Author: nivtric

The Twilight That Could Be Dawn

nivtricLeave a comment

The sudden collapse of liberalism

In 2016, Trump supporters overran the GodlikeProductions.com message board. The atmosphere turned grim, much as it had fifteen years earlier, when Fortuyn supporters overran the Iex.nl message board. Since then, the new fascism has grown stronger. This time, I didn’t run away as I had missed out on something important. And given the job that may lie ahead, and me supposedly being Adolf Hitler reincarnate, not understanding fascism is no excuse. It is an exaggeration to say that Jews run the United States, but to say that they don’t is naive. And so, I kept visiting the message board and familiarised myself with the MAGA movement, like I previously did with Muslims. But I have never seen this level of bullshit. The first Trump administration was not a clean break with the past, as his cabinet included Republican establishment figures. They kept The Donald in check.

The second Trump administration was a different ballgame. Trump had surrounded himself with sycophants and went unhinged. Because there is no limit to Trump’s ego, and his being erratic and spiteful, it became a spectacle, so hilarious that even Monty Python couldn’t have made it up, with Trump naming building after building after himself, making his birthday a public holiday and countless similar self-aggrandising acts. And let’s not forget his self-enrichment and that of his family members by abusing his office, his mass-pardoning of criminals and his divisive Christmas messages. If Hunter Biden should be in prison, much of the Trump family must also be. I have seen lunatics on the left as extreme as MAGA, but they don’t run the United States. Knowing it is a script, I could laugh about it. Otherwise, I might have feared the worst. Others probably did, judging by the surging prices of gold and silver.

We have seen the collapse of liberalism. Things will not return to what they were before. The liberal world has ended, and forever. The liberal fairy tale has long been successful. Liberal states have been the strongest because of capitalism and science. Americans may think their nation is a Christian nation, but its constitution is liberal. Liberalism is as much a part of the Western heritage as Christianity. Science and capitalism thrived most in a liberal environment with freedom of expression and property rights. When the Nazis took over Germany, several Jewish German scientists fled to the United States, including a fellow named Einstein. They helped the United States develop the atomic bomb. And then Adolf Hitler made the error of attacking the Soviet Union. That is how liberalism won the day. When the Soviet Union collapsed, liberalism seemed to have won.

And so, complacency set in. High on delusion and lured by the prospect of profits for the businesses they represented, the neoconservatives, who were a breed of conservatives that had adopted Hegelian dialectic, much to the horror of true conservatives, believed that Western culture is so superior that after toppling the regime in Iraq, a liberal democracy would magically appear. Since then, China has revised its economic model and now outcompetes the West, while mass migration of non-Westerners has eroded the West’s liberal foundations. Most Muslims, Africans, and Eastern Europeans have little interest in LGBTQ rights or women’s rights, in the liberal sense that is. They have had no upbringing in a tradition of progress rooted in the Hegelian dialectic. Westerners can already notice that in inner cities. Liberalism is yet another fairy tale. It has just collapsed in front of us quite suddenly, even to my surprise, but liberals have yet to catch on. It seems that the time is drawing close. It may be the end of Hegel’s ride, so it will either be the collapse of Western civilisation or the completion of our journey to Paradise.

Peak Bullshit

MAGA could be Peak Bullshit, the era where nonsense can’t reach higher levels, as I surmised two decades earlier, after seeing misinformation spread on the Internet. In retrospect, it was a prophetic thought. After peak bullshit, things may collapse, and The Truth may come out. But why did the rise of MAGA nonetheless surprise me? Something similar had already happened in the Netherlands fifteen years earlier with the rise of the populist politician Pim Fortuyn. Only, the level of nonsense was much lower. For over two decades, I believed that the US dollar-based financial system would break down at some point, but when that collapse seemed to start, I had trouble believing it. I could be the messiah, but that is even more unbelievable.

