One more thing...

[Anonymous]

Your not weierd, your great.  Are you LB?

[Anonymous]

On 2005-08-14 03:42:00, Anonymous wrote:

"

On 2005-08-13 12:33:00, Anonymous wrote:


There are always those people who have to blame someone and something for every real or imagined wrong in the lives...I neither have my head up my ass nor live in a fantasy land...I have good friends and I am happy with my life...So I go blissfully on with my life, living it one day at a time, dealing with what comes my way and having no regrets or remorse.
Does that make me weird?"

ARE YOU KIDDING ME??  Of course you're weird! You have been posting on the wrong site, my friend...ANYWAY, all kidding aside, I just want to thank all of you special peeps for your kind words to me and know we'll be keeping in touch beyond this downer of a website...Peace, my friends!"

Are you sure you always use your handle.  It sure looks familiar, special "peeps" and all. Maybe not ALWAYS?

[GregFL]

On 2005-08-13 12:33:00, Anonymous wrote:

"I imagine spittle covered screens from people like Ginger and Stripe with the venom, hatred and animosity that is spewed toward one and all.  I'm thinking they need to lighten up a bit.  Everything in life is not coercive or subversive and not everyone has agenda.  And Greg about the time I think you're okay, you veer off on a tangent and denigrate the rest of us for not thinking or feeling like you.  It was 30+ years ago for god's sake, and each of us has moved on in our lives, far past what happened when we were teenagers, or at least we should have by now.  The time spent at the Seed does not represent the sum total of who we are as adults.  And for anyone who hasn't gotten beyond it, I'm pretty positive they would have been a mess in their adult lives anyways, even if they hadn't been there.   There are always those people who have to blame someone and something for every real or imagined wrong in the lives.   As for those of us who don't have any "real" problems with what happened to us during our time at the Seed, you accuse us of having our heads up our asses and living in a fantasy land.  I neither have my head up my ass nor live in a fantasy land.  My friends, co-workers and bosses who don't know a thing about the Seed, think I'm one of the most compassionate, grounded, common sense individuals they've ever met.  I raised good kids who are happy and productive members of society, I have good friends and I am happy with my life.  Not too shabby in the grand scheme of things.  So I go blissfully on with my life, living it one day at a time, dealing with what comes my way and having no regrets or remorse.  



Does that make me weird?"

"And Greg about the time I think you're okay, you veer off on a tangent and denigrate the rest of us for not thinking or feeling like you. "

Not only do I not think you should feel or think like me, I do not want it. I only want everyone to be able to post their thoughts and experiences without all this personal projection going on.

An anon some posts back summed up how I feel.  He said about me that he didnt experience the seed the way I did and would not attempt to denigrate my experience.

Bravo.

I dont intend on denigrating anyones experience. that I point out at times that the seed was a cult, or that bad things happened there, in no way denigrates that someone thinks they took something positive away from the experience. For example, that JU is no longer a junkie.  he attributes that to the seed. wonderfull result. I cant and shouldnt try to take that from him. Should he now dismiss everyone who says they had a bad experience?

I also am not happy with some of the attacks going on around here, on all sides of the issue. those responsible should ask themselves why they feel the need to try to stop the voices of other people. Making rational counterpoints is much more productive.

[Anonymous]

Thank you Greg.  We'll never see eye to eye on our seed experiences and that's okay.  I am neither a leader nor a follower.  I pretty much do my own thing and that's one of the things I took from the seed.  I don't much care what others think of me and how I live my life, cause it's my life.  Because my mind works pretty simply what I took from the seed, like any religious dogma, was to try and life a good life, treat other people and myself with respect, try to be compassionate and understanding, not judge a book by its cover and mostly to just let people live their lives and for the most part while I'm a fallible human, and don't always succeed, and I've made plenty of mistakes in my life, it's an easy way to live.  

As for Stripe, because of your legal training, I will never attempt to go toe to toe with you.  My brain wasn't trained to attack and argue.  I know this because I've spent my entire adult life surround professionally by attorneys.  I have faced my fair share of life's adversities, I didn't get to be 46 and raise kids without having faced life and all its pleasantries and unpleasantries.  Let's see, there's births, deaths, alcoholism at home and and work, aging parents, and don't forget raising teenagers and all the challenges they offer.  I took what I needed and moved on.   My seed experience wasn't yours and yours wasn't mine.  It was 9 months out of my life when I was 15 and thus I've moved way beyond that point in time and just try to live my life and take what comes my way and deal with it as effectively as I can, for a simple human being.

[Antigen]

On 2005-08-15 05:36:00, Anonymous wrote:

I am neither a leader nor a follower. I pretty much do my own thing and that's one of the things I took from the seed. I don't much care what others think of me and how I live my life, cause it's my life.

