Ok, here's a quick recap, as I see it, of what's gone down over the last couple of years.
Going way back, Richard forced the last Straight, Inc location to shut down or reorganize under different names.
Wes picked up the issue and, drawing on all his talent and skills at research and documentation, he's had just about untold influence in bringing people around the the nightmare reality that Straight didn't actually shut down.
SAFE has been severely crippled, though not dead yet, due to a lot of light having been shed on their operation by Florida media, protestors, former clients keeping in touch w/ current members, etc. No telling exactly how effective that effort has been. The planned lawsuit failed due to incompetent (intentionally or not) legal representation.
Phil, Rebecca and Lulu cleaned Miller's clock, shutting down the Program under the Kids name.
As all of this is going on, ppl are talking and comparing notes. Something like a dozen of the WWASP/CEDU variety of gulags have shut down and now I hear Bethel (the subject of Alexia Parks' book,
An American Gulag, and WWASP are both facing class actions.
Those are some of the facts. I'm leaving out a LOT, just for brevity. I know you're already tired and bored and I don't want to try you!
In the course of all the forgoing, including the skipped parts, we've managed to outrank the help for troubled parents industry in the search engines with practically $0 investment.
That's the nice advantage we have over the opposition. They have to continually shell out bucks and effort to force their propaganda. We, on the other hand, have nothing to hide and no need to control the information. Plus, there's the added milage some of us get from just the sheer joy of being able to carry out some of those thousands of Bizarro World conversations whe had to endure in group, only this time we get to drag the sadistic lunatics out into the more commonly accepted reality.
Couple of problems keep cropping up. One, we are an unusually hostile, paranoid and trucculant crowd. It's frustrating as hell sometimes, but it seems to be part of the debacle that we'll just have to deal with. Peace out!
Another significant problem that I don't think too many people really expected to be such a problem has been that trying to find people in positions of legal authority over these facilities and who actually give a shit, or even believe what we tell them, has been about damned near impossible most of the time. In most cases, the program ppl have already established cozy relationships with regulators and other legal and moral authorities long before anyone on our side ever hears about the places.
IOW, the problem is not that these little, individual groups are getting away with something and all we have to do is rat them out. The problem is that our society actually condones these practices, when you get right down to it.
So the solution is going to have to address that. It's all about education. There's just no telling how much impact something like a letter to an editor, a visit with your state or federal rep or a social worker, activist organization w/ sympathy for our cause or some other random act of
RAMPANT talking out in group will have or has had.
It's sort of like what Treebeard said. It takes a very, very long time to talk all this out. I think we've almost finished saying good morning. Now it's time to find out the names of some of the folks we've just said good morning to so that we can properly introduce ourselves.
We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
--Plato
