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To: bwteim
Sad to see how low Holland has sunk since WWII, no pun intended. What happened to the decent, hard-working, freedom-loving Dutch of yesterday?
81 posted on 08/30/2003 5:08:43 AM PDT by Liberty Wins
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To: Liberty Wins; knighthawk
Sad to see how low Holland has sunk since WWII, no pun intended. What happened to the decent, hard-working, freedom-loving Dutch of yesterday?

Sad - but good pun, tho!
I found a paper - see excerpt below, there may be the promise of some reality therapy for the Dutch before it all goes under?

THE NETWORK SOCIETY AND THE SOLIDARITY CONTRACT

Challenges for Social Policy in the Era of Information and Globalisation, by Erik de Gier, University of Amsterdam

"The Netherlands experienced in 2002 a relatively strong political and social upheaval, till that moment unknown in the post-World War II years. Then, the existing sustainable pragmatist political coalition of social democrats and liberals suddenly lost massively social support in favour of a populist right-wing political party whose party leader has just been assassinated.

This new party for the first time publicly played the anti-immigrants playing card. The overwhelming political success of this party during the parliamentary elections in spring was only one of the expressions of an unforeseen social dissatisfaction at a large scale. The troubled relation between citizens, and between citizens and government reached its peak in the first half of 2002 (De Gier 2002).

The background of this dissatisfaction is the deeply felt experience of uncertainty and unsafety of many people in their daily life situation and as a consequence the decline of trust between people, and between the population and the government. Vos relates this directly to the informational revolution (Vos 2002). She states that the feeling of uncertainty and unsafety of people is based on the gradual decline of social cohesion in many neighbourhoods of cities in The Netherlands. Also neighbourhoods experience a development from a more traditional neighbourhood society to a network society. Geographical closeness of people in neighbourhoods as such, is not sufficient anymore for the creation of social cohesion (also Van Beek 2003)."

87 posted on 08/30/2003 8:37:23 AM PDT by bwteim (bwteim = Begin With The End In Mind)
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