A new spitting cell

Primary school nightmares

One can only reminisce with amusement those kinds of myths and rumours that pervade the mid-mornings of primary school breaks on events that purportedly happened after closing the day before.

Before the rumour another primary school memory surfaces with the event of having all my hair shorn after a visit to the barber's though one is not sure if that was a professional mistake on the part of the barber or a Machiavellian ploy by my father for his amusement.

I never lived that episode down, with all the name-calling at school the next day. Suffice it to say kids can be so unknowingly unkind.

However, getting to school one morning the air was filled with the rumour of a spitting cobra having been caught and killed in the alleyway that leads to the playing area.

Every sort of embellishment followed with the legend of spitting teeth, blindness, terrifying and nightmarish aggressive attacks that made on walking daintily for days in the playing area thinking a brood of cobras had arrived to paralyse our quest for fun.

Faced with a spitting cobra

You may wonder why this diversion into triviality, even I wonder at the consuming triviality that accompanies the purposeful and deliberate lack of vision and social determination of our politicians.

News reaches one that a social miscreant who alleged tried to spit in the face of the Dutch Immigration and Integration Minister still languishes in a police cell pending unknown action beyond the complaint lodged by the minister.

That the minister should draw such animosity is no surprise; though she did so deftly evade the attack; her seemingly obnoxious policies one of which involves having to gain fluency in Dutch and its customs before applying to reside in the Netherlands is covered in another of my blogs.

Once again, one does not condone the unwarranted personal attacks on persons, especially those of importance in governance and society.

To pretend that certain actions and policies can be promulgated without some reaction or reactionary seeking to express dissent in some unusual albeit despicable manner is to forget the nature of society, especially when one is the Integration minister.

The unfortunate event occurred on a family outing and so probably would have affected the members of the minister's family, but then it exposes them to the fact that the wife and mother can be held both in esteem and utter contempt - such is life.

Comfortable crime figures

Not wanting to contrast the inaction of the police to ones plight when three young men put their feet into me in many bodily places which eventually required hospital treatment.

One can only subsume that lodging a complaint with the suspect to hand is easier resolve to the police than reporting actual crimes against the person where the suspects have bolted.

However, one should think that person should have now been charged with an affray except if some innovative terrorist related  crime is about to be evoked, hence, the euphemism 'The motive of the "attack" remains unclear', that said entirely without prejudice. One has to explore if a spitting cell is operating the Netherlands; that represents enough terror to our leaders.

Nonsense and sensibilities

One has documented repeatedly the apparent pre-occupation of politicians with burnishing their image and seeking redress from the most playful name-calling or irreverence that government and leadership suffers.

Might it be that the lack of inspirational ideas to get involved in mean that there is just enough time to sue for being called a toddler, or risk a diplomatic fallout for the out-spoken commentary of a truthful foreign minister.

All this, in face of the fact that the Dutch are considered blunt, if not altogether brusque.

To want to sanitise oneself from the rough and tumble of politics in the cocoon of a bye-gone age of serf and unimpeachable master is fallacy to the extreme, but that fallacy is suddenly too present in the Dutch policy, none of which leaves us with much to be surprised about.

One wonders in the end if the freedom of expression through spitting is not being curtailed by this new crop of political untouchables that crowd the Netherlands political landscape.

If one lesson can be learnt of history; Julius Caesar, a model of political office did have the opportunity to say, "Et tu, Brute"

Reference

Spitting cobra - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Man held for spitting at Verdonk

Tolerance as a mindset of choice, prejudice and hypocrisy - Part 2

Poster Dogs Potter