Last Thursday Western Europe was 'taken by storm'. In Holland it hit 10 on the Beaufort scale, with max wind speeds up to 160 km/hour on some beaches. Some people died, some got hurt, and there was a lot of damage to roofs, trees, cranes, cars etc. It was quite impressive, but then again, other parts of the world face such storms ten times a year and are used to much worse! It was surprising to see the effects on our news media. The 8 o'clock news on our public channel ran 20 minutes of storm news and trivia and about 5 minutes of 'meanwhile in the rest of the world' news. Newspapers the next day filled their first three or four papers only with this storm! It looked like we had suffered a historic nature disaster...but actually, even in our quiet little corner of the world, storms like this happen on average every two years. What happened to our country that we get so impressed by this? What will happen if we are struck by a really huge disaster? Are we prepared for anything beyond this? Or has media turned every modest event into a big sensation? So much for the stereotypical 'down to earth' character of the Dutch...I guess we lost this healthy characteristic somewhere in the last five years.