Prisons of Travel

By sunset we took off for hang glider trips over The Hague to the North Sea coast. We started in the dark and rose to the light, seeing landscapes and human life diminish along with our daily concerns at the air force base where my friend R was also a private glider pilot and I came as his passenger. At evenings without military flights, hang gliding was allowed and we used the opportunities. This flying felt like utter paradise, there, high up in the air. But we could not step out of the cockpit. Well, we could, but death was eagerly awaiting on the ground. Paradise and hell were just one handle away from each other.

This thought often occurred to me again when I traveled continents for my holidays and ninety foreign projects. Travel is hard work and I fear nervous airports with their long queues and missed connections. I fear hotel rooms without my personal energy at lonely evenings and weekends. I fear jetlegs that grow longer with aging. I fear food poisonings. I fear plotting taxi drivers. I fear pickpockets in rushy cities. I fear long, hot hours in the traffic. I fear for accidents that take a 1,4 million deaths each year. I fear the police in countries where they tell me: ‘Stay away from the government, and most of all from the police.’

Travelers best learn to stay in the cockpit to protect their sense of freedom.

Environmental dangers, balanced policy making

It's nice that leading figures have started to point at the dangerous effects of climate change. But other environmental dangers are larger: depletion of groundwater stock, depletion of ocean fish with nearing irreversible marine ecosystem damage, and depletion of forests with irreversible slope erosion, all for about 70% now already. 

But how do we rank these damages? There is no need to remain in the domain of confused worry. We can identify three types of degradation: depletion, pollution and disasters. These degradations occur in four 'compartments': soil, water, air and organisms. This may give some the clarity for balanced policy making. Here are examples of degradation in the four compartments:

Depletion of soil: mountain run off after deforestation

Depletion of water: groundwater stock

Depletion of air: urban fresh air

Depletion of organisms: ocean fish stock

Pollution of soil: fluid waste dumping

Pollution of water: agricultural chemicals

Pollution of air: climate gasses

Pollution of organisms: genetic manipulation

Disasters, soil: earthquake

Disasters, water: inundation

Disasters, air: industrial gas explosion

Profit seeking and consumption growth per capita are more dangerous than population growth. Humanity at large has to learn that endless conquering and growth are no longer viable options. But don't count too much on governments and corporations. Count on grassroot initiatives that directly improve environmental sustainability or effectively influence governments and corporations, such as voting for a green party or organize boycotts by consumers. Personal contributions to those initiatives and interconnecting those initiatives in order to make them stronger are even better.

Commemoration of WWII victims: Unmask leaders, embrace people

Today in Holland we commemorate Dutch victims of the Second World War.

Over the last few years proposals come up to commemorate together with our German neigbors both Dutch and German victims. 

Although risking disapproval, I’ve been proposing that for decades, and not only on the 4th of May.

Most Germans were just trapped by the power machinations of their leaders. 

May our brains learn to unmask leaders. May our hearts learn to embrace people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyBiQaVyLMM

Clashes of cultures teaching wise westerners

As in other western societies, in Holland there is painful surprise about foreign resentment against us. Dutch cartoonists and standup comedians who are critically commenting on Turkish president Erdogan get stiff resistance from many Turkish citizens in Holland, while being themselves up in arms because they feel their freedom of speech is at stake.

The resisting Turks do not value high this western principle of free speech. According to their Turkish culture they experience the comments as unacceptably insulting. And now that Turks get more assertive they let us know what they think of the western free speech principle.

I fear that this friction will not be the only one but that culture clashes are going to happen more and more in the world, with many westerners learning the hard way that their culture is not a universal culture but just one culture among many. Westerners will be forced to give up their topdog position and learn what underdogs know all along: there are at least two cultures, one of the topdog and one of the underdog.

If westerners want to survive relatively well, they need to come down and learn what French Queen Marie Antoinette did not when she kept saying that starving peasants should eat cake if they had no bread. She could not come down to understand that cake was even less available to the poor.

Marie Antoinette did not adjust to the reality of different worlds living next to each other and was beheaded. Westerners may wake up in time.

On origins of human imagination

As deduced by developmental psychologists, fetuses and infants unconsciously experience their environment as fully comfortable, eternal, safe, blissful and harmonious. They think they are exclusive, the center of the world, perfect, glorious, invulnerable, inconvincible, with free will and all-powerful. They are convinced of having no boundaries in space and time, and being one-and-the-same with their mother and one-and-the-same with all reality.

Relevant here are dynamics of the unconsciously experienced merger with the mother. When we feel to be one-and-the-same with our mother, we also experience ourselves as being her. But slowly we start noticing the boundaries between ourselves, our mother, other parts of the outside world, and between now, the past and the future. But we maintain the capacity to imagine that we are our mother, others, other parts of the world and other points in time.

In other words, through the process of separation-individuation, the already existing capacity of imagination gets transformed from the unconscious to the conscious, from the preverbal to the verbal state of mind, and from merger to distinction. 

Made to believe in the Netherlands

In my country we are made to believe that elections can change politics.

We are made to believe that in spring we can put off winterclothes even when temperatures are near zero.

We are made to believe that mathematics is more difficult than football.

We are made to believe that banks are safe.

We are made to believe we should wait for the red light even in the absence of crossing traffic.

We are made to believe that the first Zionists hardly found any Palestinians.

We are made to believe that it is fairly warm even if the wind cools us down.

We are made to believe that school teachers have to measure achievements.

We are also made to believe that we should empty our dinner plate.

We are made to believe that we should drink ¾ litre of milk a day.

And we are made to believe that men and women are similar.

Some of those misconceptions are busy leaving the country now, though not all of them, to be certain.

Football star Johan Cruyff: Embodiment of the sixties emancipation

He changed football and changed the world, this man of modest descent.

Unlike Ronaldo, Messi, Maradona and Pelé, he was not only a brilliant player, but he had the intelligence and courage to dynamize team play and make it successful. Billions of people in the world watched his Dutch Clockwork Orange team in amazement and admiration.

Like Bob Dylan and John Lennon, he showed that old routines in thinking and action could be overcome. He created relief and hope. He inspired people to improve their lives by taking courage and overcome obstacles in themselves and society.

This inspiration did not only spread out in Amsterdam and the Netherlands, but also in Catalonia where emancipation had been oppressed by the Franco regime and winning remained beyond dreams for long. A Barcelona friend asked him once: ‘How do you manage to win so often?’ He said: ’Have no fear.’

He taught the Catalonians and billions in the world not to be intimidated by authorities. He had no patience with sterile hierarchies in society. He undermined self-paralyzing comfort zones. He was both a child and a protagonist of the 1960s.

His parents spoke the working class Dutch that middle and upper class people saw as ridiculous. But he did not mind and went on talking like his family did. He had a deep loyalty to his parents, as he had to his wife and children. Perhaps it was the foundation of his self-confidence.

His name is Johan Cruyff. He was born in 1947 and died in April 2016.

Johan to the left, with his father and elder brother

Johan to the right, with his mother and wife Danny