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Netherlands: discontent over government once more benefits the extreme right

The right wing Farmers Party is the real winner in the recent Dutch elections. This is a catastrophe for the environment.

As was expected, the governing parties, the right liberal VVD, the liberal D66 and the Christian democrat CDA, suffered defeat in the recent provincial elections as discontent with government policy runs ever deeper. The new right wing farmers party BBB, who participated in the provincial elections for the first time, became the biggest party in all of the twelve provinces on the cusp of a far right rural movement railing against nitrate restrictions on intensive cattle farming. The massive victory for BBB came at the expense of other extreme right parties like Geert Wilders’ PVV and Thierry Baudet’s so-called “Forum for Democracy” (FvD) as well as the governing parties VVD and CDA.

While the vote shifted from other, more extreme right parties to the BBB, the far right camp in general – consisting of the BBB, PVV, FvD and the JA21 – has continued to grow. If one includes the Christian fundamentalist SGP, which has clearly positioned itself in the far right camp over the last years, the right wing fringe has managed to gain 28 out of 75 seats in the Dutch upper chamber of the legislative (which are determined by the provincial councils). In the previous provincial election in 2019, which was marked at the time as a landslide victory for the fascist FvD, the extreme right only managed to obtain 17 senate seats (19 if you include the SGP).

Commentators in the Dutch press gladly join in with the right wing talking point that there is a rural revolt against the big cities. This follows a century old trope masking right wing extremism as “farmer common sense” – a frame used mostly by demagogues in the cities rather than farmers themselves. Most recently it was deployed by the extreme right wing “journalist” and propagandist Wierd Duk in 2018 when he justified the action of fascist “blockading Frisians” who blockaded a highway to prevent anti-racist activists from protesting the racist ‘Zwarte Piet’ figure featured in the Dutch St. Nicholas celebrations.

A superficial glance at the facts will do to show that nothing about this frame fits the reality of the situation. Initially, the rise of the far right was an urban and sub-urban phenomenon. Of all places, the working class city of Rotterdam was the site of the rise of the Islamophobic and far right Pim Fortuyn who broke the taboo on explicitly racist politics in the Netherlands. Even the gains of the farmers party BBB are not limited to rural areas. And the Dutch countryside has seen a gradual shift to the right from the CDA, initially benefitting the right liberal VVD.

The victory for the BBB is a disaster for the climate and for biodiversity. The VVD and CDA have done all they can to shift responsibility for nitrate regulations on cattle farming to the provinces, hoping that the provincial councils would block the national policy. Following last weeks’ election result, they will likely succeed in this, although they have gotten more than they bargained for. Now that the BBB is the biggest party, it is almost certain that nitrate regulations will be stalled and eventually rewritten in the interests of the agricultural and processing companies. The provincial council fractions of VVD and CDA will likely support such a move, undermining the policy of their own national government and shifting the balance of forces in prime minister Rutte’s cabinet to the right.

The Netherlands’ concentration of pig farming compared with the rest of Europe. Graphic: Arte

Forum for Democracy”

One silver lining of these elections is the loss of the fascist FvD, even though it doesn’t come as a surprise. After the party split in December 2020 and the neofascist circles around Thierry Baudet and Freek Jansen consolidated their control of the party, the electoral support for the FvD has dwindled compared to the 2019 election. The seats the party won at the time have almost all been lost to internal conflicts over the course of four years. The joy on parts of the left over their loss therefore comes off as exaggerated.

FvD have only lost votes in small amounts to other far right parties. Around 40 per cent of FvD voters in 2021 did not show up this time. Only 10 per cent voted for BBB. The fascists therefore did not so much lose because of another far right party’s success, but rather because a significant part of their own support base have turned their backs on the FvD. It seems like this can be explained by the fact that the FvD leadership overplayed their hand. In the weeks before the election, the FvD increasingly turned against the BBB, accusing them of being a “controlled opposition”. This has led to BBB-chair Caroline van der Plas receiving death threats and a rift in the far right front that was supposed to have mobilised the “biggest demonstration ever” in the Hague on Sunday the 12th of March which ended in a flop for the FvD-fascists.

Although the FvD maintain a frighteningly loyal core support base, who not only vote for them, but are also party members, buy merchandise, consume fascist media and sometimes participate in far right street protests – they are still a small minority compared to the passive electorate of the far right. The latter wider group has up to now not been won over to fully fledged fascism and seems to abhor attacks on other far right parties.

