On 2006-01-28 01:23:00, Anonymous wrote:
"Thanks for the easy conversation.
No, thank
you! I'm sure it's a whole lot easier for me. There aren't pages and pages of discussion on here about how best to hunt down and kill all the phasers. Really, I think that's largely misattribution.
Great to hear you are doing well. I had not thought much about Str8 'till I ran into this site. Though I often wondered what happened to all those people.
Thanks. So, how'd you come accross this stuff?
I think I did get my past back in the form of not feeling bad about it anymore. The time I did 'shrooms and talked about how bad I felt for doing them was B.S., but back then I convinced myself it was a bad time. Now I know I HAD A BLAST! I guess my point is that the past is what you believe it is. They took it away for a year or so but I got it back the rest of the time.
Oh, in that sense, yeah. I never lost it. But I had an edge. My family had been in the Seed for 10 years already. The whole thing didn't have the disorienting shock value for me that it did for most of ya'll. But I'm sorry to say, some people never have recovered their past in that sense. I didn't realize it at the time, I thought everbody was just ducking and covering to get through the next year or months just like I was. But, evidently, some people really bought in permanently.
The fucked up thing about that is that, all good intentions aside, it sure seems like more people bought into the "I was a fuckup" aspect of the whole thing than anything about hard work, honesty and living well.
The future is ours as well. I hope I can make better decisions than my parents did because we will have different tools related to our experience. My parents were not as familiar with what sort of options were out there and we never actually sat and talked like we do now. They had other parents telling them this was the right thing to do. And as I said before drug rehab seemed to be a fad back then. We just ended up in a very weird one.
Well, not exactly that either. That's what I thought, though, for most of the last 20 years or so. It turns out that Straight, Inc. branched off into public policy under the name Drug Free America Foundation. There's a whole littany of corporate entities tasked w/ insinuation program philosophy into various aspects of public policy. At the same time, there was another branch of the TOUGHLOVE hategroup busy as beavers building another line of teen gulags. Some of them were and are far weirder and more deadly than Straight ever was. Google
Larkin Rose are doing and formally challenge those laws. So far, both guys have been required to appear at hearings and answer various kinds of corespondence, but not once has IRS ordered the half dozen tax payors standing nearest them to tackle them to the ground and sit on them till they quit bitchin'.
You wrote "Now, again, I don't think there are insidious evil bad guys in this story to be identified and shot at dawn. I think the system, the plan, the concept upon which the program is built is more than just a little faulty, it's downright insidious."
I don't understand the use of insidious. Do you think Str8 is trying to entice us into their way of life? Well I ain't buyin' what they're sellin' anymore. I have free will and am not afraid to use it. Well, within reason.
"
Hmm, come to think of it, it was a bad usage. In sort, yes. "The Program" in the form of Drug Free America Foundation, Community Coalitions, to some extend MADD and the TOUGHLOVE parent movement (still alive and... well, strong though they never were 'well') certainly are trying. It's not even a secret backroom plot, just read their mission statements and other public statements. Here's a classic example of Calvina Fay trying (and, thankfully, failing) to bring a misbehaving doctor/professor into line.
Multijurisdictional Counterdrug Task Force Training at St. Pete College. Know how I found that? Well, when I started looking into the Program (like looking for boogiemen under my bed) I found a whole slew of names that were familiar to me from following drug policy. So I started following hunches. This one struck. This organization was set up under the Nixon admin w/ GHW as former (I think) head of CIA as point man.
Honest to God, I really did think Straight must have gone the way of the Seed. I figured they probably still operated somewhat under the table somewhere, but it wasn't like in the old days when judges and cops had kids in the program and there was no escape. If that had been the case when I
did go looking, well it would never have been a topic worthy of this much discussion and muck raking. But I was wrong. It's worth discussing. If you think these people and their ideas don't effect you today, check into your kids' DARE program. Not only will you find Betty Sembler, again, in the admin of that organization, but if you poke around asking questions, you'll get the hard eye and, maybe even some more substantial retribution. You KNOW these fuckers don't apreciate constructive criticism.
Anyway, that's my apologia. I don't think there's a way to discuss the Program w/o unsettling some people and shattering some illusions. But these are some dangerous illusions.
Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men's shadows and look at a white woman twice.
--Hearst newspapers nationwide, 1934
