One nation's quiet response to tragedy

During my six years in Amsterdam, one thing I never quite understood was the Dutch attitude toward celebrities. They are passionate about local celebrities - far more than about Hollywood stars - but in the midst of intensely gossiping about a homegrown film or sports personality, they will suddenly turn blasé, as if the celeb were a family member who became uppity.

The explanation is in the size of the nation. When you have a population of 16 million crammed into a country smaller than 41 of our states, everyone is within a couple degrees of separation of everyone else. Wesley Sneijder 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 watched somber memorials unfold like dreams in cities all over the country this week. Roughly two-thirds of the 298 people who died on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 were Dutch. I asked several Dutch friends how they were doing. As I expected, every one of them knew at least one person on the plane. One said her daughter was friends with a girl whose entire family was on the flight, headed for a vacation in 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 against Russia. Someone posted the address of Vladimir Putin's daughter, who lives in the Netherlands, on Facebook.

But in the main, the reaction to the sudden loss of a cross-section of Dutch society - the proportionate loss of life for the United States would be about 6,000 - has been muted. Even the idea of a national day of mourning, floated by a politician or two, hasn't taken hold. It was already happening in a natural, unofficial way. A mountain of flowers in front of a restaurant in Rotterdam. A pall of silence descending on a gay festival in Tilburg.

The Dutch are strikingly different from Americans in their gut reactions. When hit with a national shock, Americans almost instinctively reach for ideology - the 9/11 attacks 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 to do with being a small country surrounded by larger countries with 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 a struggle against nature. Living in lowlands 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 haven for refugees from less tolerant lands. Even before its 17th-century golden age, Holland had become an intensely polyglot hub for goods and ideas.

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 manifest were a Vietnamese family that lived in Delft; a Chinese couple from Rotterdam; a Dutch Israeli student; a Dutch Malaysian family; a Dutch American; people from Curaçao and South Africa; and others with diverse backgrounds.

We hear about the growing multiethnicity of the country mostly through the screeching of right-wing fanatic Geert Wilders, who riles up some elements of society by declaring that newcomers (read Muslims) are torpedoing Dutch traditions. 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 cafés): 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 Founding Fathers were deeply influenced by the Dutch commitment to a heterogeneous, freewheeling society - a commitment already introduced into America via the Dutch colony of New York.

Wilders knows the media always glom onto a counter-narrative, and he has used that fact repeatedly to his advantage and to the detriment of his country's image abroad. But the 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 Flight 17 mirror their rapidly evolving society and remind the rest of us that our futures lie not in tribalism, but in expanding our connections.