But this situation is far from static. The FvD has a solid base and a real network of fascist media with a serious reach behind them. Furthermore, the fascists show the logical consequences of views that the entire far right share. FvD is focused on raising an extra-parliamentary movement and can continue building it. They might not be a big force electorally, but the danger of fascism is felt in the long term and doesn’t originate from their parliamentary fractions as much as from their influence outside of parliament.

The Left

The left wing parties (the social democrat PvdA, the green party Groenlinks, the socialist SP and the animal rights party PvdD) have done really badly in this election, even if one wouldn’t guess it from the speeches from their leaders. The left has not been able to profit from the blows the government parties incurred. The explanation is simple: the left have not consistently opposed the government and have made no attempt to offer an alternative. The PvdA and Groenlinks together have 15 seats in the Senate and form the second biggest fraction. That also shows that their plans to merge their parties together have not had any substantial positive effect. That is not surprising; the left parties have been losing for decades now because of their neoliberal, rightward turn and their untrustworthy opportunism. One doesn’t solve that problem with different marketing.

Groenlinks and PvdA proved their limited worth in the election debates. While the VVD liberals went on the offensive, the left parties had no fundamental answer. They didn’t dare to wholeheartedly defend the actions of Extinction Rebellion in The Hague on the 12th of March. Neither did they have a left wing answer to the hard capitalist arguments of the right wing – like Rutte’s remark that rents cannot be lowered because that would scare off investors from investing in affordable housing. They even cowed from saying that the right wing government has to go. PvdA’s lead candidate was asked four times in one debate whether Rutte should step down, and she never answered in the affirmative.

Even in direct confrontation with the VVD on the eve of the elections, the “opposition” parties wanted to come across as constructive. They are not opposing the government, they mostly hope that they can continue to help Rutte to maintain his parliamentary majority in exchange for some loose change. Sigrid Kaag of the liberal D66 party described this servile attitude in an unintentionally devastating way: “I know the PvdA and Groenlinks, up till now they’ve voted for almost every cabinet proposal, given some amendments, and I thing they will continue to do so after the 16th of March.” She’s right. The difference now though is that Rutte can make deals with BBB too, which means that the left parties have lost some of their leverage.

One piece of good news is the seat gained by the animal rights party (PvdD), now giving them a total of 4 seats. This party is also quite liberal and petite bourgeois in outlook, but is irrevocably green and principled. They were the only party who dared to directly contradict the BBB. Unfortunately, they needlessly juxtaposed the interests of farmers and nature, for instance with the tactless slogan “no bees, no food”, but nonetheless their courage and principles were rightly rewarded.

Bottom of the barrel

It seems like many left wing voters didn’t vote out of enthusiasm, but mainly out of horror of the right and far right, as was shown in the the Socialist Party’s (SP) fifth consecutive election defeat under the leadership of Lilian Marijnissen. Even in the party’s traditional stronghold of Oss, the SP gained less votes than BBB and VVD.

The party reacted as it usually does – by sticking its head in the sand and explaining the victory of the “protest party” BBB as “a middle finger to the established order”. The fact that this middle finger comes from the far right and not from the left, even from a party that prioritises the interests of agribusiness, apparently doesn’t even make a difference anymore. This latest defeat will not prompt Marijnissen to make way for new leadership, nor will it provoke genuine reflection. The leading clique has practically abolished internal party democracy and don’t have any ideas apart from continuing a failed and increasingly nationalistic strategy.

The SP will reach rock bottom one day, but the party has – in comparison to the other left parties – a surprising capacity to keep losing. Other left parties retain a certain attractiveness to voters who want to prevent things from getting worse. The SP is much less credible in this regard. The party flirts ever more openly with the far right, conducted a racist campaign against labour migration and let their MP Mahir Alkaya make an appearance on the fascist conspricacy channel BLCKBX.

The effect of all this is that the SP is the only left party that substantially lost votes to the far right. Of all SP voters in 2021, 21 per cent voted for the BBB this March. Only a third voted again for the SP. The SP did not manage to gain votes out of the far right camp – those voters have enough parties to choose from anyway.

