The question that got me was on my first sec check and although I don't remember the exact words but it had to do negative things about scientology on the internet. Of course the first thing I did when I got home was to log in and do a search on [scientology negative].
I had no idea that there were negative feelings toward scientology before I got involved with it. In fact, the only thing I knew about it was that John Travolta was one and that his movie about it was crap. But I liked John Travolta and if he was one then why would I think there was anything bad about scientology?
The amount of information I got after this was huge. I talked to my sup about it and she sent me to ethics who interviewed me and told me it was due to MUs and Overts and was sent to the usual Leavings and Leaves PL. But the question remained in my mind. I bought all this. What I didn't buy was the order I was given to stay off the pages that had that "entheta" material. I had been ordered to what I could or could not read once in my life before. It was when I was 7 years old and I watched my parents books, magazines and letters and some of my own story books being burned by the military in Chile after a fascist military coup.
Still, it took me over a year for the comm lag to catch up and me to leave.
P.S. one of my books that was burned was "Little Red Ridinghood", cos it had the word "Red" in it.
Lovesnightsky - I have to tell you a story.
When I lived in LA, I was the "Inspector" for a polling place during the presidential elections of 2000.
My duty was to see to it that the polling place was run efficiently, to debug address and voting issues, and to make sure all the ballots were organized correctly and got to the counting stations at the end of the 15 hour day.
Our polling station was in the SF Valley, inside a woman's garage in a nice entertainment industry-studded neighborhood.
At 7am, it was my duty to stand outside this woman's garage and announce "THE POLLS ARE OPEN!". And then at 7pm that night, it was my duty to stand outside again and announce "THE POLLS ARE CLOSED!" and to make sure that no one voted after the polling station was closed.
We had a long day. It was a very hotly contested election, and there were many issues to sort out to make sure that everyone got to vote.
As it got to the end of the day, around 6:56pm, the lines had started to dwindle and we rushed everyone through so that they could vote. Most every voting booth had someone in it voting, and no one else was in the line.
I looked at my watch, it was 6:59pm.
A car pulled up on the street and parked. I thought, "Oh no. I'm going to have to tell these people they can't vote." They got out of their car. It was a man and his wife and two pre-teen children. They came walking toward us.
I looked at my watch. It was 7pm.
I had to make my announcement.
"THE POLLS ARE CLOSED" I said, as the family approached. They were looking all around, wide-eyed with smiles on their faces.
"I'm sorry", I said. "I can't let you vote as we are closed now."
The wife looked at me and said, "Oh That's all right. We lived in South America where we were not allowed to vote. We just brought our children here so they could see what it was like."
I almost cried.
We all showed them all around and explained the process to them. I let the kids take home sample ballots so they would have no problem voting when they came of age.
Sometimes, growing up in the US or England, you can forget about things like that.
After that day, I don't think I ever will.