Opinion

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Herb Prooy: Cop out

Monday 09 January 2012

Herb Prooy thinks 'best wishes 'are not going to help the prime minister.

Are you as sick and tired as I am of colleagues and friends conferring their best wishes on you? It’s a trivial habit and one that shows no signs of dying out any time soon.

Research shows that there’s hardly anything left to wish for. We have everything we could possibly want and that is why we trot out the same old lame new years’ resolutions: we will eating more healthily and give up smoking. Rather than acquire more stuff we want to get rid of it, especially those pesky pounds around the waist.

Bad year

It’s not as if our wishes would be likely to be fulfilled anyway. Government leaders here and abroad have been predicting that 2012 is not going to be a good year. In fact, it is going to be a very bad year with the euro crisis far from resolved and the eurozone economy, the Netherlands included, plunged into further gloom causing more unemployment, more cutbacks and less prosperity.

We should prepare to face more painful measures, is what they are saying. To understand just how difficult it is going to get you only have to read the interview with prime minister Mark Rutte in the Volkskrant in which he exhorts us not to look for happiness in things but rather in our relationships with family and friends.

Single minded

This sounds well-intentioned and is the kind of thing that made him politician of the year. But at the same time it is a huge cop out. If anyone knows what is necessary to get the country back on track it is Rutte. But the truth is that he is not in a position to do so handicapped as he is by a coalition partner fighting for survival and his alliance with the resolutely single minded PVV and SGP, not the kind of allies you would like to be seen with at parties.

For Rutte and the country best wishes would include a more capable team to tackle the problems with. And the hope that things in 2012 won’t turn out as badly as we think.

Herb Prooy is an entrepreneur in the field of ‘software as a service’