I suspect that much of Michigan’s Dutch community is feeling pain and pride today as tens of thousands of people in the Netherlands have respectfully lined the route of the caravan of 40 hearses carrying the first of the dead from Flight MH17 to arrive back in the Netherlands.
For the Dutch, a famously reserved people, the showing of quiet, yet emotional mourning for the dead — just the first of many to be flown home — was quite extraordinary. The demonstrations of empathy along the roads and highways reminded me of the amazing outpouring in the U.S. when the train carrying Robert Kennedy’s casket across many miles in 1968 similarly was greeted with many thousands of the grieving along the railroad tracks.
But these Dutch victims of the shameless, pro-Russian separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine were just average people. None of them was a Kennedy, or a potential U.S. president. And in such a small country, the show of kinship in Holland was a national statement.
In a strange way, it made me ponder an America where death due to a war-torn world has become almost trivial. All those coffins coming back to Dover over the past 13 years from Iraq and Afghanistan at some point became routine.
Maybe the Dutch have a message for us about embracing each victim of a militarized mid-section of the globe, about pausing, taking a breath and respecting the loss of each of our American brothers.