Media

Many commentators explain the success of BBB by pointing to the way in which the media has continued to offer the farmers party a platform over the last years. Especially talk shows have made a habit of inviting all kinds of uncouth figures. This was the case with Thierry Baudet, but also with leading COVID conspiracy theorist Willem Engel and the fascist commentator Raisa Blommestijn, whom talk show host Eva Jinek kept inviting on to represent a “fresh alternative point of view”.

But it would be too easy to blame the rise of the BBB on the media alone. VVD and CDA have laid the groundwork for the current nitrate crisis by attempting to circumvent EU environmental guidelines and opposing the nitrate regulation plans of their own government when they had no choice but to act. That in turn energised the farmer protests, which gained an ever more distinct far right character at the same time that the BBB became their most prominent political representative. The BBB therefore had a social movement behind them as well as the support of agribusiness.

Another factor was the lack of a credible left opposition. The left parties have done nothing to organise a left wing countermovement. The fact that the farmers movement and the BBB actually did manage to make things difficult for the government, meant that a lot of people mistakenly saw them as an alternative to the neoliberal status quo – even though the farmer protests are precisely meant to maintain this status quo.

Wishful thinking

Just like after the election victory of the FvD four years before, liberals are trying to square the circle in all kinds of ways to reassure themselves. One variant of this is the assumption that BBB will enter into a similar crisis to the one of the FvD after 2019. There is no indication of that at all. Furthermore, this wishful thinking ignores fundamental differences between BBB and FvD.

The FvD crisis stemmed from the fact that the FvD leadership was and still is pursuing a neofascist project, even though a big part of the party neither understood, nor had been won over for such an enterprise. The self-confident fascists in FvD initially amounted to a small group that tried to push the party to the right bit by bit. Before the 2019 provincial elections, the party needed all sorts of candidates that they did not have, and therefore needed to recruit them. Once elected, these representatives were confronted with ever more explicitly fascist outbursts from the party leader Baudet, which put pressure on their relations with other parties. This eventually prompted almost the entire FvD senate fraction to leave the party.

BBB is much different. They also have grown quickly and need new people. But while BBB flirts with all kinds of far right ideas – like the so called great replacement theory and conspiracy theories revolving around the World Economic Forum – and is unmistakably populist and opportunistic, the main party goals are clear to the entire membership. All kinds of former VVD and CDA politicians are now active for BBB. Furthermore, BBB has a powerful and experienced network of agricultural capitalists behind them, that can provide talking points and supply figures to support their arguments – whether those figures are manipulated or not. Despite this, we will surely see all kinds of amateurism from new BBB representatives, but indications for an imminent party crisis are nowhere to be found.

Conclusion

Once more, these latest elections were bad news for the left. The Rutte government can continue to govern and can find senate majorities with the far right as well as with the (centre) left. The VVD strengthened its position in the national government. The fact that the VVD has cleverly managed to put its mark on government policy goes a long way towards explaining their relatively small losses compared to the other government parties (D66 and CDA). It is therefore to be expected that the VVD will continue to strengthen its position. The continued rise of the far right helps them in this regard.

The implementation of nitrate restrictions will be kicked further down the road and probably rewritten in favour of the interests of the big agricultural companies. That will lead to significant conflict, as BBB is determined to force a break with EU guidelines on nitrate and environmental protections, whereas for the governing parties this is probably unnegotiable.

The left opposition will likely play an even more insignificant role. Groenlinks and PvdA are exclusively focused on parliamentary cow towing, which will deliver even less results. This underscores the importance of the extraparliamentary left, especially the climate and the trade union movements, who show that victories for working people are only possible if we fight for them.

This article originally appeared in Dutch in socialisme.nu. Translation: Freek Blauwhof, Die Linke Neukölln

Letter from the Editors: 30th March 2023

Rent madness and fossil fools


30/03/2023

Hello everyone,

Tomorrow (Friday) at 4pm, the broad organisation Reinickendorf bleibt Bunt (Reinickendorf is staying colourful) is organising a demonstration against the headquarters which the AfD is planning to build in Wittenau. The opening rally will be at the Märkisches Zentrum, followed by a demonstration along Wilhelmsruher Damm and Eichhorster Weg to the site of the planned office in Wallenroder Straße 1.

On Saturday at 1pm, Die LINKE Neukölln (with the support of other Berlin districts) is organising a rally Stop the War! Russian troops out of Ukraine! End the Escalation! The rally demands a civil society instead of a spiral of militarisation. It is fighting for the unconditional right to stay for all refugees, not the current hierarchisation of refugees into first and second class. It rejects any joint work with the AfD and other Neo-Nazis. The rally starts at 1pm at Hermannplatz.

