Coolpolitics

INSPIRING YOUNG PEOPLE TO IMPROVE THE WORLD

Do you think Dutch young people are uninvolved in international issues and politics? That is nonsense, according to Coolpolitics. It is just a question of how they are presented.

Lesbian hedgehogs and homosexual ducks; the Netherlands in space; the link between music and taste; the realities of on-line gaming; the source of all life; CSI in the country side; a thousand miles of polar ice; black holes; Google’s algorithms; responsibility for national security; alcohol, marihuana and no brain damage?; and will it ever be possible to beam people up, just like in Star Trek? A wide range of subjects was discussed during the Lowlands University classes that were organised during the Lowlands pop festival in The Netherlands eld for the past three years.

Many people were rather surprised that the classes were such a great success from the start. 'Our first speaker in 2005 was Ruud Lubbers (former Dutch Prime Minister). Two thousand festival visitors chanted ‘Ruud-je! Ruud-je! Ruud-je!’ when he appeared. So that was good stuff. We had organised debates with politicians before at Lowlands in the previous years under the direction of Theo van Gogh, and on those occasions the venue was always packed as well.'

It says something when thousands of festival goers are prepared to get up early after a wild night to discuss the pill in the national health service or to listen to lectures about European unification and sustainable energy, according to Jaap Spreeuwenberg. 'When coolpolitics was set up in 2003, everybody told me I was crazy. They told me that young people are not socially engaged. In the meantime that perception has been adjusted considerably. Of course you do need to come up with a format that appeals to young people in order to be able to explore issues more deeply.'

In spite of its success, coolpolitics has decided not to organise a new series of festival debates in 2008. Jaap Spreeuwenberg says: 'In those festival debates the ‘big’ issues have all come up, like security versus privacy, war and peace or rights for homosexuals. At a certain point, they have been well and truly discussed. We also wanted to avoid people saying: “There you have coolpolitics and their debates again.'

In the future, coolpolitics wants to do more work with stories. 'If you read in the newspaper that inflation in Zimbabwe stands at 100,000%, you might think “goodness, that’s a lot” and then move on to another article. It is easier to retain that information if you read that rich Zimbabweans order their beers before they go for a round of golf and drink them after their game because otherwise their drinks will have trebled in price in the time it takes to play a round of golf.'

'Kyrgyzstan provides another example: it is traditional for men to carry their brides off. In the meantime Kyrgyzstan has obviously moved into the Twenty-first century; there are cars and there is urbanisation. And then there is the march of Islam which is putting pressure on the position of women. The consequence of all this is that the men now drive around towns and simply steal a wife. This is, of course, very different from a village boy who runs away with a girl who is actually perfectly willing. Such ‘stories’ are a peg to hang greater themes on, such as freedom and emancipation.'

'We want to produce news reports on this sort of themes for MTV, the channel with which we have already collaborated extensively. Young people
watch MTV because they identify with a certain life style. If MTV shows politically-oriented reports, then that is an important message: politics are worth getting involved in. That, in turn, links seamlessly into the Coolpolitics’ general objective: to inspire young people in a positive and creative way to make the world a better place; and to be ambitious in that objective.’

Coolpolitics aims to encourage young people to change the world and to become involved. This is why it organises, among other things, debates and lectures at pop festivals (Lowlands University; the very best lectures by the very best professors), produces politically oriented reports for the music channel MTV and writes, together with Spits (free daily Dutch newspaper), columns about icons under the motto: who inspires you?