Stripe here, Anon, replying to you.
I have let you and every one else know exactly who I am. I am not ashamed of any decision or choice I have ever made - except one: voluntarily staying at the seed after being graduated, spouting dogma and supporting the what I see as the oppression of other innocents. If being called venomnous is the only consequence I have for that, I'll gladly let you slap me with snakes and smear the venom on myself.
I am truly glad that you have raised your children well and that they have grown up safe. I am also glad that folks think you are compassionate and kind and all the other things you say about your self. My friends, my family, my professional associates, etc., all say those same things about me, too. I too have raised an incredibly compassionate, intelligent, truly wonderful young man of whom I am so proud it makes my heart burst. We are not that different, are we?
I don't know you so I can't really think any thing about you. But I do know this - you and I have never ever walked in each other's shoes. Maybe you needed to live your life by the addiction code of the seed. I didn't. I chose not to live by a code that was imposed from the outside and proved to be purley USELESS to me.
The crime of the seed, its supporters, sleeping staff members, sleeping addict proponents, the lifelong seedlings and the program progeny is that the place and participants refuse to allow free thought or action. They believed that any person not involved and towing the company line - any non-seeder, was or is an inherenltly bad person. Kind of like what you think about me. How could that be? How could every one in the world be bad except the people in the warehouse?
That's no differet than the experience I had at the Baptist school where I was told by the preacher/teacher that every religion in the world was wrong but the Baptists - there was only one true religion. "Even the people who never heard the word of God and had their own religions?" I asked. Yep, going to hell. hmmmm. There's a conflict here.
I think the rehab industry is, to use a term I despise to this day, a "fullofshit" industry. But worse than being "fullofshit," it's an industry. And you and I and every other seed graduate or non-graduate, we are products of the industry, like it or not. We were imprinted with a programmed thought pattern - a set of specific regs to follow - a paradigm under which to operate. (you say a goodseed/ I say a bad seed). But either way, we both were imprinted with that knowledge and sent out in the world to use it for the betterment of the seed society. And what does not fit into the paradigm is totally rejected - from sibligs to parents, to friends, to jobs, to schools, to lovers, husbands and wives. Just your basic experiment in social engineering. Only no one asked us if we wanted to be part of it. No one.
I don't know you so I don;t know whether you have taken any significant steps or had any significant experiences to date that have challenged your own belief about your personal experience at the seed. You have accepted it as just another part of your life - "it is what it is," to quote you.
Being put in theseed was NOT a normal experience. Volunatrily going into theseed was not, I repeat, not a normal experience either. I don't think we should so easily dismiss the experience as "it is what it is".
The brain hurts and BIG problems arise when lifelong conformance is challenged. Ask Martin Luther King - well ya can't, but look at history. When any person or group challenges the mindset, there's hell to pay.*
It's not confortable for me now and it has caused and still causes some pretty clear dividing lines in my life. How do you determine that I have not "gotten over it" ? You have as much as decided my adult life was probably uncontrolled and messy without the benefit of EVER having personally known me. That is a pretty big assumption for you to make about any person, let alone someone you do not know. Life is not about control and neatness. Life is, in fact, quite messy, it's what happens when we are trying to control everything.
That folks continue to buy into the conformity and accuse me of spouting venom, hatred and spittle- that you dislike what I have to say so much tells me it's not a challenge you care to confront at this time and that's okay. Please, don't just blanketly assume in such a "pat answer" fashion that I'm not over it - that I am a fuck-up because I don't tow the company line or lay back and just accept what happend to me as okay.
Instead of just accepting it as "it is what it is" I think my experience requires me to understand what happened and how it happend so that I can work now to never let something like that happen to me or any one else I love.
I'll continue to post here and take the shots, cheap or deserved. I'll consider your points and concede when I agree or my opinion has been changed. But I truly do believe that these programs are inherently dangerous for all humanity. Then and now.
* Reference the song: Holiday in Cambodia by the Dead Kennedys, I believe, circa 1982?. Cambodia under Pol Pot - the terrible results of a despot's wicked desire to rid the society of all intelligensia and non-conformists. I don't think I need an extreme make over or an extreme re-education camp. Well, I'd take the extreme make-over if it were free... :razz: [ This Message was edited by: Stripe on 2005-08-13 19:35 ]