And I am also biased. We all have a model of reality that gives sense to the world. We use it to explain things. Liberalism and fascism are both models of reality with merits and limitations. Christianity is high on bullshit as well, but there is an underlying truth, and Jesus had reasons to believe he was the Son of God. We all cling to our worldviews, but we deal with contradictions differently. Peak Bullshit came with the following symptoms:

  • Outright fabrications: many claims were simply bogus, so untrue. But they riled up people nonetheless. Anti-vaccine posts were usually of that nature.
  • Improper sourcing: a Twitter account claims something has happened, but there is no other evidence. You have to trust the gutter on that one.
  • Hyping incidents: if a black guy molests a white guy or rapes a white woman, the fascists claim it is evidence of white genocide.
  • Distorting the truth: if you get access to the same news from regular sources, you find that the reporting of the alt-right paints a caricature of reality.
  • Finally, there are definitely things that the traditional media do not report on, and are worth knowing. You can think of what preceded the war in Ukraine.

The left uses similar tactics. MAGA is just much better at it. The left hyped violent incidents committed by neo-Nazis. A most excellent example of nonsense from the left is Black Lives Matter, which made an issue out of the police violence against blacks. The incidents that inspired the movement were acts of police brutality with fatal consequences, and some of them might be murder. Racism may have played a role, but there is no proof. Compared to European police forces, American police make a high number of casualties, and not only blacks. And compared to Europeans, Americans accept a high level of lethal violence. You can get away with shooting a cleaning lady who tries to open the wrong door. In the Netherlands, that would be murder. And if you take violent crime levels into account, you get an entirely different picture. Blacks are three times as likely to be killed by the police, but eight times as likely to be a murder suspect.

So, relative to the number of murders they commit, the police killed fewer blacks. It would be fairer to say the opposite was true than what Black Lives Matter told us. And defund the police? Let violent gangs take over? Black Lives Matter was also high on bullshit. They used incidents to paint a caricature of reality. If you want to know why people went MAGA, here is one reason. I don’t doubt that there is widespread racism and that blacks are wronged. But is violent crime among blacks not a far greater problem than police brutality? And is it not that, whatever society does wrong, positive change begins with you? So, do you want to be good at sports, or do you want to become an engineer? Solving these issues requires a different approach than painting caricatures. And that is what MAGA is also about. But MAGA is the end of the line. You can’t go further down that road.

It was hard for me to grasp that people believe things that are easily disproved. But the proof is everywhere around me. And it happens to me as well. I found Black Lives Matter a noble cause until I found out about the violent crime levels among blacks that the liberal media didn’t mention. And there we arrive at the issue of conservatives distrusting the liberal mainstream press. Liberal media may not lie as much as fascist media, but they forget to mention crucial facts, which can be as bad. Often, more is afoot than you can prove, and some conspiracy theories point to these issues. They reflect gut feelings. Your gut feelings, however, are a survival mechanism, not a fact-finding instrument. If you suspect that someone is planning to murder you, waiting for proof can be fatal. So, shoot first and ask questions later. Yet, basing your actions on feelings while ignoring the facts is also dangerous. We live by stories that give meaning to the world. It is our nature to accept the errors and falsehoods in our worldviews.

Hence, dismissing the MAGA people as stupid or evil is a mistake. The Netherlands had once experienced a large-scale benefits fraud, with most culprits coming from a particular ethnic group. The United States also had one. Only, you can’t trust the reporting in the US because the issue is heavily politicised, while that was less so in the Netherlands. Giving in to popular sentiment created a greater disaster later on. The Netherlands is still dealing with the fallout from a fraud-prevention campaign gone wild, and paying reparations to people treated as fraudsters without proof. A conservative politician’s relentless efforts helped uncover the latter scandal. At the same time, the government tried everything to cover it up, including blacking out pages that it was required to hand over. Moral integrity mattered more to him than political gain. Such politicians are a rare breed, also in the Netherlands. Other politicians schemed to get rid of him by giving a ‘position elsewhere’ a note accidentally photographed by a journalist revealed. He came from the region I came from and lived at striking distance of my birthplace.

In a world ruled by money, fraud and corruption are everywhere, but if immigrants do it, we are more alarmed because ‘they’ are robbing ‘us’. It is only natural to feel this way. We are group animals. And so you have to be serious about fascism. Otherwise, things only get worse. The truth is often disagreeable. You hope that it isn’t so, unless you are a jerk. Those who abuse a system may feel no connection to the society they live in. They may have their reasons, but a society has its reasons to expel them. We can only address these issues if we are candid, and if needed, politically incorrect and as sharp as a knife, but that also means fairness and painting a truthful picture.