Also at 1pm, starting at the Ernst Thälmann memorial near S-Bahn Greifswalderstraße. there’s a demonstration against rent madness. This is part of the Housing Action Days 2023, which last from 24 March to 2nd April. This week of action was first organised by the European Action Coalition, and in the last 2 years, up to 70 European initiatives have organised actions, including some in Berlin.

A third action at 1pm on Saturday 1st April is the Fossil Fools Day organised by Extinction Rebellion. Is there anything more foolish than allowing the fossil fuel industry to destroy our planet so that the super-rich get richer? This April Fools Day, XR will satirize the fossil madness – with colour, costumes, laughs…and some tears, because the foolishness is ludicrous but also tragically sad. The action starts at Washingtonplatz, at the South of the Hauptbahnhof. You are promised a varied programme of talks, music and performances. There may also be a separate, unregistered action.

On Saturday night in Mensch Meier there will be a party starting at 10pm under the title “Love Enteignen Hate GroKo” You are invited to have a dance and resist skyrocketing rent with performances, interventions and banging music!! Put on your dancing shoes and let’s give GroKo the boot! The CDU government will be over eventually, but we’ll stay till it’s bright out! Every donation supports the Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen campaign and brings us closer to expropriation. We celebrate our freedom Berlin will remain our home!

This week is full of activities in Berlin, so make sure you find out what else is going on by looking at our Events page. You can see a shorter, but more detailed, list of Events which we are directly involved in here.

Looking further into the future, on Saturday. 15th April, the Berlin LINKE Internationals are organising a Küfa where international activists can cook, eat, and talk with each other, while we raise money for an important cause. This month, money is being raised to provide a reception at the coming meeting 75 Years Nakba: Anti-Palestinian Racism and Repression in Berlin. The day after the Küfa. Sunday 16th April, it will be the next LINKE Internationals Walking Tour – this time on Riots in Kreuzberg. And remember that on 10th-11th June, the LINKE Internationals are holding their annual Summer Camp on the outskirts of Berlin. The programme will be available soon.

This week’s Campaign of the Week, Go Film The Police  is a call to film racist police violence to make police brutality as a from of organized violence visible, as well as to demand police accountability. The campaign also encourages people to record police violence on video themselves. They recently published a guide about filming police in the German legal context. The guide is currently available in German, English, French and Arabic!

In News from Berlin, the CDU-SPD coalition ignore the result of another referendum and decide to start building on Tempelhofer Feld, and the referendum to make Berlin Climate Neutral by 2030 fails as not enough people vote.

In News from Germany, inflation and energy price rises are hitting single parents particularly badly, Germany’s new migration law is criticised for ignoring women, German tanks arrive in Ukraine, and Germany’s public sector strike is the country’s biggest in decades.

Read all about this week’s News from Berlin and Germany here.

New on theleftberlin this week, John Mullen reports further escalation of the French protests and argues that a general strike is necessary, as the trials of people arrested for assembling on Nakba Day 2022 continue, we publish the speech of a Jewish Bund member who won his case, and Victor Grossman looks at both recent developments in local and national German politics, and the threat of conflict with China.

You can follow us on the following social media:

If you would like to contribute any articles or have any questions or criticisms about our work, please contact us at team@theleftberlin.com. And do encourage your friends to subscribe to this Newsletter.

Keep on fighting

The Left Berlin Editorial Board

Go Film The Police

The Go Film The Police campaign fights for the decriminalization of recording police (brutality), for holding police accountable and to encourage others to act in solidarity with those affected by police violence.


29/03/2023

The Go Film the Police campaign is a call to film racist police violence to make police brutality as a from of organized violence visible, as well as to demand police accountability.

Police claim that they are not racist and/or otherwise discriminatory, that they only use force when provoked and/or threatened. So why do they try so hard to avoid being filmed then?

We regularly hear and see witnesses of racist police violence being criminalized when they offer themselves as witnesses or film and make the abuse of power by the police visible. They are threatened, beaten up, their phones are confiscated, video material deleted and are charged with offenses such as “resistance against law enforcement officers”. The police repeatedly invoke the so-called “eavesdropping paragraph” § 201 StGB (violation of the confidentiality of the word). This states that anyone who unauthorizedly “records the non-publicly spoken word of another on a sound carrier” commits a criminal offense. However, it also states that “it (…) is not unlawful (if) the public communication is made in order to safeguard overriding public interests.” At the same time, the police claim that filming is prohibited.

