Rev. #1 Cost of Seed - per child - survey (ignore earlier po

[Anonymous]

Greg, what exactly is motivating? Does it mean just raisng hands or what? Thanks.

[GregFL]

No, it is far from just "raising hands".

I believe that motivating started in the St Pete seed while I was there. I went to the Ft lauderdale Seed  after graduating and don't remember the extreme motivating behavior we were forced to participate in at the Seed St Pete

The kids, Us, were told we must "motivate our desire to be called on" and were given constant raps on why this was important. The boys started waiving one hand frantically and snapping their index finger against their middle finger. Soon whole sections of the Seed seemed out of control as one kid tried to outdo the other. The girls developed their own style which was slightly different.I saw a gradual but drastic change in group behavior that became more and more extreme as the kids tried to appease their captors by "motivating" their desire to be called upon.

The teenage Seedling graduates that became the original staff members of the straight took this behavior with them and over the years it became more and more extreme.

You can view the 31 year development of motivating at a video of SAFE, a direct linear descendent of the Seed.

click this link and then watch 28 daze, a two part news report on SAFE.

http://fornits.com/anonanon/video/

 Safe used to be a Straight branch, and as you know, Straight was just a spinoff of the Seed. There are as we speak the seed rules, the three signs, the seven steps, all on the wall of SAFE, and kids have open meeting and public confessionals and all the other Seed alchemy that didn't work then and doesn't work now.

While you are in the video fault, may I suggest you view "Bingo"  and some of the other videos?  Enjoy.

And next time you are in Ft Lauderdale, drop Art Barker a line and Congratulate him on 31 years of "motivating". His contributions to the drug war were far reaching and had heavy impacts on many lives. He still lives in a bubble and believes he had a 90% sucess rate, a dubious claim with no facts to back it up.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Greg. Was the closeness of the relationships among The Straight participants the same as the Seed participants? Did they feel the same illusion of closeness to each other as it was all "planned in the stars" :eek: ?

[GregFL]

That is an outstanding question and I would generally say they relationships among the inductees was similar. In the seed as in the Straight,  as "close" as you might have felt to someone, you knew you could never trust them.. that any behavior that strayed from the Seed ideal would be instantly turned over to the staff for immediate punishment. You could neither be to the left nor the right of the behavior model or you were either exhibiting druggie behavior or "Super seedling" behavior which was viewed with great dismay. You had to toe the line and behave as the group excepcted or else, so there was little room for actual closeness to people unless you totally and completely bought into the thing hook line and stinker.

The difference? The Straight took a cult model with a cult hero and institutionalized it, turned it into a busines model which is something Art never really had. Along with this they became a cult without a kooky kool aide love cult leader, and Along with this change the lovey dovey thing kind of faded and it took a sharper, meaner edge. For example, kids in the Seed were rarely physically assaulted unless you tried to escape, instead they threatened that they would bring your parents in, they would throw you in jail, they would court order you, etc etc. The Straight, on the other hand, adopted physical restraint as a punishment for non compliance.

[Somejoker]

As far as "planned in the stars", the whole astrology trip came after the Seed lost gas. During the seed's heydey astrology played no part that I remember. It seems that later, when the seed got small the astrology angle got introduced.

[cleveland]

I entered Cleveland Seed in '78 and I remember my parents telling me it cost $2000