For the job that may await me, I needed answers. So, let’s start with a warning. It is the truth as I see it. I try to have a fair and balanced view, but above all, an insightful one. And it is my personal view, so definitely not neutral. But if I am the messiah, it might be the truth you should accept. The truth has many sides. Different views highlight different aspects of it. If you are a liberal, taking the perspective of a conservative opens up a different world with things you weren’t aware of, but are nonetheless true. The same is true if you are a conservative and adopt a liberal perspective. But I fear it is impossible to become good at it if you haven’t been both, and don’t consider your former views a folly.

That happened to me. I adopted the Hegelian dialectic to deal with the contradictions. There is an underlying truth. There are fundamental disagreements about direction, leading to an authority crisis and a moral crisis that divide societies. Think of it. An Antifa activist is as concerned about the future as a neo-Nazi. Authority and morality come from the stories we believe in. The United States has a moral corruption issue that gave rise to MAGA. Most Americans are normal people who have jobs, obey the law and pay taxes. They think what they do is right. Yet, Americans live in a tradition of pragmatism while Europe has a tradition of idealism, and that is a profound difference.

As Judgement Day seems to be approaching. The International Court of Justice is in The Hague, the Netherlands, where I live. The Hegelian dialectic has progressed the furthest here on issues like dealing with the planetary boundaries, LGBTQ rights, animal rights, and the right to decide to terminate one’s own life. That is no coincidence, either. The Netherlands has its own issues. There is a crisis of authority with rioters attacking police, firefighters, and ambulance crews with fireworks during the New Year’s celebrations. They are people who shit on authority. Some are immigrant youngsters, some are soccer hooligans, but most are neither. Liberalism is at the end of the line as well. If I sound judgmental, that is because I must, not because I like to. Try to view it as a problem description rather than a moral judgment. If it seems otherwise, remember that I am a systems engineer appointed to fix the biggest clusterfuck in the history of humankind.

For most ordinary people, the most brutal truth may be that if you work hard to get ahead, you may live at the expense of the planet, other people and future generations by taking more than you need. So, there you are: hard-working, obeying the law, paying taxes, raising your children properly, giving money to charities, perhaps even being faithful to your spouse, only to find out that your hard work and consumption ruin the planet. And that affects both liberals and conservatives. It is hard to stomach. But if we intend to march towards God’s Paradise, we must accept the whole truth and spare no one. Coming from a family of farmers, I am not afraid of shit. If necessary, I grab it with both hands. These are shitty issues, and you can’t fix them unless you get your hands dirty. Some of the most profound truths are hidden at the bottom of a manure pit.

Featured image: AI-generated

Latest revision: 5 January 2026

The Grades

nivtricLeave a comment

Unemployment in the early 1980s was high, especially among young people. I had asked my mother, ‘What is the point of studying for unemployment?’ She stressed that there would always be room for the best. They had lived in poverty and had learned that you must work hard to earn your place under the sun. I never experienced poverty, but my parents kept reminding me that you shouldn’t take a comfortable life for granted. It made me work hard, possibly harder than everyone else. It was a conservative Protestant school, so that says something. In primary school, I didn’t see the point of working hard.

Occasionally, I knew more than my teachers. My father later told me about a mayor he knew. He had been my history teacher before he became a politician for the Christian Democrats. He told my father that I once had corrected him during the lessons. It annoyed him, so he checked his books during the break to discover I was right. He was not the only one. A geography teacher admitted I knew more than he did about Russia.

On the final exams, my average grade was the highest (8.6 out of 10). The scores were good but not outstanding and resulted from hard work. Some pupils had stellar degrees in mathematics without working hard, but not me. My average was good but not stellar. If I didn’t prepare for a test, which happened once, my grade dropped dramatically to 3.5. And so, the mathematics teacher, Mr. Blaak, had a field day and made jokes about me spending too much time on the school newspaper. And I never solved the Rubik’s cube, despite spending much time on it. It demonstrates I was not a genius.

My weak spot was explaining literature. It is about guessing the supposed motives of book authors. My scores were consistently poor, the poorest of the class. I considered guessing other people’s motives and decoding hidden messages in texts a waste of time. The authors themselves often marvelled at what the literature experts found out about their intentions from the books they had written. Art and literature were a lot of fluff about feelings, quite often imagined. And I did poorly at it, and it probably has to do with my Asperger’s Syndrome. With the final exams nearing, I began to fret and asked my teacher, Mr. Amelink, to give me additional practice exams. A teacher could only dream of such a fanatic pupil, so he was helpful, but the grades remained as poor as before.