Ok, please don't take this the wrong way. I'm just sort of at a loss to understand how you took that particular mind-set away from the Seed. In my experience, doing one's own thing w/o checking it out w/ staff first was a fast ride to front row. I used to fear running into anyone affiliated w/ the Seed while I was growing up. What if I seemed off in a daydream? What if my jeans were a little too tattered? What if my eyes were red from swimming? What if I were listening to "druggie" music or something? What if someone busted me crying or noticed how depressed I often was? I was terrified of being reported for some sort of imaginary manifestation of druggiedome.

In my experience, thinking for yourself was just verbotten. I had to double think everything; to prepare a Seed Approved response and, if I wanted anything else, a very secret, private take on it. And respect for others? Yeah, right! About like the "respect" that my favorite anon troll or my brother give me when I try to engage them in discussion about the TC method.

Maybe it was a whole lot different for you. Maybe it was such a large group at the time and you were able to get in and out w/ little trouble. I suppose it could be compared to Singapore. It's a beautiful place to visit. So safe and clean and honest. But if you had to grow up there, in fear of imprisonment for forgetting to flush a toilet or of caning for some minor infraction, you might view it differently.

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.

--Mark Twain

[Antigen]

On 2005-08-13 18:58:00, Stripe wrote:

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.

See? That's what I'm talkin' about. When I was a little kid growing up in Pompano, we had a defacto neighborhood watch program. We used to call them the Iggys because they were old and stooped and Mrs. Iggy had this Al Sharpton thing going up top. There were no secrets in Lyons Park, except the open kind (like Mr. Folks was gay and the firemen are not generally faithful to their wives) But the day in the life of a kid growing up in that community was pretty idylic compared to what we've got going there now.

Then, if a kid cut class or damaged a neighbor's property or stole candy frm 7-11, our dad found out and dealt with it. Now? The school resource officer will hunt them down, place them under arrest and transport them down to the Juvenile Intervention Facility (JIF) for assessment and intervention. And, we're told, that good citizens join the neighborhood vigilante (oops! neighborhood watch) program and report directly to law enforcement. They even have seperate toll free hotlines for truancy and other suspicious activity.

Have you checked into Peer Counseling in the schools? My oldest daughter was assigned that program in 9th grade. It stuck in my craw, it did. I just wasn't comfortable w/ the idea of 14yo kids as the first line intervention for the personal issues of other 14yo kids and a lot of other aspects of the program.

So, for years, I thought I was just paranoid. I found out a couple of years later that Peer Counseling, as implimented in Broward County Schools, was developed and marketed by none other than Bill Oliver, former Straight, Fairfax exutive staff. Same w/ DARE. Creeped me out for a hundred reasons. Later, I found that it's founder, Daryle Gates, LAPD chief, had been involved in trying to establish a Seed and then a Straight in So. Cali and that Betty Sembler is on the boa of Dare America and a whole slew of other murky, government funded drug nazi organizations.

So it's not just my imagination. And yes, I remain angry about it. I'm angered that, after all I went through and all I gave up in the course of escaping that cult that they've manuevered very successfully to gain access to my kids through compulsory schooling. I'm pissed as hell that I have to pay for it, too!

But you can't question these things w/o getting a very Seedling-like response from those involved. You just got and try discussing with the local school resource officer the wisdom of turning 10yos into CIs w/o compensation, informed consent or any of the protections normally afforded to undercover officers. It's a taboo subject. Our children are conscripted. Anyone who questions any aspect of it is smeared and accused of being the worst kind of person.

The cultural hunger for a substance that lets you hold affordable conversations with God, watch walls melt, breathe colors, and explore your psyche remains unsated.
--Ryan Grim for Slate, April 1, 2004

[Anonymous]

Actually it was quite small in St. Pete the year before it closed and there was no getting lost in the crowd, there was no crowd.  

I remember a rap with Darlene leading it where she talked about taking what we needed from the program and leaving the rest, that we were merely being given the tools to make choices in our adult lives.  I remember her talking about the use of alcohol and drinking in our futures.  It was neither a negative nor a positive, just about making informed adult decisions.  At least that was my take on what she had to say.  

Which is why in my opinion my life now is so much more than the 9 months I spent there.  It's a part of me, but I am not defined by the time I spent there.

[Antigen]

That's just really hard for me to imagine. However, Marshall brought up Marnie's name recently. That makes me think. I remember her very well and very fondly. She and a gal named Cheryl were on staff together and, it seemed like, close friends. They both were just less strident, more well intended.

