We leafleted, and I did my stint at the boom-box, until it developed power problems, so I just had to rely on good old-fashioned lung-power. Most of the time we outnumbered the Scientologists. One chap tried the 'Death Stare' from inside the 'org', was laughed at, and never showed his face again. Another was more persistent, and tried to show his skills at non-blinking. He was more persistent, but also got mocked for wasting his money on taking a course developing such a useless skill. He also tried complaining about the cold and yawning hoping that we would be driven to give up. As with so many Scientology techniques, it might seem to work in the Scientology course-room, but is useless in the real world. He insisted that he could make his own decisions, so we gave him two leaflets (two because Scientology would obviously take the first leaflet away on some plausible pretext) whereupon his Scientology superior ran out to snatch them away from him, just pulling back in time as the gales of laughter revealed that she was behaving in exactly the way we had predicted.
The Scientologists eventually brought out a pile of leaflets and put them on a shelf, but never got round to actually trying to give them out. The only criticism we met was from a couple of people who mistook us for Scientologists, and many people thanked us for our efforts. After two hours we retreated to a nice warm pub to discuss our successful day.
Returning from the pub at 6:15 the 'org' was completely shuttered up.
This is an org on its last legs. We will be back soon to kick them away.
Five hardy suppressives: John, Hartley, Tony, myself and new protester "Charlotte," picketed the london org (more like a morgue - ha! ha!) of the criminal organisation known as the "church" <spit> of $cientology. We were simply trying to do our part to remember the black day of L Ron Hubbard's birth.
The clams were not pre-warned, so we had the pavement to ourselves for quite some time. Maybe to make sure we didn't get too cocky, the boom-box packed it in half-way throught the picket. Someone ought to sort that out, but it's so hard to get good help these days :-(.
When we arrived, there was what looked like one staffer and two public lurking at the back of the very uninviting org. After some furious phoning by the staffer, some staff and public arrived. Our old acquintance Coco showed up and had a chat before moving on. He wondered what my name was and I told him (I'm sure I must have told him before - maybe his memory is not so good; $cientology claims to be able to help him with that, but they're just lying). He asked where Dave Bird was and I told him that Dave was in Birminghem and that the London org was too downstat to merrit a visit. Coco replied "sorry to disappoint you" and I assured him that we'd be back nonetheless.
One public clam who arrived and was briefed by the DSA was a young fellow called "Junior." He was very good at appearing to be nice, and he had certainly mastered the distraction-TR. I let him string me a long for a while and had to struggle to cut the conversation off. I did get him to allow me to ask him questions, such as: was there anything in $cientology that he disagreed with? "no, not yet." I said that struck me as odd, I couldn't think of a reasonable environment where I agreed with everything. Junior was very big on making up him own mind (yeah, right), and said that it was his own choice not to read our leaflet. We got him to do an experiment; even thought he had said that he was not going to read our leaflet and we had agreed that he could do that, we persuaded him to pick up two copies and see if the other clams tried to take them away from him. The DSA promptly came over and tried to snatch the leaflets - that made our afternoon.
I kept telling him to look me up on the Internet (he assured me that he had no interest), but if he gets in touch with me I'll officiaslly stop calling him a clam :-).
New protester Charlotte kept up very good leafletting tech and made our viewpoint clear with "Just say NO to $cientology." She handed over hundreds of leaflets to happy passers-by. Respect!
Junior had not done the PTS/SP course, and we said we were sorry that the org was going to make him take it and that we weren't doing it to him - the org was. He said that it would be his decision to take the course (yeah, right).
Nice chap, Junior, and I hope he grows out of being a clam.
We retired to the pub to plan more suppressive merriness.
A Grand Day Out.
Jens
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