Picket Report : Brisbane, Sat 15 Mar

Neil Muspratt, Fri 21 Mar 1997

From: Neil Muspratt <neil@fit.qut.edu.au>
Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology
Subject: Picket Report : Brisbane, Sat 15 Mar
Date: 21 Mar 1997 10:37:01 GMT
Message-ID: <5gtocd$5tq@dove.qut.edu.au>


This report is a bit late. Reasons forthcoming.

--

Another picket goes down in Brisbane.

We had a bit of a coup this time. Five protesters, up from only
two on Friday. It seems Stuart Riley has been in touch with a few
people recently. They had to send out for reinforcements. When I
turned up just after 10:00, there was hardly any opposition. In
the end there were about 16 of them defending their real estate.
What a crowd. You couldn't fail to notice it from the street. 
There were people and signs everywhere. It was *big*.

Hmm. That means 1 SP is worth about 5 clams here in Australia. We
still have a way to go to catch up with Clearwater. :-)

With relatively few pedestrians about (typical for a Saturday in
Brisbane) and a surplus of picketers, I could afford to get busy
with my camera this time. Got some nice shots too. Lyn (the local
DSA) even posed for me outside the front door. How nice. Now I
just have to finish off my *%$^&#@* 24 exposure film . . .

The level of "confront" was raised a few notches today. One of
the defending team was very aggressive towards the new picketers.
At one stage he was right in their faces, yelling that they were
bigots. I thought at one point that it might come to blows.

After this spectacle, I decided that if he was going to confront
someone, it may as well be me. Plus, ever since I staged my one
man protest last year, I've been looking forward to having a
little chat with him. I spent the rest of our two hours there in
conversation and left the picketing to the others. I wasn't
paying much attention to what everyone else was doing while I
was preoccupied, so I'm afraid I don't have much else to report.

He's actually quite an intelligent bloke and interesting to talk
to, although he's very tech oriented and uses a lot of the tech
lingo in a discussion. To his credit, he took the time to explain
things when I had some trouble understanding.

I brought up the sad case of Lisa McPherson in Clearwater and he
was very sceptical that anyone in the church would allow that to
happen to a fellow member. I hope he checks this out thoroughly
and gets to use sources outside of the organisation. However,
there still seems to be that great reticence on their part to
accept anything on the Net or in the regular media as being
reliable. Of course, not everything *is* reliable, but I reckon
the standard is a heck of a lot better than what the Co$ feeds
its members. 

They know a bit more about me now, especially the reasons for my
picketing, which extend right back to 1985 when I ran into one of
the staffers from the org, out recruiting in the city. I was only
18 at the time and have never forgotten the incident. I still
hold the behaviour of this particular person in contempt, and the
reason for his behaviour is quite simple in my book. That is how
$cientology trained him to operate.

The crowd stayed around after we called it a day at about 12:00,
even sending a small detachment up the street to where we were
gathered, talking, at Stuart's car. One of the women attempted a
bit of DAing, so I brought out Mr Pentax again. One more shot for
the record. Gee, they can be vile when they want to be.

--
 _.-_|\     Neil Muspratt (SP3)              Tel : + 61 7 3864 2146
/      QUT Technical Services Section        Fax : + 61 7 3864 1959
\_.--,_/  Faculty of Information Technology  Net : neil@fit.qut.edu.au
      v  GPO Box 2434 Brisbane Qld 4001      PGP : 2.6.3i (send email)

Sitting on the fence both ears to the ground
The fat cats still push the thin cats around

- Midnight Oil, "When The Generals Talk"