Zacht Ei

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Friday, May 6, 2005

American homosexual beat up in Amsterdam

Read his story here.

I was walking through central Amsterdam with my boyfriend back to our hotel. People were still milling about on the sidewalks from Friday night's revelry. We were only blocks from the most popular gay areas; and we were holding hands.

As we passed two men standing on the side of the street, one of them deliberately spat on us, mainly hitting me in the face. Without saying a word, we stood our ground. We stopped, turned around, and asked why. The man, who looked in his 20s, had Moroccan features and spoke with a heavy accent, murmured something about "fucking fags."

Within seconds, the two somehow turned into seven — and five of them were ganging up on me, probably because at 6-foot-7 I'm a good bit bigger than my boyfriend. It seemed like every direction I turned, I got another punch to the face, and when they kicked me to the ground, time seemed to stop. My heart still races as I write about it now. It felt like the situation had spiraled completely out of my control.

Then just as quickly as it began, it was over. I was standing up on my own, and our attackers were fleeing. There had been dozens of people on the streetcorner, but none of them had acted or even yelled anything. My boyfriend had escaped his attackers and had come to my aid, and that finally convinced the others to run.

Two kinds of herd mentality. One is to only dare attack someone when part of a group, the other is to ignore evil happening in front of you because everyone else is. And both are hallmarks of supreme cowardice.

21:30

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A tribute to Margraten Cemetery

Sunday is V-E Day. President George W. Bush will visit Margraten Cemetery. There lie the bodies of 8,301 soldiers. It is the only American war cemetery in the Netherlands, and a few weeks ago I drove there to take pictures.
So before the news gets blurred by anti-Bush protesters, here's my tribute to those young American, British and Canadian men who never got to raise a family, so I can do so now in freedom.

Click 'Lees verder' to see some of the nearly 200 pictures I took.

More...

11:15

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« 5 May 2005 7 May 2005 »
Epibratie
"I believe in life. I believe in treasuring it as a mystery that will never be fully understood, as a sanctity that should never be destroyed, as an invitation to experience now what can only be remembered tomorrow. (...)
I believe in liberty. I believe that within every soul lies the capacity to reach for its own good, that within every physical body there endures an unalienable right to be free from coercion. (...)
I believe in the pursuit of happiness. Not its attainment, nor its final definition, but its pursuit. I believe in the journey, not the arrival; in conversation, not monologues; in multiple questions rather than any single answer."
Andrew Sullivan












    I wrote a daily column in Dutch at Planet Internet.

    Click on one of the headlines to go to an article directly.