“When you die, you’ll die alone and in pain and in the dark.”
Now who would say such a thing to another person on the street, in broad daylight? Can you guess?
Ok, so that wasn’t really difficult, was it? But how did this come about?
I’ll tell you.
Today, I was wandering around East Grinstead, in the vicinity of Sainsbury’s (supermarket), when I saw a Sea Org staff minibus, parked on the side of the road and three Sea Org members standing near it. After some discussion, they crossed the road and two of them stood outside the front door of a house, presumably in order to see the occupant/s and get them back on lines / buy more materials etc.
Sensing a good photo opportunity, I whipped out my trusty Canon and took a snap. This apparently aroused their interest, because one of their party followed me down the road and took a photo of me. Nothing wrong with that, I was in a public place after all. In any case, I thought I would take the opportunity to speak to him about what the leader of his ‘church’ is really up to. Ask I walked towards him, he walked off. I followed and asked him if he could confront me. His response was rather non sequitur to say the least. He accused me of being a squirrel!
I was rather bemused by this and decided to respond by telliing him about David Miscavige (allegedly) beating his staff and the fact that Marty Rathbun and Mike Rinder had left and were now speaking out. At first, he actually listened to what I said. But this soon changed as he was apparently unable to face any criticism of his leader or organisation. Several times he said that I was repeating a circuit, while himself repeating the same accusations over and over (squirrel, suck on the track, insane, etc). He even suggested that I beat my wife! Yes, really. I mean how corny can you get?
I tried to communicate in a rational way, but it was obviously that he would not listen. He was so intense that he was actually spitting while he was hurling his invective at me.
Anyway, you can see for yourself in this video:
Immediately after this, I switched my camera off and just tried to talk to him person to person. I told him that I, and members of Anonymous actually cared about him and his fellow staff members and that we wanted to help them.
But he was having none of this and just shouted me down. It was quite clear that he was well past being able to act rationally and would not listen to a thing that I said. Perhaps staff have been trained in the newly developed ‘Wall of Sound’ Tech in handling critics, where you overwhelm them not with logic and truth, but just drown out anything that they have to say? After a couple of minutes of his rantings (with ever-increasing amounts of spittle), a bus arrived and he got on, presumably to return to St Hill.
I like to think that I don’t set out to cause trouble or provoke people, I don’t see any value in deliberately upsetting people. Perhaps I did overstep the mark in approaching this person, and talking to him. But, I feel very strongly that the staff should have the opportunity to know what is happening in the real world and be able to make informed choices.
Unfortunately, it is very clear from this man’s reaction to a few simple statements of fact, that CoS staff have developed a ‘seige mentality’ where anyone who says anything remotely critical is ‘attacking’ them and must be verbally attacked immediately in response, rather than utilising the purported principles of their founder, namely communicate in a sane and rational manner and handle the problem.
This might sound rather trite, but I really do feel very sorry for guys like this. I’m sure that he is really a very decent person, otherwise he wouldn’t have joined the Sea Org and give up so much. It is the Church of Scientology that causes people to behave so irrationally.
As an amusing postscript, the bus that originally attracted my attention, was parked illegally, and got a parking ticket, shown here:
Axiom142






Reply With Quote

don't know whether to
or



3 new Alan C. Walter eBooks now available for free download from PaulsRabbit at 