Person of the Year: Jerry van den Brink

::Person of the Year::

Jerry van den Brink

No picture, because there is none I assume. Mr. Jerry van den Brink is a Dutch living in the Netherlands and more popularly known by his pseudonym, which refers to a character from a novel Chapel Road by Louis Paul Boon that have shaped his view on the society.

What did he do? He gives hope. What did he do exactly? He reads your writings, takes it as a part of him, and return it to you humbly. Where to find him? At blogs–Indonesian ones. Commenting, sometimes debating, but most of the times, encouraging you to do better. He doubted why, but he rarely doubted who. Why did he do it? We have no idea, maybe somehow he finds a piece of a puzzle in every personality he has encountered in the blogosphere, picking it up one by one patiently, expecting none in return, and trying to get the pieces together.

A personal friend of mine once told me that by blogging, bloggers are carrying a great deal of responsibility for writing. I briefly replied that it’s not the writer that carries such responsibility, it’s the reader. To write, is a one-way sequence; writers cannot force a two-way dialogue. It is indeed that only a person like Mr. Jerry van den Brink, a socialist, humanitarian, activist, loving husband, father, and future grandfather, that makes the two-way sequence possible and actual. He, and others like him, carries much greater responsibility by discerning a writing with a sense of reason and purpose. Not mere flattery.

But is that really why I chose him to be this site’s Person of the Year?

Unfortunately, nope. It’s like this. Centuries and centuries ago, what I call now as a tribal ethnicity used to be a village, a village of families. It is called Batta or Batak. It’s a small village compared to the empires in Riau or Java, but a strong one, similar to Greece’s Galia village. My ancestors are savages, warlords, barbarians of the island. Nevertheless, they also have no history of being enslaved, or enslave others. While the Dutch East Indies (VOC) colonization have settled elsewhere in Indonesia, the Batak villagers still resist to fall down and kneel before the “kompeni”. And as cannibals, they used to eat their Dutch and German intruders–that is, until Nommensen came and told the Bataks to start living with a healthier diet.

So, that’s basically it. It’s because my ancestors used to have Dutches for dinner.

As of that pieces of puzzle, hopefully all of us can give Mr. Jerry van den Brink a beautiful view someday.

Thank you.

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