However, as many legal experts as well as some courts have also acknowledged, police actions in public spaces can never be understood as “non-public”. Therefore the intrumentalization of this paragraph by the police must be stopped, who try to use it strategically to deligitimize evidence and criminalize those affected by their violence.

We are convinced that it is time to act as an alliance against this violent practice of the police and demand the decriminalisation of filming police actions. In a democratic constitutional state, individuals must have the possibility to document unlawful police behaviour. Only in this way can the police be controlled in their work and made accountable. It must be made politically clear that video recordings of police actions are admissible as evidence in court. They serve to make racist police violence visible and to identify and convict violent police officers. Filming must not be prevented. We also demand that any confiscation of cell phones and/or the deleting of videos by the police is prohibited.

Goals of the campaign include:

  • Informing and raising awareness in the public about police brutality
  • Collectively making racist police violence visible
  • Decriminalizing the recording of police actions for witnesses as well as victims
  • Banning confiscation of cell phones and banning the deletion of video recordings by police
  • Accepting video recordings as evidence in court
  • Police oversight and accountability
  • Identification, legal prosecution and conviction of criminal police officers

The campaign also encourages people to record police violence on video themselves. Go Film the Police!

Read our Open letter, and we have just published a guide about filming police in the German legal context. The guide is currently available in German, English, French and Arabic.

News from Berlin and Germany, 29th March 2023

Weekly news roundup from Berlin and Germany

NEWS FROM BERLIN

CDU and SPD agree on development at Tempelhofer Feld

In their coalition talks, the CDU and the SPD in Berlin have agreed to build on parts of Tempelhofer Feld. This is the result of the final agreement paper of the negotiating group for urban development and housing. The two parties want housing to be built by state-owned housing associations and public-interest cooperatives. The CDU mentions clearly the procedure of a “referendum”. However, the SPD is vague about it, considering that such decision should rest with the people of Berlin. This could mean that the future of Tempelhofer Feld is possibly linked to the result of the next parliamentary elections in 2026. Source: tagesspiegel

No chance against fossil powers and anti-democratic politics

Klimaneustart holds companies and politicians partly responsible for the failure of the referendum “Berlin 2030 climate neutral”. Although most of the voters, a total of 442,210, were in favor of the capital becoming climate-neutral as early as 2030, the needed amount of 608,000 votes was not reached. However, more astonishing is that a very large number of voters, a total of 423,418, ticked the ‘no’ box – instead of simply not attending. The need for a car as means of transport and the refusal to combine the referendum with the elections on February 12 are believed to be among the sources of these decisions. Source: nd

NEWS FROM GERMANY

Life at the edge: how a single parent manages in Germany

Since Christina Sander became a mother, she has been at risk of poverty and prices are rising. She and her daughter live on Bafög, housing benefit, child benefit, and the citizen’s allowance she gets for Zoe. That gives her a total of just under 2,000 euros a month. The official poverty line in 2021 for a single parent with one child was 1,621 euros a month. This means Christina Sander and her daughter are about 300 euros away from being at risk of poverty – for now. Inflation and the energy crisis hit benefit recipients and families with low incomes particularly hard. Source: taz

“Migration is thought of in male terms”

The planned German law on skilled labor immigration does not take women’s needs sufficiently into account, says lawyer Sina Fontana. Although the regulation does not make any distinction between men and women, she highlights aspects such as childcare. The maximum age at which a potential migrant receives extra points according to the system, 35 years old, is exactly the one at which child-rearing usually takes place. Moreover, she notes that this is mainly done by women. This means women may have worse chances of getting the opportunity card. Source: taz

German Leopard tanks have arrived in Ukraine

The 18 Leopard 2 battle tanks promised by Germany to Ukraine have now arrived. According to a report in the magazine “Der Spiegel,” the transport had already begun last week. Now the tanks have been handed over to the Ukrainian armed forces at the border. 40 Marder infantry fighting vehicles have also been delivered. The Federal government launched a new platform to strengthen Germany’s engagement in the reconstruction of Ukraine, which is intended to network non-state actors. “The reconstruction of Ukraine has already begun, even though unfortunately there is still no end to the war in sight,” said Development Minister Svenja Schulze (SPD) when presenting this project. Source: dw

