…usually we celebrate Queensday by… I wrote yesterday afternoon. Then I realized that we always celebrate Queensday in the same manner and I remove the word “usually”. Selected a few music video and art sites to tweet later that evening. Washed a few dishes and left my house to go down town for the celebrations.
On my way out of my apartment building I ran into a neighbor who asked me whether I had seen what was happening on televion, the attack on our queen. Although he was clearly very serious I had trouble not bursting into laughter because what he was telling me couldn’t be true.
Things like that don’t happen in the Netherlands.
But the driver of the bus I took into town also told me about the attack on the queen. Apparently someone drove into the crowd, killing and wounding several people and just missing the bus with the queen by a few dozen feet.
Although he didn’t know whether it was an accident or deliberate we both agreed that it had to be an accident because things like that don’t happen in the Netherlands.
By the time I reached my favorite bar the television was telling that the police was sure that this was a deliberate attack and most of the smaller towns and villages in the Netherlands where canceling their celebrations. The larger towns didn’t but mainly to prevent getting problems with the hundred of thousands of people that flog to big cities on Queensday.
Today newspapers are wondering what kind of influence this will have on the future of the Queensday celebrations and on the future of the Netherlands as a whole.
Eight years ago when the planes flew into the Twin Towers my country men and I felt relatively save. We couldn’t imagine that something like that could ever happen in the Netherlands because we don’t matter that much in the great schemes of things. And we don’t have that kind of nutjobs in the Netherlands.
But clearly we where wrong!
The narrator is talking about the route the bus is going to take when the car hits the monument. The narrator is clearly surprised about what is happening and about the people that are laying on the ground: Oh, a cars drives into the monument… what is this…? there are people laying on the ground… the royal family is shocked…. Is this an accident or deliberate…?
The journalist says ….someone hit by…. People are yelling go away, quickly go away…. …behind the fence…
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