Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

Well, the clock is ticking for my sojourn in the US to be over and to soon return, albeit briefly, to Belgium before I then head off to India. So, as I have not been reading Belgian on-line version of its newspaper, De Standaard, as regularly as I normally do, I took a gander today, and guess what was on the front page?? Potato(e)s and Fries of course, what else? That, and the continuing crisis of not having a government. The two are more related than you might think.

Apparently, because of the substantial rains that Belgium has endured while the rest of the planet is drying up, most notably here in Texas, the potato crop has experienced a surplus and the price of a kilo of spuds has sunk to epic proportions. Now, this should be cause for dancing in the streets, but there is just one catch. The price of Frietjes has not experienced this windfall and has consequently not lowered.

Bernard Lefèvre of the National Union of Friers explains that the cost of the potato is actually quite marginal in the process of making the fries and that it is more about the cleaning, peeling, packing and shipping of the product than the base material of the spuds.

In the politics of Belgium, the current political impasse still rages between the French-speaking Walloons, championed by Elio Di Rupo and the Flemish-speaking Flemings, whose main mouthpiece is Bart De Wever. It has become a classic case of one side saying "AAA" louder each time the other says "BBB" and so on. Nothing really gets settled and each side continues to see its own agenda as more and more important, focussing on the differences rather than the commonalities. It was to such an extent earlier this summer that the Flemish party was dubbed the "Ja, Maar" party, or "Yes, But" in that every compromise offered was met with a "Ja, Maar..." and the impasse continued. Futility in praxis.

What the Flemings are arguing is that the Walloons, now the financial minority, are mooching off of the more affluent Flemings. However, recent history will clearly show that the exact opposite was the case when the southern portion of Belgium was booming and the northern part was bust. The Walloons supported the welfare state of Flanders for quite some time, but when the tables are turned, the Flemings don't appear to be willing to be so reciprocal. Granted, this is a huge oversimplification of a much larger, more complex problem, but the problem is universal, not limited to Belgium.

The core of most arguments, whether political or religious, private or public, is often a failure to either effectively communicate our differences, or more commonly, an inability to be willing to recognize the plight of the other party.

In a hypberbolic example, if the potato growers are providing the goods at a lower cost and those who make the actual fries don't reflect the change in price, they should not then later expect to share in the profits if the price of potato(e)s one day surges due to a blight or the like, right?

If we continue to look only after our individual concerns, without looking at the larger picture, we end up in tangled up in a sterilized stalemate and nobody profits.

The future of whether Belgium will actually stay a tri-lingual menagerie of provinces, or if it will be split up into two or three separate municipalities remains to be seen. For now, it comes down to whether you say pataat and I say pomme de terre. Regardless, the truth is, for now at least, French Fries are actually from Belgium.