Friday, July 13, 2007

Annoying easily discriminated youth

Tonight I joined a couple of girls from my school to have a night out in Rotterdam. It was fun, but on the way there we ran into some trouble on the train. One of our group is a middle-aged lady, easily considered White Secular Dutch (not to be confused with White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). On the other side of her sits a Temperamental 3rd Generation Morrocan-Dutch girl. As is befitting of the stereotype, this stranger is b****ing about life and has her music player on full volume without earplugs, explaining to her friend how some guy shouldn't be telling her to tune down the volume. The woman from our group comment to this girl how "she really should turn the volume down". This youth is up in arms about it immediately.
She start a whole rant about how this is only said to her because she's Morrocan and it's her choice of music and why nobody will ask a skinhead to turn down his hardcore in the same situation, and that only Morrocans get that kind of comment. So my friend replies how it's simply obscenely loud. The little b**** considers this an insult to a Morrocan's taste of music and how all Dutch songs are crap and not at all worth playing on her music device. It degenerates into her ripping on Dutch culture while accusing my friend of intolerance. G-rated language has at this point long been abandoned. A passenger sitting next to my friend, who has a young boy on his lap, tells the Morrocan girl she has to be more respectful of the country that allows her to life there. The girl, once again letting loose a spluttering of obsceneties that probably scarred the innocent soul of the boy, accuses both of being intollerant of foreigners. So the man explain to her "I am also a foreigner". Which should have been obvious from the man's skin color. Yet this does not convince the girl she isn't the victim of hate. The rest of the way she blows bubble gum in my friend's ear and keeps her music player playing loud, unknown music (which according to her was Morrocan, though I thought Morrocans had better tastes in culture). While this girl hold her tirade, the only one to come to her aid is some politically correct Jojo sitting in the back, hidden in a corner. Every other non-native Dutch person considers the Morrocan girl a nuisance, even that girl's friend.
Asside from this one Morrocan, my friend gets along well with the rest of our class, which is made up of a splattering of diverse ethnicities like Dutch, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Colombian, Nigerian and even Afro-Anglo (for lack of a better word). The only ones we don't really like at school are the loud and obnoxious Morrocans. I'm all for tolerance and respect for other people's culture, but if Morrocans or anyone is going to abuse that good faith whenever somebody disagrees, they can stick their complaints where the sun don't shine.

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