Syn, have you ever read up on any of the other programs? I'm not talking about corporate ties and stuff, though I am interested in that. I'm talking first hand experience.
I just read a post by Matt earlier in this thread about the shock of having all this horror forced to the fore when the Skakal case made headlines. I feel ya', friend. But you're not the only ones. For a lot of Elan people, the Skakal thing was an unwelcome trigger. For a lot of Straight and KIDS survivors, the Partnership for a Drug Free America ads have the same effect.
Around 5 years after I got out, I'm working in a screen print shop, putting heat transfers onto baseball caps. I actually liked this kind of work, though it never paid enough. Simple, monotonous tasks that my body could do with little supervision while my head went elsewhere.
So that's the state I was in, really good frame of mind, calm, mellow and pleased to be right where I was when I become vaguely aware of someone approaching from behind. Then this older male voice calls me by my given name in the same sort of condescending tone that Program executive staff and parents always used. For a split second, I thought they'd come to take me away and I reeled on the guy. I don't know if I had a fist raised or if it was just the look on my face, but this little turkey jumped about two feet! Then he handed me an envelope with a shaking hand, congradulated me on having been selected as employee of the month and then turned and
ran back to the safety of the front office.
Now, I didn't have the roughest ride through the program. I only got beat up once for around 4 hours (some kids got it for days at a stretch, all day long) I only got sat on once for around two hours (same as above, some kids lived on the floor)
For about that timeframe, the first 5 years, I got arrested each and every time I got pulled over or had any contact with law enforcement. They always stacked as many charges as they could dream up only to drop them all except for the improper lane change or faulty equipment ticket or whatever and turn me lose the next day when they couldn't find any cause for my bizarre behavior.
That's because the cops in Broward when The Seed was big and in Pinnelas/Sarasota still to this day were all either program supporters or their supervisors were. Logically, I knew they just wanted to write me a ticket and I had nothing to fear from them. But I was utterly terrified of them, none-the-less.
All the wild panic was about what the place and the goings on there did to our heads. It was frightening. You watch people go from lucid to brainwashed zombies. You want to reach out and make friends, but you don't dare because they'll turn on you. And you wonder constantly whether you're really just playing along or whether maybe you're a zombie now too or soon will be.
There are slight differences in the way the Program is implimented under different names and in different locations. But there are an awful lot of similarities, too.
If it hadn't been the Skakal case, it would have been something else. You might have been watching some news magazine on TV about Dundee Ranch and found something unpleasantly familiar in the story. No one can tell you anything about Elan at the time and in the house where you were there. But you might actually learn a bit about it from folks who've had very similar experience.
I dont know or care about Dan Bosdorf's personal life. Frankly, most good journalists and writers are total crack pots in their private affairs. But I know this to a dead certainty. No one's going to shut down Elan by keeping to this little clanish group.
Some folks might well get a nice chunk of change out of Ricci's estate or some other source related to Elan. But that doesn't shut them down. That only feeds their martyrdome while they change their name, maybe their location and sometimes even rearrange the names on their board of directors list. It's happened again and again with Seed/Straight/Kids/LIFE/Growing Together/PFC/etc., ad nauseum.
It's not going to end, though, till the stories get out and those history buffs and compulsive documentarians, either those among us or those from outside, can comb through the details, connect the dots and arrange it all into some coherent insights.
If I am of the opinion that it is inexpedient to assign to the government the task of operating railroads, hotels, or mines, I am not an "enemy of the state" any more than I can be called an enemy of sulfuric acid because I am of the opinion that, useful though it may be for many purposes, it is not suitable either for drinking, or for washing one's hands.
Anonymity Anonymous
