Twenty-year-old Robin van Helsum better known as Forrest Boy apparently is heading back to Holland. He’s sure pissed off a lot of people especially in Germany, but one must ask what’s really going on with this kid.
I for one can understand the feeling of just wanting to run away and re-invent yourself completely. How wonderful would it be to just decide one day that your previous self is now and forever forgotten? Sure he did it in a balloon boy sort of way, but the concept in my opinion was quite frankly brilliant. I don’t know what laws there are to deal with when you emigrate from Holland to Germany. What opportunities there are; for getting a job or even what social nets there may be because I don’t know German law. I would assume that his previous reputation in Holland as a trouble maker would make things difficult to say the least, so his solution though misconceived had some roots in logic even as ill-conceived as they were.
To tell the truth I worry about this young lad. I wish I could be there just to offer my emotional support. I wish I had the financial wherewithal to assist in his rehabilitation, I certainly would offer that much. If he was an outcast before; then just imagine how difficult it will be for him to have to return to people he knew in udder humiliation and disgrace.
Those of us who are no longer twenty can remember being twenty and the mistakes we made back then. Sure we may have not done anything close to what he’s done and there are reports that he has a shaky past, but in listening to the news I never heard any reporter say that in his previous life he committed murder or belonged to a gang or sold drugs to children, but nobody seems quite as upset about the twenty-year-olds who have. It’s almost as if he’s thought of as worse than those people just because he told a lie.
The German officials say they were made fools of by Robin and maybe so, but to be honest they didn’t need his help in looking like fools, they were doing just fine on that long before Robin came along and I suspect they’ll be doing that long after he’s gone.
If anyone reading this is from Holland then I ask that you attempt to reach out to Robin and offer some sort of compassion and support. Please I can’t explain it, but I feel there is something salvageable in him.
Sorry, but being placed in psychiatric care does not mean you have a screw lose. Psychiatric care could mean that he is being evaluated and someone who does have a psychiatric problem don’t have screws lose, they are ill; no less ill than someone who has cancer or even AIDS like someone was talking about before. I do understand what you’re saying, but I can’t help but to think that American republicans are far crazier than this kid is. They sure do crazier things. However, this is exactly what I am talking about. Look at all the trouble he went through to tell this lie. What must his life have been like to cause him to take such drastic measures? There is far more to this story than simply slapping him in a rubber room and locking the door behind him. There are 195 countries in the world today and not all these countries have the same laws and not all countries can even agree amongst their own population as to what normalcy really is, i.e. democrats, republicans and independents. One state says 16 is the age of consent and yet another says 18. Some countries have no age of consent laws at all and yet Cameroon goes as high as 21 before you can legally have sex. There are some regions where the average person would look at you as absolutely insane for wearing clothing and some you would be branded for life if you don’t. The United States constitution states very clearly that we all have the freedom of speech and yet a senator in Michigan was banned from speaking for using the word vagina when republicans tried to pass some anti-abortion law. What is sanity really? Would you know a sane person just by site? How many people walked by you today and of those people how many have decapitated corpses hanging upside-down in their basements? Better yet, who decides what is normal or not; western psychiatrists or Hindu priests?