May 7th, 2002

Yesterday, a black day in Dutch history... A black day for democracy...
Pim Fortuyn, leader of his own political party, was murdered in cold blood outside the radio studios where he had been for a radio program.
It was just past six o'clock in the afternoon and I was sitting here at the computer when I heard Anna... Oh my god... Oh my god...
I asked her what it was and she kept on repeating Oh my god.... I got goosebumps on my arms, even if I had NO idea what was going on. The tone of her voice, the terror in it, told me there was something seriously wrong. I hadn't heard the radio myself, so I ran down the stairs thinking that something was wrong with her.
When I got down and asked her what was wrong she told me she had just heard on the news that Pim Fortuyn was shot. Some unknown man had shot six shots at him and Fortuyn was in critical condition (later in the news they said he had been shot five times, twice in the head, twice in the back and once in the throat).
I got this really awkward feeling in my stomach. Not because I know him personally, or because I'm such a fan of him, but because it was such a cowardous thing, such an inhuman thing, a thing that shouldn't happen anywhere to anyone, a thing that couldn't happen to someone in Holland.
A politician with a great charisma. A politician who had been in the news lately, because he was the one who woke up political Holland. Because he dared to say what a lot of people thought all along.
I didn't sympathize with all of his ideas. Some of them, especially in the beginning I thought were even completely insane, and radical. In the beginning of the political debat I even made a poem (in Dutch) about it and I wondered if he would make it all the way to the end — in the political way, I mean — but I think his ideas softened up and he got more and more reasonable. He outtalked people who were against his opinions, just with facts, not with bluffing, but with pure facts.
In the 10 years that I had the right to vote, I never did. I followed politics from a distance, because it was something that — even if we're living in a democracy — people can't direct. A lot of promises are always made, but none has come true.
But Pim Fortuyn made politics interesting, he had the ability to make people listen to him, and said things that stung in the sitting parliament, because they never had the guts to name the cases with their true names. I wouldn't have gone voting this time, but politics were different with the presence of Pim Fortuyn.
Maybe that's what made him not so loved with some people. It showed in incidents at debats and in threats to his person.
And now... what he warned for came true, and it killed him.

I've never felt so touched before when a person got murdered. I didn't even know him personally, but still it struck me pretty hard.
I think it even depressed me in a way... I've been wondering where the world is going to. It's maybe a tiny bit of an exaggerated reaction, but if these things "just" happen, what in the world is going on with people?
If we start to shoot people in cold blood just because we have a different opinion?
I know it's happening all over the world every day in (communistic) countries, but it never really broke through to me since yesterday.
I used to live in a fantasy of a "free" country called Holland and that fantasy is rudely distorted.
No one's really free, anywhere. And nothing's more real than today's reality.
I wrote in the poem, one of the last verses (translated): "Politics are nothing more but one big play", but nothing's more untrue than that, proving last day's happening.

And this morning I read the newspaper, ofcourse all over the front page, the whole story again. Including a page-wide picture of Pim Fortuyn, shot down, lying on the street with a bandage on the head where one of the bullets hit in, in a pond of blood.
I talked about it with Anna last night and I agree with her so much that she says it's disrespectful to put a picture like that there.
I also understand the commercial side of the newspapers, action pictures sell and make profit, but geesh... does that have to be at all costs? Can't we at least grant that man his last dignity in an honorable way?

Another thing... I finished the newspaper and I closed it and I looked again at the picture, but it almost made me sick. I couldn't stand watching it anymore. I always take a book downstairs in case the newspaper isn't in yet, so that I can read still some before I leave to work in the early shift and at this moment I'm reading Stephen King's Dark Tales bundle Everything's Eventual.
In an impulse I grabbed the book and put it over Pim Fortuyn's head in the picture on the front page of the newspaper.
I left for work shortly after and I'd been driving for almost 20 minutes, thinking about the whole thing, when I got stuck with the image of the book Everything's Eventual on the picture of the killed Pim Fortuyn. I swallowed and started crying almost, because it struck me so hard how ironic and sad and frightening true all at the same time that image was.
Everything's eventual...
Everything really IS eventual...

The world is sick. Violence, murder, terrorist attacks... And there's so little we can do about it.
Where did the morals and values go? Where is the social control? The concern from one person to another? Why don't we watch eachother's backs anymore?
And once every now and then we are put straight back into reality because of happenings like this. There was September 11th of last year, when a lot of people died in New York when the planes flew into the Twin Towers and now there's this thing again, for me a lot closer...
But the thing that scares me the most... the thing that terrifies me is that people don't learn ANYthing from history. Not ONE thing.
Last century there was World War I, four years of war. This can NEVER happen again! It was a horrible period and people got scarred. It went in to the history books and the feeling faded.
Then there was World War II, five years of war. Even worse than the first war. It DID happen again! Somany people died, somany more people got scarred. And did we learn from it? It's gone into the history books and faded... again...
We're fighting the Gulf war, we're fighting in Kosovo, Bosnia, and where ever in the world there are wars and people are dying. And where ever in the world there are liquidations and drugkillings and heaven knows what else.
The moment it's actual it's all over the news and everyone talks about it and everyone thinks it's terrible, but it fades away and it disappears somewhere in the back of our minds as a black memory until the next thing happens and we remember and compare and think that new thing is terrible and horrible for the time that particular thing is actual. And that thing will also fade away eventually.
And we don't do ANYthing with those happenings. We don't LEARN. Temporarily increase of guards? Temporarily closing of airports? Temporarily extra checks at customs at airports and borders? And then? When nothing happens for awhile all those measures slowly vanish again and people do and act like nothing had ever happened.
How STUPID can we be? What needs to happen, howmany people have to die before we finally understand that there's a lesson in everything that happens?

This is for Pim Fortuyn, because another human being was sacrificed for nothing...