Column | Crowdfunding as a moral fast -drying cement

It is heartwarming, and at the same time the amount makes me a bit uncomfortable: 163,775 euros. You can buy at least four thousand Efteling tickets from the amount collected on Gofundme to still deliver the « unforgettable day » that asylum minister Faber (PVV) sabotaged with one tweet.

Crowdfunding is more often the filler for the moral cracks and cracks in government policy. Non-owned medical treatments, a playground or new theater grandstand for which there is no municipal budget. But here comes a whole concrete truck with quick cement to collapse into the moral crater where Faber has changed its policy area.

I get it. And yet I am blinking at that recruitment page with my eyes. There is so much together here of good intentions, misconceptions, and twisted imaging that it is difficult to pick everything apart.

Where to start? Maybe with the two photos that are there. The fundraiser has commissioned AI to put asylum seekers’ children with an enchanted twinkle in the eyes in an attraction cart. Two boys, two girls, one with hood, one with headscarf.

They would form the perfect picture, were it not that it is not right. These virtual children are between six and eleven years old. The group that matters is between twelve and eighteen. Does that matter?

Apparently for the fundraiser, otherwise he would have placed a real photo of the real teenagers who look like all the teenagers, with their hoodies and telephones, their caps and ears in. The moral gap is immediately packaged as a marketing, where it is a group that « prefers to be a carefree child ».

Here the reality is at least a bit retouched. And precisely because image formation has started to control almost everything around this theme, you should be reluctant to do that. The fact that the Efteling outing at Geert Wilders stirs deep deportation fantasies (he proposed an alternative outing: « all out of the country in a bus ») does not yet mean that we have to exchange our critical capacity for an emotional counter -reaction.

Because you can ask questions about that choice in Sint Annaparochie. The Eftelinguitje was not primarily intended to give those children an unforgettable outing, it was intended to prevent fights from breaking out between the local young people and those of the AZC at the fair of the village festival. Last year that led to a stab incident. Three injured, three arrests, two of which are minor asylum seekers.

The amusement park as a neighborhood prevention, Pardoes as a youth worker. It is wonderful. Send the hard-core supporters to the tiki bath during a risk match. Rioters on their way to Scheveningen? Hop, the tourist train to Drievliet is already coming.

The amusement park as a neighborhood prevention, Pardoes as a youth worker

The underlying question in the Eftelingrelletje is: who can enjoy their free time in what way? The PVV and her supporters believe that an asylum seeker should behave as the image they have of the asylum seeker. Arm, passive and withdrawn his time. The asylum seeker who ventures on a terrace is not recreating but provoking.

Minor asylum seekers in The Hague also recently fell with local youth, after some of the latter group had stolen their fatbikes. The local VVD was deeply indignant: how on earth did those asylum seekers come to such expensive bikes?

Now that Minister Faber cannot make a policy, she fills that emptiness with riots that respond to emotion and imaging: first the ribbons, now Efteling. It is symbolic resentment, which is now answered with symbolic compassion: a donation for asylum childs that fit into the progressive picture – pathetic, in sober second -hand clothing, and with twinkling eyes of surprise and gratitude for our merciful gifts.

You should not think that they are hanging around there, a little gland, a little ragadent, with their snow -white Nikes and their noisiness – that they, in short, like all the teenagers. Until they have earned that privilege, they have to comply with the role for which they were cast in this fairy tale. Faber and the fundraisers: they both take a ride in the Symbolica, only in a different color cart.

Christiaan Weijts Is a writer.

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