Steps (12): The emergency exit.  [nederlands]

The phrase 'emergency exit' always gives me the memory of the sang sentence 'Waar is hier de nooduitgang' [en: Where is the emergency exit here?] by the former Dutch band Het Goede Doel [en: The Good Cause], and i even had a look at the old video of a live-version, and it is awfully 80's with the hairdo's and Henk Westbroek, of who we did not know at the time, that he loves to speak from the underbelly. Luckily we have Twitter for that now. Did you also notice, how he doesn't pronounce the 't' in the 'nood' part, but he somehow pronounces it as a 'd' and that makes it a kind of other word: 'noo-duitgang'. The loudly singing audience does pronounce the 't' however.

The emergency exit on this photo descends from the very tip of where a station fuses with the railways. You cannot see it on this photo, but i suspect the stairways ends in some sort of cage construction, which is not accessible from the outside. Whether people in need can get out, isn't very clear to me.

I was more or less obliged to work at Knorporix, a terrible shitty company in the vicinity, at which people tended to exclude others in many ways, but hee: everything for the money of course. During the breaks i fled, frantically looking for an emergency exit, which only manifested itself to me after months in the form of intense fears and tormenting abdominal cramps and how at a certain point i literally couldn't bring myself to go there anymore; every time i had to cross the bridge to get to the train station, my gut would start to squirm and twitch. It was only as soon as i took a different route away from the station that things calmed down a bit. And this was repeated at the next job: my body was also looking for the emergency exit there. Without my knowledge, by the way, and of course i wasn't pretending to be sick.

And so there are many people in need, and they are looking for an emergency exit, and that can go in many ways. You would think that a government would want to prevent that, but nothing could be further from the truth. After all, there is also a lot of money to be made from people in need, and you don't want that to disappear. I think a good example is the unemployed young people who are trained as coaches to guide other unemployed young people to work. Some time ago there were promotional texts in the neighborhood newspapers, to train young people as such a coach. So it is actually a kind of pyramid scheme: there are coaches who coach others to become a coach, and they then coach others to become a coach, and in the end everyone is a coach, and there are too few workers in other sectors and... oh... wait...

I would like to find the emergency exit to a society in which there is a basic income that is sufficient for everyone to live in a healthy and safe way. That will take some searching, perhaps. And while i'm searching (hopefully you too) i can write a piece about Knorporix, with the matching photos i took at the time (this will ALSO take some time).