Biggest strike in decades: warning strike paralyses transport infrastructure in Germany

A hint of the extension of the strike waves in France or Great Britain arrived in Germany on Monday: buses and trains remained largely in depots for 24 hours, and planes on the ground. Frank Werneke, ver.di’s leader, considered this to be the largest strike in the Federal Republic since 1992. Around 335,000 workers followed the joint call of the service sector union ver.di and the railway and transport union (EVG) for a nationwide warning strike. On the same day, the third round of negotiations with ver.di for approximately 2.5 million federal civil servants and local authorities began in Potsdam. Source: jW

The Imperial ambitions behind Olaf Scholz’s Japan visit

Victor Grossman on the Simmering Conflict with China


28/03/2023

It has become so urgent to rally all those who oppose the most bellicose elements now panting for more weapons, more billions, militarization, even the draft and, basically, more war. German Foreign Minister Baerbock, the new Defense Minister Pistorius, EU boss von der Leyen and NATO-leader Stoltenberg all seem so close to Washington military policy they deserve a Stars-and-Stripes flag sewed on their pants or at least a USA lapel pin. Others, full of talk of “Eastern flank” and “Southern flank” and tactics for 2026 or 2067, dream once again of Prussian glory. They want regime change in Moscow, the opening of vast reaches of Eurasia and a springboard toward China.

Till recently China was Germany’s peaceful trade partner, its biggest. Now, with one provocative visit to Taiwan after the other, with a German warship, fighter planes and soldiers back in old German colonial areas, it is joining in with an encirclement of China like that against Russia.

Olaf Scholz just visited Japan to increase trade and cement common policies. “We are united by democratic principles,” the SPD politician made clear, as he does at virtually all state visits. A leading Japanese journalist noted that “in view of the current world situation, our coordination and cooperation with Germany in dealing with Russia and China are very important.” And Premier Kishida stressed that “Japanese-German relations are stronger and closer than ever before!”

He was not quite correct. They were once even closer. If, like the legendary American long-sleeper Rip van Winkel, I had fallen asleep in 1936, I might have read, before drowsing off:

“… the following November (1936) saw the ratification of the Anti-Comintern Pact, an anti-communist treaty between Germany and Japan; Italy joined the Pact in 1937… It aimed at “formally integrating the military aims of Germany, Italy, Japan, and later followed by other nations… to stand side by side and cooperate in their endeavours in the Greater East Asian region and the European territories, their primary aim being to establish and maintain a new order of affairs capable of promoting prosperity and welfare for the peoples there.“

On awakening today I would have been amazed at some similarities, such as the aspects on Russia and China! To quote Yogi Berra: “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”

There was a major difference from 1936; today’ German-Japanese friendship is under the aegis of that other major power, which also likes to promote prosperity and welfare but is more blatant about its goals – and more frightening. It would have been a rude awakening!

Twentynine Palms, Calif.: “…a half-dozen officers of the Hawaii-based Third Marine Littoral Regiment took a very short break from days of fighting … The war, they said, was going well.

The unit, newly created and innovative in nature, was facing its toughest test yet — a 10-day mock battle across Southern California…developing new tactics to figure out one of the service’s highest priorities: how to fight a war against Chinese forces in their own backyard, and win.

Over the next two years, the new unit will have a relentless schedule, with about four or five times as many exercises as most infantry regiments. Its next big test will be in the Philippines in April.” (NY Times, 3.5.23)

The China-Russia-USA tension recalls another game known to kids in many countries: “Rock, scissors, paper.” Which one wins points? During a visit to a Russian children’s home ten years ago I watched two sweet little 9-year-olds playing it and asked if I could join in. They laughed and nodded. Under their rules, the winner touches the loser‘s forehead with a gentle finger. As I followed this rule they roared at a funny foreigner playing along. Of course they could not know (or care) that I was an American.

I reflected later about another possible finger pushing a special button, not gently, and bringing an end to the girls, now adults, that happy home, all such games – and me if I am still around. People have marched to prevent such an ending in recent weeks, fine people, but far, far too few. Despite all differences, all quarrels, all coalitions. Such protests and demands must quickly increase, everywhere, with countless worried humans, of all colors, preferences and beliefs. My plea is: join in!