Marnie did stand up all the newcomer girls and apologize for a truely horrific round of haircuts. The "stylist" was a dog groomer who had never cut any human's hair except her poor, longsuffering sons'.

Naturally, we in group never got an iota of info about why they poofed out of our reality one day. But I can believe it was because they finally figured out that there just was no mitigating the disaster.

But still, I can't imagine any staffer from either The Seed or Straight standing in front of group discussing future drug and alcohol use in terms other than harsh condemnation.  

I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.
--Vincent Van Gogh, Dutch painter

[Anonymous]

Hard to imagine or believe, but true.  At the end, St. Pete was a fairly quiet place.

[Ft. Lauderdale]

I wondered for years why the chicks in St. Pete looked like poodles. :grin:

[Anonymous]

LOL-it wasn't just at St. Pete!  I had really curly, long hair when I was dragged into Ft. Pierce.   By the time my old-comer was done with the scissors, you could have called me Fifi or Buckwheat.  

I remember sitting on the front row at the next open meeting and seeing the horrified look on the face of my parents-that is a bad haircut.  My sister, of course, was snickering.

Someone tell me again why chicks had to get their hair cut?

[Anonymous]

The stated purpose as I recall was to remove the druggie image associated with long hair, short hair, curly hair, afro hair, shag hair cuts, whatever.  If you had a hair cut, it had to be changed.

The effect, REGARLDESS of INTENTION, because we all know and accept that the seed was only based on good intentions.... was to remove and alter self-image and self-identity.  HIHO and welcome to the cult.

[Antigen]

The Report of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse
Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding
Commissioned by President Richard M. Nixon, March, 1972 [summarily discarded like last years campaign promises, April 1972]

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lib ... c/mis2.htm

SYMBOLISM

The symbolic aspects of marihuana are the, most intangible of the items to which the Commission must address itself, and yet they may be at the heart of the marihuana problem. Use of marihuana was, and still is, age-specific. It was youth-related at a time in American history when the adult society was alarmed by the implications of the youth " movement": defiance of the established order, the adoption of new life styles, the emergence of "street people," campus unrest, drug use, communal living, protest politics, and even political radicalism. In an age characterized by the so-called generation gap, marihuana symbolizes the cultural divide.

For youth, marihuana became a convenient symbol of disaffection with traditional society, an allure which supplemented its recreational attraction. Smoking marihuana may have appealed to large numbers of youth who opposed certain policies or trends, but who maintained faith in the American system as a whole. In ;a time when symbolic speech is often preferred to the literal form, marihuana was a convenient instrument of mini-protest. It was also an agent of group solidarity, as the widely-publicized rock concerts so well illustrate.

For the adult society, the decade of the sixties was a distressing time. The net effect of racial unrest, campus disruption, political assassination, economic woes and an unpopular war was widespread uneasiness. Attending a general fear that the nation was witnessing its own disintegration was a desire to shore up our institutions and hold the line. That line was easy to define where drugs, particularly marihuana, were concerned.

Use of drugs, including marihuana, is against the law. For many, marihuana symbolized disorder in a society frustrated by increasing lawlessness. Insistence on application of the law tended also to harden views, thereby escalating still further the use of marihuana as a symbolic issue.

The social conflicts underlying the drug's symbolic status have dissipated somewhat in the past few years; and in some ways, the Commission has similarly noted a partial deflation of the marihuana problem and of the emotionalism surrounding it. We are hopeful that our attempt to clarify the scientific and normative dimensions of marihuana use will further deemphasize, the problem orientation and facilitate rational decision-making.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.
--Arthur C. Clarke, author

[Anonymous]

The effect, REGARLDESS of INTENTION, because we all know and accept that the seed was only based on good intentions.... was to remove and alter self-image and self-identity.

EXACTLY!! I had this "slutty shag" which NEEDED major altering.  It was the first step in altering the f****d up self-image I was putting out to everyone...I was "just too cool" ya know? It worked, and I considered it a good thing.  My mom happened to like the change...as did I.

[Antigen]

Good intentions. I suppose it depends on how you define the term. Certainly, they all thought it seemed like a good idea at the time. But don't you think it's just a tad evil to intentionally convince little girls that having (or wanting) the fad haircut somehow made them morally flawed? Just for example. There are many examples.

At the bottom of it, the Program is all about squashing dissent and forcing conformity. Never mind whether the haircut or the friends or the music or any other detail were actually worthwhile or not. It made mom nervous, and so young one, as much as it pains me, I must squash your free spirit and independent mind and install a nice, simple, clean new set that won't vex your mother.

I remember how that all seemed perfectly fittin and proper at the time. But looking back, what kind of monsters were we to even think of it?

Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more you must have of the former

--Horace Mann