Day 9: Tying it all Together

We are down to the last and final day of academic study and contemplation. For this special occasion, we have scheduled a visit at Amsterdam City Hall with two city council members: Maarten Van der Meer and Hetti Willemse. These two are from 2 different political parties, but are similar enough in some interests that the city council members had worked in coalitions between their two parties in the past.

I was really glad of the timing of this visit, as we have had many different perspectives on a variety of issues over the course of the trip. From academics, government officials, laypersons and volunteers, to professionals and self declared experts, everyone had different opinions about the state of affairs and the best way to solve the current problems and strategically place Amsterdam to maximize on future growth opportunities. One such example of an issue that received much consideration was the alleged attempt of the City Council to shut down Prostitution in the Red Light District. When asked about this issue, Maarten commented that the City Council is aware of the existence of the area, and its activities over the last couple hundred years. One thing that he mentioned that others had not was that the actual amount of prostitution had increased at levels unseen in the past. Hetti also commented that the City Council was concerned about the exploitation of women coming in off the trains, the crime and money laundering, and that these issues rose at the same rate the prostitution had over the last several decades. While I don’t agree with their approach of “guilty until proven innocent” that Bette explained during our PIC tour, she was seen as slightly exaggerated and biased when you compared her comments to those of every other speaker who were not so closely affiliated with the Red Light District. Being able to see these biases is crucial in being able to collect the information on issues and really be able to sort through to see what the true issues at the end of the day are, having been removed from the filter of bias as much as possible.

Another issue that was discussed was the shortage of housing, and a little bit of how the market structure is designed in Amsterdam. While we were all pretty informed that there is indeed a housing shortage in Amsterdam, it wasn’t until this meeting that the issues of housing affordability in terms of paycheck dollars towards rent or a mortgage became harder numbers for consideration.

I personally felt the most interesting part of this meeting was listening and watching the interaction of these two council members from different parties. When I asked how the 2 parties would differ on an issue they could provide an example of, it really showed us a lot about how each party viewed itself, and how it viewed itself when compared to the other party. The issue of social support and advocacy being a necessary ingredient of public policy and the cost of strong guidelines of personal privacy showed that even though Amsterdam is light years ahead of the United States in providing tolerance and freedoms to their citizens, it does not happen without debate and dissention about what exactly are the right steps to take. That being said, we were told that the most conservative members in the Amsterdam City Council have been heard saying they supported Barack Obama, a United States Democratic (liberal, in our view) candidate. This just goes to show how much perspective matters in your classification in a political ranking structure.

There is something that constantly amazes me about modern day American culture. We generally, as a whole, are not very good at giving names to things that can specify more than one level of meaning. My first experience with this was with Greek language having more than 1 word for love, to express different relationships and intentions. Reading through The Fine Art of Prostitution, I felt the most important thing I walked away from was the separation and actual definitions being used by the Dutch culture to explain their attitudes towards prostitution, but also showing they are still human and not as perfect as sometimes I have felt Amsterdam and the Netherlands in general has been portrayed. In American culture, we see so much as black and white. Because the Dutch culture does not outright legalize, and by Brant’s definition “prostitution is seen as regular labor, governed by the market forces. Neither being a prostitute nor earning money from prostitution in any other way is criminal, and it is subject only to such rules as derive from labor law and other statutes”. However, the U.S. culture in general would very quick make that definition synonymous to regulation, where “prostitution is accepted as social fact and strictly regulated by law, in order to protect not prostitutes, but the public from any adverse effects… including registration and mandatory medical inspections.”

As we keep reading about a lot of things we would consider radical in the US, I keep coming back to this prostitution article. Even though it primarily focused and made an example of prostitution, it has been one of the most eye opening texts we have had, especially at laying out and depicting the Dutch mentality and approach to their social and regulation issues in general. These attitudes were evident in the treatment towards the coffee shops and drug addicts as we saw in the film. Above all, I really felt the mental paradigm shift that I think is really necessary to not only appreciate the differences, but embrace how successful they have been at making Dutch policy work for its people and their ideals. Their end goal is the same: to have a productive, healthy, functioning society that is proud to call the Netherlands their home. I think they have finally figured out that humans will be humans, and that as history has shown us, attempts to change the core fabric of our instincts and interests will prove futile. Imposing morality clauses within law almost invariable soon follows any large exposure or awareness to less than ideal human behavior. I noticed this in a text from another course that talked about attitudes in the public housing slums of London in the 1800s, and later Chicago and New York. Jane Addams and her Hull houses in Chicago received attention because they were at the time the only real parties to be seen to actively interact with these populations. However, as in the Hull case, the impression of Christianity as the solution to the attitudes in the slums had little, arguably no true long lasting effect on changing how people approached a less than desirable issue from an intellectual and mental capacity. If we don’t change the parameters in which we operate, we will forever go around in circles coming up with the same failing “solutions”, that are never really having a good firm grasp of what needs to be included in the solution equation.