I lived in the Netherlands for over a decade. At first, it felt like we had moved to the nightmare community depicted toward the end of Madeline D’Engle’s book, Wrinkle in Time. In the book, the child time travelers find themselves in a mechanically perfect bedroom community. The houses are identical, the kids all dress the same, emerge from their homes at the same time to bounce their basketball the same number of times, then return to their homes for the same snack.
It took awhile to notice the many variations within the pattern. The homes, though similar, were not the same. Schedules are important to the Dutch, but they vary considerably from person to person. I tried my best to not have a schedule, but as a teacher, had little hope of succeeding. After showing up a week early for one meeting, and hours late for another, I trained myself to follow the schedule, though I let others make it for me.
Despite its small size, the Netherlands is the world’s second largest agricultural producer. This is largely thanks to their careful land management. You can see this everywhere: well-organized greenhouses, farmland, commercial spaces and residential communities. In America, we zone land for different types of usage, but not to the extent it is done in the Netherlands. There, you can almost see the zoning lines running along the streets, crossing farmland, and even in the air, defining where windmills can and cannot be placed.
Near my home was a small manmade lake called Asterdplas. It had a short, sandy “beach” along one side, inviting locals to lay out on towels to get a tan, or to hop in the water for a swim. My family and I liked to swim in the lake, which we did as often as possible during summer months.
After swimming there for a couple of years, I developed a rash on my back. I didn’t know where it had come from, and went to the doctor to get rid of it. At about the same time, we noticed people were sitting on the Asterdplas beach, but weren’t swimming. One day, we asked why. “Because the water is contaminated.”
It turned out that the Asterdplas welcome sign had a new feature warning residents that the lake was now a biohazard and to avoid swimming in the water. We had seen the sign when we first moved in, but didn’t understand Nederlands (Dutch). At that time, it din’t have a biohazard warning. By the time the biohazard warning was added, we did understand Dutch but had long since stopped reading the sign. We thought we knew what it said. The locals knew about it because it had been in the news and everyone was talking about the pollution in the water.
The way the Dutch have scientifically engineered their high agricultural output is a marvel. They have also come up with many innovations to limit pollution and to keep their population healthy. Their towns are designed as communities, with communal places called a town “centruum” (like a town square) where almost all shopping is done, and people often meet friends and family for a day’s outing. Likewise, the farming is done in designated locations, broken down by type of farming, and roads are designed to keep people and the things they need as close to each other as possible.
Similarly, they had excellent information-dispersal systems to quickly pass on important information to the communities they served. As a foreigner, I missed the Asterdplas warning, but that was a rarity. Even I knew when there was a burglar in the neighborhood, because police erected huge billboards near the street I lived on to warn us.
It never occurred to me when I was a resident, how easy it might be to destroy everything the Dutch had built. And yet, like a bit of gravel in a pocket watch, it almost happened.
Over the past few years, we observed in horror as Dutch and other European countries were told by the EU authorities that they had to stop about thirty percent of all farming activities. The EU leader, Ursula Van Leyden (Dutch, no less), led the movement. They had decided that, to protect society from the illusion known as climate change, that they were going to destroy themselves.
The Dutch farmers knew what this meant: the destruction of their nation. Along with unchecked migration to the Netherlands and Islamic violence, the attempt to destroy their food supply and a major source of economic health was the last straw. The farmers of the nation rose up and protested like nothing seen since World War II, when columns of Nazi tanks invaded Rotterdam and other cities.
This time, it was farmers with columns of tractors, blocking access to many important thoroughfares, who paralyzed the country. Their goal: to protect the Dutch from the EU. They succeeded. Geert Wilders, the man most feared by Dutch leftists, and his party (PVV), won a landslide victory in parliament this year.
I remembered Wilders from my time in the Netherlands. He frequently spoke about the assassinations of Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh, and the threat posed by migration from Islamic countries. For that, he was threatened with prison, had his right to free speech curtailed, and suffered many other indignities. When I mentioned to a student that I couldn’t find anything wrong with Wilders, he reacted with a gasp of horror.
My student, just like me when I stopped looking at the Asterdplas welcome sign, had failed to notice the warnings in his own community. Wilders saw the problems, just as the farmers did, and are now acting to fix the problem. If they are as successful as their predecessors were at designing the world’s most productive agricultural powerhouse, the time of climate change alarmism will soon end. They have sounded the warning, and they were heard. It didn’t happen right away, but it did happen, and now the tide is starting to turn.
We see it also in France, where Marine Le Pen’s conservative party scored a significant victory against globalist Macron. In Italy, their new leader, Georgia Meloni, seeks to steer her country away from the globalist agenda. Meanwhile, Hungary’s Victor Orban has just taken the reins in the EU’s rotating leadership, and has met with Russia’s Vladimir Putin to talk peace with Ukraine. Other countries are also fed up with globalism and are turning away.
A few years ago, I wanted these things to happen, but they seemed very far away and perhaps impossible. Now, they are becoming a reality before our eyes. It is a beautiful thing, to watch as so many people awake to the warning signs all around them, and react appropriately.
Globalism isn’t dead yet, but we now know it was designed to kill us, and that is the first step to defeating it. We’re already working on step two. It is only a matter of time before globalism and all the other socialist-inspired sub-movements that go with it, are faded memories.
Speaking of warning signs, I’ve compiled some interesting articles and multimedia by and/or featuring Geert Vanden Bossche, Dr. Philip McMillan, and Dr. Robert Rennebohm. I named my collection with an easy to remember shortcut:
tinyURL.com/NewCovidDanger
There is some timely and important information in there with which you should be acquainted if you are not already.
Love the optimism!! We individuals have more power than we realize and as Marly Hornick often says ‘we are the miracle.’ Prayer and positive affirmations are working.