Before the final exam, I prayed that the grade wouldn’t be too bad. Not only to my surprise, my result was the best of everyone, only equalled by Geraldine, a girl with a striking hairdo, a bit alternative, who dressed outspokenly and flaunted her interest in art and literature. Mr. Amelink was also amazed and suggested the extra lessons had made a difference. Another girl became curious about this feat. She said, ‘You have a mysterious way of winning in the end.’ I was too embarrassed to tell about the prayer. It was selfish to pray for a higher grade. People in Africa needed God’s help much more. And it could not be that God granted that wish, or could it? While doing the test, the questions appeared more concrete than usual, making it easier to answer them.

There is a subtle difference between speculating about hidden motives and understanding the meaning of texts. I was good at the latter. It inflated my grades, as explaining texts comprised 50% of the scores in English and French. If a particular English or French word was unfamiliar to me, I could still infer its meaning from the subject of the text, the author’s opinions and the purpose of the paragraph or sentence. By connecting the dots, you often arrive at the correct answers. I hardly made errors in these questions.

At the time, there was no reason to suspect God had anything to do with it. Still, later developments added a peculiar twist to this incident, as I may have uncovered messages from God in pop music lyrics. The teacher’s name, Amelink, suggests a possible link to the isle of Ameland, and Ameland was to become part of a set of peculiar coincidences. A song named The Foundling of Ameland refers to this island. It includes a scene with the foundling walking over the water. But that was still over twenty years into the future. And I disappointed my economics teacher. Had my grade for economics been slightly higher, I would have received a 10, and an economist would have come to the school to give me the diploma. My teacher had hoped for that.

Perhaps You Can See the Irony of It

nivtricLeave a comment

On a road to nowhere

After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, a populist politician, Pim Fortuyn, gained popularity because traditional politicians had failed to address the growing unease of the Dutch about Muslim immigrants. Fortuyn promoted a messianic personality cult. He called himself the Son of the People of the Netherlands. About the leader the Netherlands needed, Fortuyn wrote in his book De Verweesde Samenleving (The Orphaned Society), ‘A leader of stature is Father and Mother in one. He dictates the law and oversees the herd’s cohesion. The skilful leader is the Biblical Good Shepherd.’ Fortuyn anticipated the coming of the Great Leader of the Netherlands as he wrote, ‘Towards a Father and a Mother, on the way to the Promised Land,’ and, ‘Let us prepare for his arrival so that we can receive him.’ He posed himself as the Messiah. It was one of the reasons I didn’t like him. Perhaps you can see the irony of that.

Fortuyn called Islam a backward religion and claimed that Western civilisation was superior. He valued the achievements of Western civilisation, such as the separation of church and state, LGBTQ rights and freedom of opinion. Many Muslims hold on to a medieval worldview. Still, Islam opposes interest charges on money and debts, and I believed that interest was one of the gravest threats to civilisation, so my views of Islam were more favourable. We could learn something from Islam. Even more so, out-of-control technology might end human civilisation, either through an apocalyptic event or by altering humans to the point that they cease to exist. You can’t blame Islam for that. It is Western civilisation that has brought us to the brink. And if you can only choose between doom and women wearing body covering garments and honour killings, the choice is not that difficult, for a rational individual at least. We are on a road to nowhere,

We’re on a road to nowhere
Come on inside
Taking that ride to nowhere
We’ll take that ride
I’m feeling okay this morning
And you know
We’re on the road to paradise
Here we go, here we go

Talking Heads, Road To Nowhere

The song says that the road to nowhere is to paradise. That is the duplicity of it. Everywhere Fortuyn went, there was chaos and conflict. He seemed to enjoy it. Establishment politicians didn’t like him because they feared he would undermine society. The Netherlands has had a consensus-building tradition known as the Polder model for over a century. Fortuyn broke with that tradition.

