Sistionary: 13+ Reasons Being Dutch Rocks

Hey Steph,

I've recently figured out something about myself: my favorite hobby is being with people; and this hobby has created a lot of other hobbies. My freshmen year of college my roommate loved football, so I went to every home football game that season, and I loved football too. A similar experience happened two years later but swap out the roommate and the sport--this time it was basketball.
And it's not just sports. I've loved local bands, pranking, throwing parties, Spanish music, and hiking all because my friends liked these things. The best part is I don't just pretend to like these things because it is what my friends want to do; I actually, truly, independently love them (at least for a season).

My most recent love occurred two weekends ago when I spent some time with our awesome kid brother. I picked him up from the airport clad in my orange Netherlands jacket (he wore his Netherlands jersey), and we headed straight to a sports grill to watch the Spain versus the Netherlands World Cup soccer match. After that 5-1 clobbering of Spain, yes, I became a lover of soccer, or football as the rest of the world calls it. And I also had a fact reaffirmed to my mind: being Dutch is the best thing ever. Here's a few reasons why our ancestral heritage rocks.

Source

Without the Dutch, the world would have 3 billion tulips fewer every year.

Without the Dutch, we wouldn't have names for Brooklyn, Harlem, Coney Island, and Flushing (in Queens). (Heck, even old New York was once New Amsterdam. Why'd they changed it, I can't say. People just liked it better that way.) Without the Dutch, New Zealand, Mauritius, Easter Island, and Tasmania would have different names. Americans wouldn't be called Yankees. We wouldn't trek across the plains. We couldn't pull the trigger. There'd be no Wiggles (and maybe that's a good thing). We couldn't have a hankering for a thing called a pickle or a gherkin (though who would want to eat that, anyway?) We wouldn't have luck, and we couldn't geek out about anything. It's a sad linguistic life without the Dutch.

Self-Portrait with Velvet Beret and Furred Mantel 1634

Without the Dutch, we'd lose some of the greatest masters of art. Without the Dutch, there'd be no Rembrandt.

The Milkmaid (c. 1658)

Without the Dutch, Vermeer's masterful light would have been kept in the dark.

The Starry Night, June 1889,The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Without the Dutch, a starry, starry night would have remained unseen.

Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930

Without the Dutch, Mondriaan's iconic work in primary colors would have never met the canvas nor Yves Saint Laurent's Fall 1965 collection.

M.C. Escher, Relativity, 1953

Without the Dutch, a lizard would remain a lizard and the world would be right-side up.

Henry Baker, Van Leeuwenhoek's Microscopes

Without the Dutch, we'd lose the Father of Microbiology, Python computer programming language, and van der Waals forces (or at least a name for them). Without the Dutch, there would be no Fokker airplanes, Philips tvs, and Shell gas stations.