Having gone through Straight at it's peak, I for one know damn well there are over 600 survivors in the Tampa Bay area alone. I went through from June '78 til August '79 and remained an active 7 stepper until Oct '82. It has been around 22 years and so much has changed in this country that it makes it real easy to bury it away in the past.
I can compare the level of the frustration to a guy I met in a sportsbar once who was at the Baseball Stadium that had the ill fated "Disco Demolition" that resulted in wholesale rioting.
Out of all these people in the place, I was the only one that remembered the event and when I asked him what it was like, he lit up like a Christmas Tree and told me all about it. The point is, that up until that point he felt as if all the other folks that had witnessed that event had left the planet or something. I myself, was at Tampa Stadium in 1977 when Led Zeppelin left the stage due to lightning and rain and the crowd tore the place to shreds, but I seldom meet anyone else that was there. Now these are normal everyday experiences I am talking about, but when you tackle an experience as heavy as Straight, few people are willing to talk about it. In the '60's the war was fought in the sweltering jungles of Vietnam. In the 70's and 80's the war was brought home and fought in sweltering warehouses and we were the fodder that served the needs of the government. I have returned to the warehouse that still houses a piece of my soul and the floor still bears hundreds of imprints of hundreds of chair legs that held hundreds of teens timeless while their lives were put on hold for the "convienience" of their gullible parents.
And then there is denial plain and simple. What we went through is so unbelievable to most people and so hard to get across, most folks just bury it and move on. After all that is the American Way. I have been seeing a therapist for 14 damn years, and it was not until 2002, when Mike Sherman had the first conference in St. Pete, that I had something tangible to bring in to my therapist and discuss. Up until that point, I figured that my therapist would wind up needing a therapist if I ever tried to bring up Straight. The shit we went through is too heavy duty for even licensed professionals to deal with. We are just as messed up in the head and heart as any Viet Nam Veteran ever was, only nobody knows and nobody cares. Hopefully that all will change.
take care, and know that you are not alone.