False Messiah

Fortuyn saw himself as the coming Great Leader of the Netherlands. History took an unexpected turn. On 6 May 2002, a left-wing loner assassinated him, an event that shocked the Netherlands. ‘The bullet came from the left,’ Fortuyn’s supporters claimed. Exactly 911 days later, an Islamic fanatic murdered the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Fortuyn’s sudden popularity was closely linked to 9/11, while Theo van Gogh had just finished 06/05, a motion picture about the assassination of Fortuyn. Van Gogh was killed on 2 November 2004 (11/2 in American notation), while 112 is the European emergency services telephone number. That points to the hand of God. The Bible has warned us of false messiahs like Fortuyn. I hope you can see the irony of that as well.

Jan-Peter Balkenende
Jan-Peter Balkenende

Fortuyn aspired to become Prime Minister. Instead, Jan-Peter Balkenende got that job. He looked like an apprentice from the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry Potter became his nickname. And that was not a coincidence, as the Netherlands was in for a massive bout of magic. Captain Decker, a song by Boudewijn de Groot, has the following lines,

Captain Decker, Flying Dutchman,
climbs above the timeless
space machine you’re living in,
starts to turn you inside out,
he needs you to know
what he was really all about

Captain Decker, Boudewijn de Groot

The timeless space machine could refer to the place where God is living. A Dutchman may need God to know what he is about. The animated picture Kroamschudd’n in Mariaparochie by Herman Finkers explores the possibility of Christ being born in Twente. My birthplace is Eibergen, just over the border in Achterhoek. In the 1980s, there were plans to create an independent province of Twente. It was to include Eibergen and Nijverdal. Finkers came from Almelo, like Ilse DeLange. DeLange’s fourth studio album, The Great Escape, plays a central role in God’s messages in pop music.

World peace

In December 2008, there were many strange incidents. One of them was that the candy vending machine at the office delivered a particular message. Often, I went there to fetch a Twix bar. This time, the machine malfunctioned and failed to produce a Twix. It repeatedly misfired. That had never happened before, and to my knowledge, no one else had trouble with the machine that day. After trying three different options, it finally worked when I chose option 22: a Nuts bar. That was nuts, even more so because 22 = 11 + 11.

It was about to get even nuttier. To me, 11:11 represents a strange coincidence with two parts. The next day, I bought a bag of potato crisps from the same machine. This time, it worked fine, but after opening the bag, I found a small piece of paper with the crisps. It was a temporary tattoo with the following Chinese text:

世界和平

One of my colleagues knew a Chinese man who translated it for me. The characters stand for world peace. No one else got a temporary tattoo with a bag of crisps. It was a production glitch. The paper had slipped into the bag, perhaps from another product line, and it ended up in my hands. Remarkably, my colleague Ronald Oorlog was absent that day. He had fallen ill. His last name, Oorlog, is the Dutch word for war. Now, that is a funny coincidence. Another colleague, Rene H, joked about the text, saying, ‘World peace is what Miss World would say she wanted after winning the prize.’

Linking it to Sneek

A nursing home in Sneek is named Nij Nazareth (New Nazareth). The nickname is The Banana because the building is banana-shaped. A former neighbour of Allard and Geke, nicknamed The Hedgehog because of his hairdo, has taken residence there. If the name New Nazareth means anything, it could mean that the Second Coming comes from this particular town, which was, by some miraculous accident, my town of residence. It could be that there were other places and buildings with the same name. And so, I used a search engine to look for them, but nothing else came up. Perhaps I was making too much of this coincidence. In the song Het Sneker Café, the unrivalled poet of the Dutch language, Drs. P mocks the making of outlandish connections to a pub in Sneek,

There once was a girl of seventeen years of age,
the only child of a wine merchant,
who sought shelter in the Jura,
because she was lost on a trip.
She found an unoccupied house at the edge of the forest,
and felt from the outset that this is not right.
She took a glance at the window and what appeared:
Inside was the skeleton of a salesman in toiletries,
who had been missing for years
and had once stayed with his uncle and aunt in Bordeaux when he was young.
And there, they had almost exactly the same type of lampshades
as a small pub in Sneek.

Drs. P, Sneker café

That is indeed scary, that skeleton being the remains of someone who once stayed at a home with lampshades almost identical to those in that particular pub in Sneek. Equally sinister is the following. Sneek is one of the Frisian cities of the famous 11 City Skating Tour. The only junction on the tour is at Bartlehiem, which loosely translates to ‘Bart’s home’ but originally meant Bethlehem. And that brings us back to New Nazareth. Drs. P’s song reveals a few more equally sinister connections to the pub and then concludes,

You see now how the pub again and again
affects the social interaction.
How here and there, and yes, even overseas
one stumbles upon this pub from Sneek.
It’s inexplicable and almost occult,
something that fills the world with trepidation.

