Sometimes village news makes it to the national newspapers. Such as the conflict on Amsterdam’s Borneo Island, where a sad, angry houseboat couple managed to have a very popular swimming jetty shortened because they were bothered by children swimming next to their boat when the weather was nice.
However, there is also a cheerful side to this Driving Judge News. The seething sour set, which according to the neighbors with their bleating has been the abomination of the neighborhood for years, also rents the boat out as a bed and breakfast. On the website they tell you how nice and quiet the place is. That you can relax there after a hard day in the busy city center. A while ago they also praised the wonderful swimming water next to their clean ship. They have now deleted that rule. I think on the advice of their lawyer. Maybe Geert-Jan when he was not yet suspended.
I get the urge to rent that boat for a week and then put it in some untraceable place. Just to tease. We call that taunting back.
No, of course I won’t. I am now a civilized retiree with more dreams than actions. But in the past I would have liked to do this job. And now I would have called that a youthful sin.
Youthful sin. What a wonderful word. A friend of mine calls his wife that. So does she, by the way.
Do I have many youthful sins? A few that I like to keep for myself. So I don’t share that with anyone.
Now don’t immediately think that I once prevented Nelson Mandela, who was released after almost 28 years of unbearable captivity, from giving a speech by making a mess together with a number of terrifying South African Nazis and burning the ANC flag in front of his eyes. But that is not a youthful sin either. That’s just criminal behavior.
If you have done that, then you are just a scary little guy who should be avoided as long as possible. In any position. Yes, I’m talking about the brave Donald Pols, who simply told his employer Milieudefensie about this youthful sin during his previous snack. Without any of those principled climate fanatics making a fuss about it. From that moment on, Pols was of course open to blackmail and after his psychotic switch to Tata Steel, the news broke through this newspaper and the rusty ironmongers immediately kicked him out. Typical Tata: if something is crooked, they immediately straighten it.
What is a juvenile sin? Tips for the SS? Halbe Zijlstra who hallucinated himself with Putin? Johan Derksen who put a candle in the box of a drunken woman? Maybe decades ago there were frat boys who drugged their girlfriends and then fumed over it with the entire fraternity. Or did that not exist yet? Perhaps that is more part of today’s civilization. Just like the boss of the website Motherless, who denied that he put this scumbag of drugged ladies who were abused on his site. In hindsight that turns out to be true. His employees did, however, post child pornography. Isn’t that also a kind of youthful sin? Or are abused toddlers not childhood?
Most juvenile sinners are allowed to continue. Aantjes is of course dead, but Halbe regularly appoints politicians to a good talk show table and De Snor babbles evening after evening as if nothing ever happened.
Kanye West has also been forgiven for his youthful sins. He brandished Nazi symbols (which he may have borrowed from brave Donald Pols), made a song with the title Hail Hitler and sold clothing with swastikas. In any case, the 80,000 fans who see and hear him in the Gelredome this weekend have forgiven him. Or they roar along in a soft, subdued manner.
I started this column with the incomprehensible mutilation of a swimming jetty. Two dictators who want to impose them on a neighborhood. In my opinion, a sin against the youth, who are looking for fun in their much too hot city. Towing that boat away was obviously a joke. Where would I have taken him in my mind? The Strait of Hormuz.