Picket Report: Using 911 for Corporate Gain

PSn (benalishsiward@hotmail.com)
DC ORG PICKET REPORT 9-14-02
14 Sep 2002

Attendees: Myself, Arnie, Elizabeth, and Duncan.

This was my first picket, and I wanted to make sure it went well, so I showed up early. REALLY early. I walked past to Org on the way to the meeting place and was offered a Personality test, which I gladly declined. I didn't need to be routed. After waiting for a couple hours, I met with Arnie, who informed me the others would be a while.

We went about 10 minutes undisturbed until me and Arnie got our pictures taken. But I thought that might have been the extent of it all until about 5 minutes later, out of nowhere came "Grumpy" and "No Name", our handlers.

I guess since I was the new guy, the figured they'd break me in. The guys go in my face asking me what it was all about, and I didn't get that they were my handlers until "Grumpy" called me a bigot. And they started using their blocking tech to keep me from picketing. That failed shortly with Arnie coming by and drawing "No Name" away from me.

"Grumpy" wasn't able to block me, but he kept up the questioning and name-calling. I quickly dispatched him with a calm, "On the other side of town, there is a man waving a picket sign, protesting the abuses of the Catholic Church. Is he a bigot?". He disappeared after that and reappeared after a while, but he didn't bother me for the rest of the picket.

"No name" handled Arnie, but no one can truly handle Arnie. He basically tried to incite an incedent, but I think the only incident he incited will be an earlier simliar incident during his next auditing session.

There was a sign outside, offering counseling for those upset by the 9/11 disaster. And they were also going to hold an open service for it, too. It really disgusted me that they'd take the incedent to their corporate gain.

They often pointed to the sign when they were handling us all asking us why we'd picket a "church" that was offering help for September 11th. That we were wrong for critiquing a church after 9/11. Like 9/11 was a message from terrorists that we should allow the Co$ to trample over individual freedoms. We had a short break and after a while, returned to picketing with the "Evil Cult Zone" sign which REALLY moved fliers quickly. We cycled between sitting and picketing a few times. It was pretty cool how many people agreed about Scn being a greedy cult. But just before we left, the guys sent out a nice young girl named Donya to take more pictures and after she was done, she started chatting and playing "Flirty Fishing" with me. She attempted to inform me about how bad Arnie was and about how little I know about Scn. However, I only had two objectives for our conversation: Get her to admit to the Xenu story in OT3, and the Google debacle.

Unfortunately, she knew nothing about the Google story, but she did admit that Xenu was in OT3, though not directly. I forced her to reconcile the two conflicting messages Scn feeds her: "Arnie Lerma is a copyright pirate" and "Xenu is not really what OT3 is". Of course, attempting to do so causes cognitive dissonance, for which Scn is legendary. But she admitted to the fact that Arnie couldn't be lying about OT3, if the church sued him over the materials.

Overall, it was very enjoyable for me, and I think the others had a good time. We let out about 150+ entheta fliers.

PSn, Signing Off.