Drs. P, Sneker café

As a prophecy, it is slightly off the mark by focusing on a pub, not on Sneek itself. Prophesies somehow tend to be off. That comes with predestination. If we knew our predestined future, it wouldn’t materialise. Yet there are inexplicable, occult connections that fill the world with trepidation. And that nursing home, New Nazareth, is not the only thing that justifies thepidation. You pronounce Sneek like ‘snake,’ and there was allegedly a serpent in Paradise. After what happened to me, there seemed to be more to it than just a coincidence. In scripted reality, there is no coincidence. And had the connection been meaningless, my noticing it would still have been part of the plan. So, behind every escape hatch hides another monster.

Pope end times prophecy

In January 2013, an Australian poster on the message board Godlikeproductions.com started a thread titled ‘112 Keeps Coming Up In The Media.’ Others joined in with their own selective biases and found many 112s popping up in the media. That same number is the European Emergency Services telephone number, and since I had lived in room 112 in that fateful dormitory, the thread caught my attention. The discussion remained active for several weeks. During that time, Pope Benedict XVI resigned on 11 February 2013, a highly unusual move. He was the first pope to step down in almost 600 years.

That became material for this thread. 11 February is also the 112 European Day, which celebrates the emergency services telephone number. 11 February is 11/2 in European notation, and 112 is the European emergency services telephone number, so that is why. You must admit the European bureaucrats have found a most peculiar occasion to throw a party. In any case, the Pope’s resignation came unexpectedly, like a bolt from the blue. And lightning struck the Vatican a few hours after the Pope had resigned.1 It made several people wonder, so the thread came back alive.

Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation on European 112 Day is also noteworthy because of the 112th Pope End Times Prophecy attributed to Saint Malachy. The prophecy alleges 112 popes would reign, starting with Celestine II, until the End of Times. Benedict XVI was the 111th Pope. His resignation prepared the way for the 112th Pope, Pope Francis, who, according to the prophecy, would become the last Pope before the End of Times and Jesus’ return. That made me curious, so I investigated the matter and discovered that Saint Malachy had died on 2 November (11/2 in American notation) 1148, and I added that noteworthy item to the thread.

The prophecy raves about the 112th Pope, ‘In the final persecution of the Holy Roman Church, there will reign Peter the Roman, who will feed his flock amid many tribulations, after which the seven-hilled city will be destroyed, and the dreadful Judge will judge the people.’ Some claim it refers to Judgement Day or the second coming of Jesus Christ. It requires quite a stretch of the imagination to make it fit Francis’s tenure, but humans are imaginative beings. Pope Francis died on Easter Monday, 21 April 2025, at the age of 88, and the 113th Pope, Leo XIV, came. My preparations weren’t yet complete, but had progressed far enough to think that the End Time could commence within a few years.

If so, that century-old prediction could be remarkably close in time, even though it doesn’t match the described events. It seems too accurate to be a coincidence, yet not entirely on the mark. The same holds for Finkers’ animated picture of Christ’s birth in Twente. My birthplace, Eibergen, is a few kilometres outside Twente. Likewise, the 9 February 2009 superstorm prediction was too accurate to be a coincidence. The date was correct, but the location was off by about 400 kilometres. Route N666 didn’t precisely end in Borssele, the location of the only remaining Dutch nuclear power plant, but in nearby Heerenhoek within the Borssele municipality. The other Dutch atomic plant, which had been closed, was in Doodewaard (Death Holm), a remarkable name. The former Doodewaard municipality had been 66.5 square kilometres in size, so close to 66.6 that it is noteworthy.


Jesus’ ministry occurred sometime between 26 and 30 AD, a period that will soon mark 2,000 years, which is worth noting. We might find out soon whether or not God finally means business this time. After 2,000 years of waiting, you wouldn’t expect that anymore, and most people live as if Judgment Day will not occur during their lifetimes. And as you might know, the hour will come as a thief in the night. The Day of the Lord will come unexpectedly, suddenly, and without warning. That is to say, if that day ever comes. Likewise, you wouldn’t expect an autistic individual like me to be the messiah. Okay, men with Asperger’s Syndrome tend to be faithful, and God might prefer a man with ‘a heart of gold’, but maybe there is more to it. So, what makes autistic people special?

