I thought the U.S. government was supposed to protect it's citizens from places like $tr8 Inc. Where they take captured children and minors and keep them in little windowless rooms, 2 guards at the door. Where they take your clothes and your wallet and your boots and your belt before they strip search you on your way into the group for the first time...I didn't realize until much later in life that I wasn't entitled to the protections of the constitution because I wasn't old enough at that time. I was 16 when I went in. What I mean is one of the things that's always angered me about that whole experience was the way I was brought up to believe in America because she would protect my human rights and dignity as a person. We had the constitution after all and the declaration of Independence an' all...In other words if I'd a been 18 I could'a' protected myself, but since I was only 16 when I first went in, I could do nothing but watch myself fall. I watched what was happening.
My dad is a Vietnam vet. So is my uncle, on my mom's side. My grandfathers were all vets. When I was 4 years old I was runnin around in a camouflage Airborne Army uniform brandishing a plastic machine gun, proper insignia and flag an' all. And me and my friends would play war in the back yards and the alleys of my Grandmas street, while my Dad was in Vietnam. Maybe I was 5 by then.
Anyway to come up from such a patriotic background and then be shoved into $tr8 where every constitutional right I would have had, had I been 18, instead of 16 at the time, was violated, is enough to give a kid whiplash. You see what I'm sayin ?!
Anyway, if an 18 year old needs so much protection, shouldn't a younger person have even more ? I know parents need rights an' all, I'm not sayin that, but my parents were completely wrong to put me in $tr8 and there was nothing that I could do about it.
When Fred Collins sued $tr8 and won for whatever the charge was...unlawful imprisonment or whatnot, what that really meant, in a moral sense, was that $tr8 was wrong to keep anyone who didn't want to be there, unless you were court-ordered or something maybe. In which case you're rights may have already been legally taken from you. I can't judge that from here, cept to say $tr8 still would have been some kind of strange and excessive punishment. Some 16 year olds can be more mature than some 20 year olds so it's nearly impossible to set some age whereby one's right to defend one's self legally kicks in. When your bein held by force in a program you need legal rights, constitutional rights. That's why most of these programs keep children and minors prisoner instead of adults. They can't get away with perpetrating such crimes against adults or in other words, those Americans who have constitutional rights. I knew what was happening as I experienced it and yet could do nothing to prevent it. I thought I had constitutional rights all along. I never stopped to think that they wouldn't kick in til I was 18. Nobody ever told me you had to be 18 for that shit to count. I thought it was just in the values of the people.
It was only as I grew up and began to see the historical pattern of the Fedral gov't to oppress people that I began to question the relationship. I thought about all that I had learned from my mother as we crossed the west, about Native American history, which seemed at the time to me, like an analogy of my own life. I was too wild and free. They wanted me in on the res. too. So I begin to go off the res. to explore the world and it's myriad forms an' such. But so I got outside of their reign of control and was discoverin things which they denied could be.
The last thing they want are socially unconditioned adults unnatuned to their way of thinking and their values. If we were to turn 18 still believing in our own transcendental natures and wielding our constitutional rights...well, that just might be damn scary for them ol' fat cats. That is their nightmare. That we might be empowered by our natures and politically free. Str8 Inc and the programs like it commit crimes against American citizens and America herself by denying the individual citizen the right to his potential both spiritually and socially. $tr8 was a private entity and so it operated without regard to any semblance of due process. In other words it wasn't any part of the penal system. It was a private prison, where you had no representation, no voice, no identity, no way.
... Criminals.
$tr8 and programs like it are an oppression against American citizens.
