the politicians complaining about people whose parents were born elsewhere being a bunch of useless criminals.

One way this discrimination against "outsiders" is expressed is by silly job requirements - frequently a native level of Dutch speaking is listed as a requirement in job listings, even though there are no interactions with customers and fluent Dutch is sufficient.

As an English speaker that hasn't looked for a job yet, I haven't been discriminated against. In fact, strangers assume I'm Dutch until they start talking to me and I ask them if they speak English. But I have an Egyptian friend from class that has co-workers get upset if him and another Arabic speaker use Arabic to explain something work-related that they can't handle in English or Dutch. He was honestly upset about this - his co-workers had hurt his feelings by demanding that he only speak Dutch in their presence at work.

With that sort of thing happening, and all of the political bullshit bouncing around, I can easily understand why even the highly educated migrants want to go elsewhere. Who wants to contribute to a society that constantly tells you that you have less worth than they do?

Boodschappen Doen

"Boodschappen doen" is the Dutch equivalent to "running household errands" or "doing household shopping." It's the title of the post because today is the first time I went grocery shopping on my own :-) I suppose I cheated a bit by using the self-checkout option, but it's still a first for me.

I started my next level of Dutch classes yesterday. The book moderately sucks though, and has to be supplemented by 70-ish pages of worksheets. At least B2 goes back to the same format we had for A. There's 15 people in this class, all from different countries. Very diverse! A couple are from Indonesia and Belgium, so they speak enough Dutch to skip the A level. Everyone seems to be at about the same level, except one guy who consistently got inversions wrong.

I have to admit, it's easy to get word order wrong in Dutch, especially if you're accustomed to speaking a language where you can speak while you're still forming the thought. If you try that in Dutch, odds are your "extra" bits (referring to time or place) or verbs and subjects will end up in the wrong order somewhere. But it's also hard to keep track of the whole sentence you want to say, if it's more than 10 words or so. I guess we should focus on shorter, concise sentences when speaking spontaneously :-P

Even though the work is harder, using more grammatical rules in combination with each other, the pace seems slower now than it was for A level Dutch. Not a lot of homework, and we just cover 5-8 pages per day, but the stuff we do cover needs a lot of practice to get it to stick.

The class I'm in now is in the morning, which is much nicer. I can stop at the shops on the way home (like today!) and get stuff done without trying to cram it in during the evening when everything is super crowded. Stores close very early here ... the grocery stores aren't so bad, staying open til 8 usually, but the special food stalls all close at 6pm. With the craptastic traffic, that makes it impossible to shop at the stalls after work. And I like cooking fresh, healthy dinners. It's so much harder to eat right when coming home hungry with no chance to shop and little time to cook. It's also more fun being able to shop every other day, and get really fresh stuff, instead of loading up once or twice a week.

The stalls here are something I'm not used to in the US. Although there are supermarkets with a bit of everything, there's also smaller shops around specializing in a certain type of food: cheese stores, fruit & vegetable stores, fish stores, meat stores, poultry stores, bakers, etc. Although they exist in the US, they're far more common here, and pretty essential if you want anything atypical. The supermarkets tend to have a limited selection of everything, though will have 10-20 different varieties of each popular item. It's annoying :-P