The gloaming falls like ground.
In Holland lopes a hound.
A hound with yellow teeth.
He roves throughout the earth
a giant sable hound.

We’re lying in the round.
No longer fused together.
What bound us to each other
died between our teeth.
The gloaming falls like ground. 

Slagveld

De schemer valt als grond.
In Holland loopt een hond.
Een hond met gele tanden.
Er gaat door alle landen
een grote zwarte hond.

Wij liggen in het rond.
Niet langer van elkander.
Wat ons tezamen bond
stierf tusschen onze tanden.
De schemer valt als grond.

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The explanation is in the size of the nation. When you’ve got a total population of 16 million crammed into a country smaller than most individual U.S. states, everyone is within a couple of degrees of separation of everyone else. Wesley Sneijder, Robin van Persie, and the other stars of the country’s World Cup team are brought down to earth by the fact that, chances are, you know them, or your uncle does.

That thought came to mind as I’ve watched somber memorials unfold like dreams in cities all over the country this week. Roughly two-thirds of the 298 people who died on Malaysian Air flight 17 were Dutch. I asked several Dutch friends how they were doing. As I more or less expected, every one of them knew at least one person who was on the plane. One, who lives in The Hague, said her daughter was friends with a girl whose entire family was on the flight: They were going on vacation to Borneo. “They were in primary school together and took the same ballet lessons,” my friend said of her daughter and the girl who died. “When you think of their empty house, it is all very unreal.”

A few people want to lash out, saying the country should strike out against Russia. Someone posted the address of Vladimir Putin’s daughter, who lives in the Netherlands, on the Facebook page of the Netherlands-Russia Center. There are some vicious tweets.

But in the main the reaction to the sudden loss of a cross-section of Dutch society—the proportionate loss of life for a country the size of the United States would be about 6,000 people—has been muted. After some hesitation, the government decided to declare a national day of mourning, though it was already happening in a natural, non-official way. A mountain of flowers in front of a restaurant in Rotterdam. A pall of silence descending on the “Rose Kermis” gay festival in Tilburg. The deaths were evenly spread all over the country, and the memorials are localized.

The Dutch are strikingly different from Americans in their gut reactions to things. When hit with a national shock, Americans will almost instinctively reach for ideology or ideals. People saw 9/11 as an assault on “freedom.” The Dutch have an innate distrust of ideology. You could relate that to World War II and their experience under Nazism, but it goes much farther back. It has something to do with being a small country surrounded by larger countries that have had long histories of asserting themselves.

It also stems from the fact that Dutch society grew not out of war against a human foe but out of the struggle against nature. Living in low lands on a vast river delta, the Dutch came together to battle water. Building dams and dikes and canals was more practical than ideological. For better or worse, the Dutch are more comfortable with meetings and remembrances than with calls to arms.

Geography has defined destiny throughout Dutch history. The little country has reached outward, and prospered thanks to its ability to trade and engage with others; it also has proven a safe for refugees from less tolerant lands. Even before its 17th-century golden age, Holland had become an intensely polyglot hub for goods and ideas, intricately connected with far-flung places.

Flight 17 reflects and updates that history. Of course, by definition the plane was packed with travelers. But this tragedy gives an inadvertent indication of how racially mixed the country has become. Among the Dutch passengers listed on the flight manifest were a Vietnamese family who lived in Delft, the city of Vermeer; a Chinese couple from Rotterdam; a Dutch-Israeli student; a Dutch-Malaysian family; a Dutch-American; people born in Curacao and South Africa; and others with German, Indonesian, and British backgrounds.

We hear about the growing multiethnicity of the country mostly through the screeching of right-wing fanatic Geert Wilders, member of parliament and leader of the Freedom Party, who riles up some elements of society by declaring that newcomers (read Muslims) are torpedoing Dutch traditions and turning the land of windmills into a giant mosque. The international media is a sucker for Wilders because he seems to give the lie to what the Dutch are most famous for (besides tulips and marijuana cafes): tolerance. The Dutch pioneered the concept in the 16th century, enshrining it in their de facto constitution two centuries before “all men are created equal.” America’s history—especially New York’s—was deeply influenced by it, via the Dutch colony of New Netherland and its capital of New Amsterdam on Manhattan.

Wilders knows that the media always glom onto a counter-narrative, and he has used that fact repeatedly to his own advantage and to the detriment of his country’s image abroad. But one truth revealed by this tragedy is that the country is quietly becoming a melting pot, a place intricately connected to other parts of the world. The Dutch people who died on MH17 mirror their own rapidly evolving society, and remind the rest of us that our futures don’t lie in tribalism, but in expanding our connections.

The post How Holland Is Mourning Flight MH17 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Dutch are known for a few things: Van Gogh, Rembrandt and other 17th century masters, windmills, canals, tolerance, klompen (those big wooden clogs), and voetbal, what you Americans call soccer. No matter where I go in the world, people know and love our national team, the Dutch orange lions. In Latin America they’re known as “la maquina naranja” the “Orange machine,” because of their systematic and offensive soccer style.

The Dutch perfected this brand of play in the early 1970s under the genius leadership of Johan Cruyff—who happens to have played in L.A. for one season for the Aztecs of the North American Soccer League. Dutch-style soccer—Total Football (“Totaal voetbal”)—is an apt metaphor for a country that has always punched above its weight on the global stage (there are only 16 million of us) and now ranks highest among the Dutch gifts to the civilized world.

In Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby’s sweet memoir of growing up an Arsenal fan, he wrote about how shocking it was when his “dour” London team adopted the Dutch invention in the early 1970s, a system that necessitated flexibility from all players: “It was football’s version of post-modernism, and the intellectuals loved it.” Since 1905, the Dutch national team has competed at the highest levels of international soccer, reaching three World Cup finals in 1974, 1978, and 2010 and winning the Euro Cup in 1988. As a result of this success, 90 percent of Dutch national players play at Europe’s most important and highest paying club teams. This is an important reason why the purest, most exalted manifestation of Total Football today can be seen not in Holland but in Barcelona, whose fabled team traces its stylistic roots back to Cruyff and a number of other Dutch imports.

Total Football requires the continuous involvement and adaptability of all the players throughout the game. The movement of everyone else around the player who has the ball is essential. If, for example, a player receives a pass, there is always a minimum of two players available for a follow-up pass or a combination.

To succeed at Total Football, a player should always be thinking one step ahead of the action, making optimal use of the space on the field, and moving often outside of his or her own position to provide support and surprise the opponent. Total Football demands that all players understand the dynamics of each position on the field. Played successfully, it makes the game appear fluid and easy to the outside eye.

Asking a preschooler to learn this system sounds like teaching a fish how to ride a bicycle. And although Dutch people love bicycles, I didn’t establish the Dutch Soccer School L.A. because I thought teaching 3- to 6-year-olds how to play soccer the Dutch way was an impossible task.

Last summer, when I saw how much fun my 3-year-old son was having with the soccer ball—and how strongly he was developing his skills—I was inspired to give him and other children his age an outlet to play together and learn the game. I asked my friend Marc—who is not Dutch, and is single, childless, and great with kids—to join me in creating some sort of soccer program for preschoolers. My wife came up with the idea for making it a soccer school, and she promoted it on a Facebook page for local mothers in Atwater Village. Because of my Dutch background and my upbringing in the Dutch soccer style, I knew there was no other option than to call it the Dutch Soccer School L.A. Some parents weren’t convinced: I heard things like, “The children are too young,” and “They can’t focus for that long.” But within a matter of days we had 15 interested parents signing up their children. We built goals from scratch, bought balls and some jerseys, and scouted for a location.

A few weeks ago, we started our third season with a little over 20 kids ages 2 ½ to 6. Every Sunday, we come together in Griffith Park wearing bright orange Dutch jerseys with the kids’ names on the back and the Dutch lion logo on the front. The younger kids usually require their parents to work with them, and sometimes children are scared or shy at first. But they grow more confident as the season goes on. At the first practice, one kid couldn’t even look at me—he held his hands in front of his eyes the whole time. His parents, however, persisted, and after five weeks he was having fun with everyone on the field.

Like any program for young kids, our goal first and foremost is to teach the fun of playing soccer. The first things the kids learn are how to navigate the field, keep the ball on their feet, and slalom around other players. Then they have to learn to do all this—which is hard enough in and of itself—while knowing where they are on the field and without running into their opponents … or their teammates. Many children at this level are blindly running after the ball and not paying any attention to the world around them. Their goal is to get the ball from anyone—even if the person dribbling is their own teammate. So we play substitute games, such as tag, so the kids can learn how to chase someone, to recognize patterns, and to anticipate changing circumstances.

I’m also trying to teach these kids about working together to achieve a goal. I want them to learn to create room on the field so someone else can pass the ball or score. It’s a lesson I think can help them not just on the field but in their lives, too.

Imagine a freeway filled with driving soccer players who think about the other drivers—drivers who move over to make traffic as a whole go faster. That’d be “total commuting.”

Teaching soccer to the youngest members of our community seems small and perhaps non-essential. But for a lot of the kids I coach, the soccer field is the first place where they understand that they are part of something larger then themselves. They learn to navigate through a maze of people, learn to identify themselves as part of a team, and learn what their role on that team is.

I hope the Dutch soccer style cannot only change how these kids play the game but also how they look at life and the world we live in. Who knows—maybe I’m not just helping to create a better generation of L.A. footballers but a better generation of L.A. drivers, too.

The post Could Dutch-Style Soccer Unclog L.A.’s Freeways? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I met Shorto a dozen years ago in Albany, New York. We were both poking about a conference put on by the New Netherlands Society and the State Library focused on New York’s early colonial days and the enduring Dutch legacy on the American character.

I was there covering the conference for The New York Times, where I worked at the time, but Shorto was there because he felt sheepish for knowing nothing (other than something about a wooden leg) of Peter Stuyvesant, whose tombstone he passed every day in the churchyard of St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery in Manhattan’s East Village, where he played with his daughter. When Shorto, already an established writer, approached The New Yorker about a long-form article on Stuyvesant and New York’s Dutch history, the editors politely told him they’d take a “Talk of the Town” on the subject. But he sensed that the story of how Henry Hudson, Stuyvesant, and Amsterdam financiers founded the first truly diverse and capitalist North American colony deserved more than a chatty front-of-the-magazine feature.

The result was a book: The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America, published in 2005 to great critical acclaim. The book is an impressive corrective to centuries of Anglophile histories that managed to white out the Dutch contribution to the American character. The English took over the colony of New Netherland, which encompassed much of what is now New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, in 1664. By then, New York (the city was known as New Amsterdam) had established itself as a bustling, tolerant, heterogeneous trading hub, so different from the fledgling English Puritan colonies to its north and the plantation society to its south—so much more, well, American.

In 2007, Shorto moved to Amsterdam, in part to work on his next book, Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason. (Descartes, though French, spent the bulk of his adult life in the Netherlands.) The other draw was the opportunity to direct the John Adams Institute, an Amsterdam forum that hosts talks by American book authors and promotes cultural exchange between the two countries. The institute occupies the former West Indies Company headquarters, where the plans were laid for New Netherland. “A friend of mine jokes that I have crawled inside my own book,” Shorto says. Later this year, he will publish a book on the history of Amsterdam and liberalism.

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