Nederlands
English One of the critical political experiences I have from the US is wrestling with the feeling of being totally crushed.
The high of becoming activated, awakened – the day of the protest and seeing all your friends – the simple body chemistry of chanting and marching, or even a confrontation with the police and the adrenaline surge from a bit of violence – all this gives way to a crash, a hangover of considering the immediate results of all the work, which often seem to be nothing at all.
It leads many to want to focus even more than before on one’s private circumstances, the things that seem under one’s control, and walk away from shared struggle and organizing.
This political dynamic is perhaps even more crucial than the work of the weeks of build up and contestation, because the response to this dynamic effectively determines the framework for the months, perhaps years, to come. The day after the protest is as much a political moment as the day of and before. If we feel responsible to help mobilize each other before, there should be some attending to the ‘after’ as well.
In the US, it’s clear that different administrations have in fact cultivated this attitude of being impervious to critique, to dialogue, to negotiation and have done so as part of a strategy of maintaining control, discouraging dissent and resistance by convincing people that their efforts were totally in vain and futile. In the former Warsaw bloc, regimes maintained this appearance of total deafness all the way to the end, the strategy of silencing dissent only vanishing when the regimes crumbled and fell apart.
Politics is like sawing a wooden log, I read somewhere, you work and work and then suddenly the piece is broken apart. For many people, unused to this process, or those who normally are disinclined to activism, the experience of political frustration works to silence them, and this silencing is perhaps more serious and effective than secret police or censorship. In other words, the sense of defeat and loss of morale can be so concrete that they damage the conditions for the next struggle, “as real as a broken leg” one could say.
The political struggle that has been taking place in the Netherlands has now come to the cultural community. Unlike teenage girls who are insulted daily on TV for wearing headscarves, this community has some resources, some insight and some skills. The accomplishments of the last two weeks have been remarkable; that they did not achieve some instant effect does not diminish them, nor take away the satisfaction that the cultural community indeed did seize the public stage to make it’s argument, and looking over the press, the argument was made in a sympathetic and effective way. This is huge, and incredibly the protests also managed to avoid seeming like a self-centered defense of subsidies. A public case was made for the status of culture within the greater good, and in addition that the cuts are not budgetary but ideological acts, both arguments are constructive contributions to civil discourse, and establish solidarity with the citizens in general. Some journalists took up with the side of culture, and some real organizers and leading voices emerged from within our community. These are concrete accomplishments on which to build upon, even if we were out-maneuvered in this round, and such accomplishments are even more precious now as we have to come to terms with our soon to be changed landscape. As we know from art making, how one responds to setbacks is often the most important part of the process. There are tough questions to face today about how we got here, but the tougher ones are about how to move forward.
Licking one’s wounds is in order – real damage has been done; but after finally having come out to fight, let’s not let ourselves be beaten back into the cage.
Jeremiah
Photo: Janneke Wesseling
