More or less?

A lesson in Morals:

It is strange how coincidence can hit you in the face and start to make you realise something.
This happened to me last week:

I am u tutor. Although I'm not graduated in Dutch Philology, people seem to be very interested in hiring me. Its a lucrative business and I meet many people with different backgrounds. For example a desperate wife calling me to teach Dutch to her Tunisian husband, because she wasn't patient enough.
It is remarkable. I enter different peoples houses without knowing what to expect. After a few times you'll get more familiar, but I avoid any personal contact with my students. Every time I make sure that there is enough distance, but somehow it still stays unusual to share a room with an unknown person.

As I said, I went to dinner with M., the son of an Indian diamond trader in Antwerp. Before going I made him very clear that I was seeing someone, and that I only would join him for professional reasons. (With my other students I sometimes went for a coffee but that wasn't personal contact, that was just to learn them how to order a coffee in Dutch.)

I was sure he understood this, until he gave me the bag of jewellery, and proposed.

How should I react? Did he really think he could bribe me? What is he more or less willing to pay? Was I bribable?
No of course not. Although the offer occurred for a millisecond as a tempting one, I immediately refused.

After that event, I was completely out of balance. Little by little I realized the meaning of this moral issue: everything is more or less negotiable.

To clear my thoughts I bought myself a Humo and went to read it on a bench in the Antwerp Zoo.
On page 146 Arnon Grunberg said in his column: “ Ik weiger nog langer stil te zijn als wij om de oren worden geslagen met onzedelijke vergelijkingen in naam van Europese waarden.” Harsh language as a reply on Benno Barnard and Geert van Istendael's comparison between Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' and the Koran.
He had a point. While staring at the flamengo's I decided to go to my lover in Brussels to talk with him about this situation, but I didn't had enough money for the train (M. never paid me for the tutoring). I decided to hide myself in the scented toilet of the train. I was feeling nauseous. When I arrived in Brussels, I vomited the dinner M. paid me. There I stood. My lover stared at me. Now there was nothing left.

I installed myself behind the computer and I was reading Grunberg's newest blog post 'More not less', in which he agreed with a war correspondent that said: “more people should experience war, not less.” At that point I realised that this couldn't be a coincidence.

I wondered... Maybe we should indeed experience more war, or at least we should be more exposed to war correspondence. And that raised the moral question: War or less? Isn't it far more easy to ignore what is happening? Should we keep silent or suffer for the truth? What's wrong with contemporary media coverage? Do they negotiate? Are the being bribed?

its all about ethics.

Even a bigger coincidence occurred when I was reading Humo in bed. The article right before Arnon's column was an interview with Kolonel Luc Marchal: 'Schuld en boete. 'Kolonel Luc Marchal over de genocide in Rwanda.'

But this is for the next post.