Tuesday, November 22, 2016

A message for all those that think (or hope) that Wilders will not be the next Dutch Prime Minister: Wake up! Hoping that it won’t happen and disconnecting from reality will give him the victory.

I remember extremely well a few concepts from when I studied Psychology in college. One is the concept of Cognitive Dissonance. This is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time; performs an action that is contradictory to their beliefs, ideas, or values; or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas or values. The example my teacher used was the person that is unable to quit smoking and therefore “tricks” him/herself with ideas such as “Uncle Louis smoked until he was 90 and he had a good life”, or “I will die of something in any case so let me at least do what I like”, tricks to reduce that stress and come to terms with that inability of quitting.

The Netherlands breathes cognitive dissonance right now in every corner. We are getting a massive amount of stress from what we are seeing happening in the world:  the Brexit, the US elections or the upcoming elections in the Netherlands and France with Wilders and Mary Le Pen leading the polls for months. We are seeing a terrifying increase in hate crimes in the UK, and the USA, we are enraged to see that the next American Vice President would like to divert HIV prevention funds to conversion therapy for LGBT people, or rule mandatory funerals for the fetuses of women that had abortions or miscarriages. We are seeing a chief of staff for the President Elect, Bannon that is the head of the alt-right movement  - which is simply the Ku Klux Klan, without the hoods, the KKK with ties and suits. We are heartbroken to see that the next leader for the Environmental Protection Agency does not believe in climate change. And the list goes on, and on.

This is so much to bare, that we disconnect. We decide not to read the news anymore, take a break from social media, and we go on with our life like if nothing happened, because we are humans after all and this is too large, too painful to digest.

And we resort to hope. We hope that the tiny chance there is that Hillary will still be president is true, hope that Trump will be impeached, we hope he will actually back up from the many things he said he would do. Here in the Netherlands we hope that Wilders will end up in jail, we hope that the multiparty Dutch system will not allow for him to be the next prime minister, hope, hope, hope….

The Guardian, the Huffington post, the New York times and many historians are warning that we are in a very similar moment than the times preceding the rise of Hitler and the second World War. So, why is the majority not reacting? It is like the band that still kept playing while the Titanic was sinking…

We hope and disconnect because is our defense mechanism and because acting is deemed extremely complicated. Two things that are allowing us to so something very difficult to get rid of the stress produced by cognitive dissonance:

One is our lack of time. We literally DON’T have time in our busy lives. We have many responsibilities at work, we have families, we have social lives, we have plans.
The other barrier is that we DON’T know quite what to do. I would add to those two, the fact that we, liberal, progressive people live in very comfortable positions thanks to our welfare systems (which we should keep), and we live in an era where we expect the government (we pay enough taxes!) to solve all of our problems for us.

Well, this is not going to be solved by the government. It surely will not be solved by us looking away and not acting. We have to learn from what has happened with Brexit and the US elections and stop hoping this won’t happen here. We have one thing in our favor, and that is that the Dutch elections are yet to happen. We can still do something so that Wilders does not become Prime Minister. I truly believe that we need to think of the worst case scenario, rather than keep hoping for the best to bring back to our minds the sense of responsibility and the sense of urgency.

Wilders 1-page program affects us all. He wants to close all mosques in the country and ban the Quran, he wants to stop funding to development cooperation, innovation, arts and culture, and funding for green energy (“windmills”), he wants to leave the EU. Even if he is right in some of the problems the country has, HE is not the answer, and HE will be the Prime Minister.

We all need to make time to act and we need to come together to think of ways (big and small) that will make a true difference. How about we use the money and the time we were going to spend in Christmas presents for 2016 in actions rather than buying more stuff that we don’t really need? How about we give each other time to make a change – as small as it might be? How about we give ourselves and others the gift of responsibility and urgency to act? How about we engage with our employers about how him as PM might impact the organization/company and ask our employer to “donate” some of our time to mobilize and “poke” others to do the same? How about we rearrange our priorities in the next 4 months to become part of the solution and not stay part of the problem?
We are starting somewhere, and are coming together to think of more strategies and actions. Join us or others that are mobilizing. Send an email to mariabordallo@gmail.com





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