The quickest way to get the most momentum of support would be to get a show like 20/20 or Dateline to put the spotlight on the revolving staff of the schools and how they keep spawning more torture centers. Much as people hate these milquetoast expose shows, they can be a valuable tool to that end. They and their viewers eat that shit up. Then it sticks in the back of the mind of any potential jurors in a legal case, whether they're told to ignore the media coverage or not, they can't help but refer back to it.
The problem is that most of the time those shows have put a positive spin on the teen help industry and boot camps, etc. They have to be shown the ugly underbelly.
That was pretty much my take 20 odd years ago when 60 Minutes did a couple of segments on Straight. First there was the gushing photo op when Nancy Regan attended an open meeting at Straight, St. Pete. Then there was a follow up, which was almost as bad. I know one of the girls interviewed. Actually, I know a couple of them. But the one insists she kept trying to tell about the kid that was bound and gagged in a back room during that visit. They simply wouldn't let that air. Strictly softball material.
The trouble with mainstream media is that it's extremely expensive and incredibly potent for political use. The real wheels behind this industry have invested shrewdly in public policy over the years. Now, which one or dozen of them do you think hasn't got some strange bedfellows in one branch or the other of the Dempublican party? I think it would be interesting as hell of they'd do a serious investigation into, say, all of Dr. Phil's influences and affiliations. That would lead into CEDU and right back around to the current state of things w/ HLA, Cascade, NATSAP et al. But it would also tread right up on the one good question that solves almost any dilema; who's fuckin who and where'd the money go? What with another high stakes election season upon us, it probably won't happen with any real impact in mainstream media.
Hell, they really ought to look into the new governor of Florida, too, and his high school equivalent activities and affiliations. But that probably won't happen either. Too many of the elite with too much riding on keeping his secrets.
But even a snow-ball news segment aired nationally can generate interest and focus for rampant talking out in group. We really gotta get crackin on an rss feed or dozen, eh?
The truth needs to be available. You dont know, what you say might be the catalyst for another survivor to file criminal or cival charges and then the "justice" wont only be abstract.
Or it could just give somebody much needed perspective and prompt them to sort their own head out a little and do whatever they do better and happier. As I get older and see how thing pan out over a couple of generations, it's more and more obvious how important high school years really are. I'm always the wall flower whenever people start talking about their high school years. I was in the Twilight Zone at that time. Or was it the other way around? Because they spent those years in a world where the tv delivers all the important news and does so fairly reliably and something like the Program could not
possibly exist in 21st Century America, right chillins?
If you're the only one who doesn't lose their head in a crisis, maybe you just don't get the full scope of things, ya know? I find it a comfort to have friends like us who live in the same kind of world I do and so understand what it's like.
::kiss::
