Nemo, let me tell you a short story.
Background:
I'm a 39 year old mother of three, a homeowner, registered voter w/ a dog eared library card and no criminal record; not even so much as a traffic ticket in well over 10 years. My family got involved in The Seed in Ft. Lauderdale around 1970 by way of all three of my older brothers and one sister. I wound up in Straight, Inc. ten years later.
None of us had been drug addicts or particularly bad kids. It's just that my parents, who were neither exceptionally good nor horrifically bad parents, were apparently very insecure or uncomfortable w/ parenting 6 kids. They believed the (now obvious) lie that dissobedience, rock music (Beatles, and especially Alice Cooper) and long hair were sure signs of morbid addiction in teenagers.
I spent two years in Straight, during which time my dad drove 4 hours each way once a month to attend Open Meetings, which were very like parent seminars. He paid the fees, did fundraising and anything else they asked of him, including (of course) vowing allegience to the TOUGHLOVE mantra above any fidelity to me as his child. At one point when I had run away from the program, he actually lied to a cop--something that was entirely alien to his character--to try to get me arrested and returned to the Program. He was
that dedicated and
that sure that I would be deadinsaneorinjail w/o the Program.
Less than a year later, I had come of age and was living on my own. He had come around a bit about the Program. We never really talked about it, but he was just not bringing it up, ya' know? I could drop by his house or, just as often, he'd call just to say hi and he never again tried to coerce me into treatment or to confess to druggiedome or whatever.
The one time we did discuss the program, he asked me why, if all these horrible things had been going on, I had never told him. I said "Dad, because you would have turned me in." He didn't deny it. He knew it was true.
Cops; you wake `em up you gotta dance with `em. They lead.
-- Jack McNulty
