Offering memories of youth and joy, old friendships and new grandchildren The Balkans sucked me so badly in for the past two-three years that I shamelessly forgot about this comfortable niche.  At the same time the VKBlog changed too. So much splashes of red. Awkward new techniques. All my photography supporting the posts suddenly gone. Jaap gone too, to Vieuille Marseilles, od all places, over two years ago. Conan not writing. I doubt that the first editor Bogaerts is still here. New kids, obviously aggressive, arrogant and poorly educated, suddenly taking over. They are all around.

But then, despite the great ease of writing in Macedonian and knowing all those talkative, responsive people out there so closely, I felt that I can never abandon this facility here. The reason for such a feeling is  in the fact that I do live here, I play with two of my grandchildren around Amstelveen, my circle of friends and acquaintances enlarges and I feel so much more at home around here than anywhere else. Twenty years around and one begins to feel very much at home despite all the huge cultural differences.

On the other hand this is ALMOST just as hopeless a place as any other civilized location may be. The worst of all is that nothing much, nothing substantial is ripe for change here. At one, very brief, moment only the late, so very eloquent and so very persuasive Pim Fortuyn blew a dash of inspirational will to change the atmosphere in the land. He did lift up furies of diverse hopes that change was not only possible but imminent. But then, days after his tragic death this small-time bureaucrat Mat Herben surfaces and the big vessel of hope, the idea of overhaul, everything that might have begun, was irrevocably sunk.

Actually, it was Pim Fortuyn's improvisation that made this provincial Harry Potter type a possible contender for the President of the superpower like the European Union. Not the political fox Ruud Lubbers, not the Father of the Fatherland but marginal figures like  Jaap de Hoop and Jan-Peter  for NATO and the EU. In consequence we see a patchwork of day-to-day measures to keep tho stupid show going.  

Medieval, petrified and totally senile social structures are kept in place by brutal force and threats.

The last seven years of biblically ugly, lean cows illustrate the dimension of the forlorn hope for change. Whether it was Zalm inviting a legally proven liar on the VVD list (with mortal consequences), whether poor Bram Peper and this Neelie Croes desperately searching credible invoices, or Balkenende instigating a near constitutional crises mishandling the Margarita-Edwin affair, or this Donner and Verdonk shaming the country with the scorched 11 detainees, or the public dismemberment of ABN-Amro, the collapse of the drive to let the populace elect (in the 21-st century) their mayors, then the bona fide banishment of citizens from this country - all that forms the bulk though not the whole pile of the mess we are in with this coalition negotiated after the assassination of Fortuyn.     

I thought that all the 15 million Dutch would march to The Hague to demand this Mat Herben eat his words that the population was not yet ripe to elect its mayors. But nothing happened.  We all trade in some of our beliefs for  bits of our comfort. I know that it is very easy to discontinue such an attitude. I think I know how it is done.

I will soon have to make up my mind and spell the secret recipe out.

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