Clash of Cultures?

I went to the provincial Dodenherdenking on the Koningsplein in Maastricht yesterday, where the victims of war and violence are commemorated.
Was a bit odd; quite a lot of it was below expected quality, imo. The male choir was terrible (apart from singing only songs about Jesus, the choir consisted of long retired blokes who hadn't had proper vocal training in a decade. It was truly atrocious. They even made elementary errors in the anthem!), the opening speech was also bad (the basic "The young people are forgetting the people who died" etc, while a survey had actually revealed yesterday that 89% of Dutch youth knows what 4 May is all about), and rather than having the two minute silence announced with a trumpet playing the Last Post, as at the national commemoration, they just said "Let us now have two minutes silence.", much less impressive. The silence was also not entirely silent as the sound machines were making a constant noise (the rest of the area was as silent as you could expect the busiest car roundabout in the city to be). The main speaker actually broke the silence near the end by thumbing through the pages of his speech.
Next year I'll just watch the national commemoration on tv. At least in Amsterdam they now how to organise events like these.

To get to the title subject: I just want to vent my anger at Limburg-bashers.
The insults Limburg gets are largely unfair, and the result of what I can only describe as "Hollandism", the behaviour of the west-Dutch population of desiring the entire country to be a Holland-clone. It is that part of the country that does not oppose to the Netherlands being called Holland, as they truly do not realise the two are not the same.
The most oft-heard complaints are basically that the majority of Limburgers - or Mestreechters - will never leave their city, can't speak ABN ("generally civilised Dutch") and are rude to students and northerners, branding all Dutch people not from Limburg as "Hollanders". While all these are true, to some extent, it is necessary to put them into their proper perspective. I'll deal with them point by point.

Mestreechters never leave their city
This is certainly true. Most people from Maastricht will not move to another city, let alone province, in their lifetime. But is this truly unique? Is it really any different in Rotterdam or Amsterdam, Middelburg or Utrecht? Are Groningen and Deventer paragons of mobility?
I think not. My experiences in the Randstad and Maastricht have taught me that the mobile social groups in society are the higher-educated people, students, businessmen, teachers, ministers, etc. The average person, however, is unlikely to move often. They live with their parents, move out, then often stay there for the rest of their lives.

They can't speak ABN
True for many. They don't really need it, though, because everyone but students and uni personnel speaks Mestreechts. Still though, most older store employees and waitresses/waiters will need to speak ABN to a certain degree. And they do. Again, I don't think this is different from any other area where a strong cultural identity, reinforced with a unique dialect or even language, are present.

They're rude, and call all northerners Hollander
This is the result of a century and a half of national policy. Firstly, they're not all that rude. I worked in a supermarket for two years and was often approached by people who started speaking Mestreechs to me, which I understand but always answer in Dutch, as I can't speak it without make a fool out of myself. I have never been offended over being unable to speak the language in that period. I know of people who have been - but they are more "Hollander" than I am. I'm not the type to look angrily or raise an eyebrow at Mestreechters for not speaking Dutch, or for making sarcastic comments about Limburgers in their presence. My hard "g" has been all but chiselled away after seven years of living in the south. I think that has a lot to do with it.

However, all these problems are magnified times ten because of the cultural difference. When a person who speaks dialect stays in the same city his entire life-time, it somehow seems more close-minded than a Rotterdammer never leaving his city. The Rotterdammer doesn't speak ABN either - however, his dialect is so much more similar to ABN than is Mestreechs or Limburgs, that it doesn't stand out as much. It seems normal. Yet he is making the same "error" - if staying in one city can be described like that.
Until 1980 or '90 Western European states tried to curb the cultural identities in their countries apart from the one, single, unifying culture. In the Netherlands, the country was based on Holland; in the UK, mostly on England (I heard it was even forbidden to give children names in Scottish Gaelic until the mid-nineties); in Spain, Castile was the ideal, whereas France still has very little recognition - if any - for its cultural minorities, like the Bretons, the Flemish, the Gascons and the people of the Languedoc.
The result of this is that there is quite some dislike of cultural minorities to what used to be the national centre. The irony is that many Limburgers are now applying it backwards - anyone not from Limburg is a Hollander. They themselves have been thus won over that Holland is the identity of the Netherlands, and consider only themselves as different. What they do not realise, which is imo their greatest flaw, is that all provinces have their own identity. Gelderland and Friesland are Hollands as much as Limburg is, or rather isn't.
It is not a sin to accept that countries are not one culture but rather a coincidental combination of many, bound together by borders, a set of laws, and, in most instances, at least some common history. However, the fact that the Middle Ages in the Low Countries were spent with Holland fighting Utrecht, Guelders invading Brabant and Friesland raiding Holland, is largely overlooked. Guelders was once more similar to Kleve (Germany) than to Holland, and Kleve more like Guelders than like Brandenburg.
Regionalism is not a bad thing. Rather, it can re-affirm the complexity of the nation-state and how a wonderful series of events brought it all together. If anything, it should give us more grounds to admire the past and continue to work for a better country. With room for all cultures within.