What is immediately striking to me, as I tour the board in search of familiar names, looking for someone, anyone, I might have known when I was a young, confused inmate of the Straight system, is the fact that people are looking for answers--answers of anykind--that might explain what the fuck happened to them all those thankfully distant years ago.
I don't have those answers, unfortunately. But I do feel moved to point out that there is certainly nothing wrong in raising these questions about the misery of straight. Whether you believe that Straight "worked" for you or not, the time you spent there was miserable. It had to be--and you're either lying or deeply masochistic if you say anything contrary. Who actually likes being held against their will? Who likes being shouted at and being told exactly how to dress, under the penalty of adding another couple of years to your sentence? Moreover, who actually likes not being able to look out of a window? Or to be able to walk around freely, without having a stranger holding you by the belt loop? Nobody likes any of those things, despite the purported amount of good they may have done you at the time.
So, my question to all the defenders of tough "love" out there is the following: why can't you stand to hear people complain about an experience that, for all intents and purposes, was undebateably bad? I mean, you can't debate that you would have rather been anywhere other that trapped inside those four blank walls for all those months--all any of us are trying to do is make sense out of it and get on with our lives. Why should the simple act of calling myself a "survivor" of such an experience be such a threat to you?
No one argues for the benefits of stepping in dogshit, or having one's cat run over--moreover, no one goes out of their way to tell a holocaust survivor that Auschitz was "a cake walk." It is utterly baffling, then, that a person who has undergone almost identical horrors to my own, should feel the need to inform me that the pain I suffered at the hands of overzealous parents is not authentic.
I'd never try to tell you that your love of--I don't know--muscle cars or power drills isn't real, even though I don't understand it and think it undeniably reflects your hillbilly upbringing--so why would you keep insisting that Straight was actually the best thing for me?
My suggestion is that you can't stand the thought of being a victim, even though you so obviously are. You were brainwashed. You totally were. One day you thought drugs were cool, the next you hated them, and the only thing that happened to in between was a lot of abuse.