Latest revision: 11 February 2026

1. Lightning strikes St Peter’s Basilica as Pope resigns. BBC (12 February 2013).

Heaths near Nijverdal

Worried Parents

nivtricLeave a comment

The school switched to a new method called the Jena plan. There were no old-fashioned classes. Mr. B was my teacher for four years. He was a gentle person with a beard and perhaps a bit of a hippy. After all, these were the 1970s. You had some freedom. The Jena plan had task hours. Every day, you had one or two hours to perform tasks you had to finish before the end of the week. Once you had finished them, you were free to do as you please. You could read books or make drawings if you wanted.

At the start of the fourth grade, Mr. B gave everyone a weekly task schedule for the entire year. I remember finishing the whole task list for the year in three months. Mr. B then gave me my work for the fifth grade. I then slowed my pace and spent two and a half years, most of the time drawing or doing other things. At the end of the sixth grade I had finished all these tasks precisely on schedule.

The school emphasised group work. That might have been due to the Jena plan. The classes consisted of children from different levels, ranging from the first to the third or the fourth to the sixth grade. They split the class into small groups of mixed levels so we could help each other. We still had old-style classes and different teachers for some fields, such as calculus or geography. Mr. B took personal development, expression, social skills and teamwork seriously. He probably found them more important than learning. And so he reported to my parents that I did well on my school tasks but was a strange kid who didn’t connect with other children, often went out alone during playtime, and acted oddly.

My parents became worried. My mother then forced me to join the Boy Scouts to play with other children and work in groups. Perhaps a psychologist had given my parents this advice. A young woman led the group. In the narrative of the Boy Scouts, she was our mother. She supposedly was a wolf, and we were her pups. We had a yell, ‘Akela, we do our best, and you do the rest.’ I endured being a Boy Scout for over a year while trying to find an excuse to quit.

Then came the epic winter of 1979, with snow storms and temperatures reaching minus twenty degrees Celsius. The bad weather started just after Christmas. On one of the last days of 1978, we split into two groups and went outside. One group supposedly was lost in the forest while the other group came to the rescue. We were the lost group. It took the other group a long time to find us. By then, it seemed we indeed needed rescuing. But no one was injured, so it wasn’t that serious.

After this chilly adventure, I refused to go there again. My mother then made me choose a sport. I wasn’t good at sports and didn’t like them. My father later recalled that I once wrote a hilarious essay about sports being a waste of time and energy. I selected judo because my friends Marc and Hugo did it, too. Judo is about harnessing your opponent’s force to your advantage. Again, I schemed to get out and succeeded after over a year.

My parents sent me to Almelo for psychological evaluation. I went there by bus every week and stayed for hours. Psychologists questioned me and watched me play with other children. I didn’t trust them and didn’t tell them about my thoughts and feelings. After accidentally saying I loved to dream, the psychologist asked me to elaborate. I cut off the conversation and tried to do and say what they expected of a normal child. And I took the hint. In later school reports, Mr. B noted I socialised more and played like an ordinary kid. He also mentioned I had a vivid imagination and appreciated my writing skills.

The report further noted that my desk drawer was a mess. Mr. B then made me responsible for keeping the materials closet in order. But I am very organised, not in irrelevant detail, but in essential matters. My files are currently neatly organised, but the room is not tidy. The drawer needed no organisation. It was easy to find what you needed. The materials cabinet had drawers for various parts, which was a file-type organisation, so I could indulge in organising it, which I did with fervour, much to the delight of Mr B, who believed he had taught me something.

Featured image: Heaths near Nijverdal. Jürgen Eissink (2018). Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Close up of chestnut tree branch at De Famberhorst in the Netherlands

The Tree Garden

nivtricLeave a comment

Once I went to bed in the evenings and sometimes during the day, my imagination took over, most notably when sitting on the swing in the back garden. There were several different fantasies, often recurring. In one, I drove a car on a road called De Weg (The Way), reflecting my life path. There is a parallel with the Chinese Tao. And our home had wings and could fly, but only in my imagination. Once, in a dream, all the houses in Nijverdal spread their wings, went up in the air, and installed themselves in new locations during school time, so I got lost on my way home. That gave me the idea.

