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Volunteer Ministers Tent in Portland
For the last week or so, the Church of Scientology of Portland has been sponsoring a Volunteer Ministers‘ Cavalcade in Pioneer Square in Portland. They put up a huge yellow tent and spoke with anyone who wanted to talk. In one week they had about 4500 people go through the tent, looking at the exhibits, reading about solutions to drugs, illiteracy and personal problems, basically finding out about Scientology for themselves. The tent just shows the Scientology tools with which Scientologists are very familiar. (Drug Rehabilitation, Study Technology, and the Emotional Tone Scale, for example.)
Scientology sometimes gets hammered in the press and on TV by special interest groups (psychiatry, big pharma, and MDs in particular seem to think we are horning in on their territory when in fact we’re not at all intersted in handling mental illness — we just don’t want the mentally ill treated like drugged cattle. The media sometimes seeks to demonize Scientologists. It’s ironic, in that even when Scientology is hammered in the media, that process still generates interest in Scientology. I guess people figure that “If the BBC hates it, it can’t be all bad!”.
Basically the message Scientology has delivered for about the last 50 years is that “Something Can Be Done About It.” Rather than sit around complaining about illiteracy, rampant drug use, and the abuses of psychiatry, Scientologists actually get psych hospitals closed down (about 200 of them in the last decade), expose their abuses to the press, document them and help send psychs to prison for abuses of human rights. Without Scientologists pushing it, there would be no black box labels on psych drugs.
We don’t do this because of some flaw in our character - we do it because it needs to be done, we have the tools to do it, and most usually, NO ONE ELSE IS DOING ANYTHING EFFECTIVE. Where they are, we help them.