A few times, I had a crush on a girl. And out of nowhere came a strange and scary imagination. She would consume me or digest me inside her stomach. The inside of her stomach consisted of giant gears that crushed me. That imagination didn’t relate to my feelings for these girls, which weren’t particularly strong, or a fear for them as they weren’t particularly intimidating. It just seemed to come out of the blue. In hindsight, it was a foreboding of things to come three decades down the line.

In the autumn of 1976, I had gathered a bag of chestnuts and left them on the ground behind the shed in the backyard. The following spring, dozens of small chestnut trees popped up on the spot. It was the start of my tree garden in the backyard land and the germinate club that specialised in growing trees, most notably chestnut trees. The backyard land belonged to our neighbour, Mrs. Schaap (Mrs. Sheep). She came from the Dutch Indies and was in her sixties when we moved there. She was a widow. Her husband had died a few years earlier, and the patch would become a kitchen garden tilled by her husband. And so, that land remained fallow, and I could begin a tree garden there.

Mrs. Schaap didn’t mind, and we could get along. I was often on her terrace, drinking lemonade with her. She also drank nettle tea, ate nettle soup against her rheumatism, and let me taste them. They were not a thrilling taste sensation. They were like green tea. Ms Schaap became very old and died in 2014, aged 100. On the other side was a garden centre owned by the Ter Horst couple. The wife often came over to let my mother do her hair. To me, the garden centre was an adventure centre. I could hide between the bushes and trees and move inconspicuously. I saved trees and plants from the garbage heap, sometimes with friends, to relocate them in the tree garden. Once, I sold a plant to Ms Schaap, but my mother cancelled the sale.

For over a decade, Mrs. Schaap had a fancy man, Mr. Langelaar. His wife had dementia and later died. He often came over, and they sat in the garden reading books. Ms Schaap sometimes came to buy a few cigarettes from my mother. She didn’t want to keep them at home as that would make her smoke more. I vaguely remember Ms Schaap having a fish tank in the living room at first. My father later confirmed it. That is noteworthy, as at our previous address in Eibergen, our next-door neighbour was also a lady of the same age from the Dutch Indies with a fish tank. I regularly visited the other neighbours as well. They were mostly older people who had kitchen gardens, chickens, cows and rabbits.

We had a horse, first a pony named Tilly, and later, a real horse, Desi, for my mother to ride. A horse in your pasture attracted girls who wanted to ride it. My mother only allowed Alexandra to do that. She had long, curly blond hair and was beautiful, but she was six years older, so I barely looked at her. As the story goes, she had been on holiday with her parents in Morocco once, where a wealthy man offered her parents 3,000 camels to marry her. My mother sold the horse in the early 1980s when interest rates skyrocketed, and mortgage payments became a drag on the budget.

Trees became special to me. I made drawings of trees and made up stories about them in which they could talk and fly. And I began drawing maps, first of the Netherlands and later of Europe or imaginary countries with coastlines, villages, cities, roads, and rivers. These imaginations made life more agreeable. In bed, a fairy tale world took over. This situation remained so during my teenage years and didn’t change during adulthood. There was a strict disjunction between reality and imagination. I was imaginative but didn’t believe my imagination. That was unusual. Most people are less imaginative but believe in their fantasies.

I still love trees. After buying my house, I left the garden and the trees the way they were, much to the chagrin of my neighbour, a lawyer who wanted them cut down. And I planted Christmas trees next to the railroad near my home. One survived and has grown large. In the early 2000s, a deadly chestnut disease began to kill chestnut trees. They suffered the same fate as the elms culled by the Dutch Elm Disease. That is peculiar, as I was born on Elm Street in the Netherlands and had grown chestnut trees later on. The fact that the elm disease is Dutch adds some juice to this coincidence.

In school, a book once presented the children with a choice about the type of future they preferred. Option one was a sober room with a light bulb. A boy on a wooden stool asked his parents, ‘When will there be electricity so I can read?’ This option represented a simple life with little comfort. Option two was a boy attached to a machine. He didn’t appear all that healthy. It represented an advanced technological society. I chose the first option.

Feature image: Close-up of a chestnut tree branch at De Famberhorst in the Netherlands. Dominicus Johannes Bergsma (2016). Wikimedia Commons.