Royal Oak, Michigan

Subject: What I Did on My Thanksgiving Vacation
From: llywrch@cyberpromo.rdrop.com (Geoff Burling)
Picket report, 5 Dec 1997, Royal Oak (Detroit), MI

I arrived on site at 11:45a, & picketted 10 minutes. It was a cold day, & about half an inch of snow had fallen this morning. I had a sign that read "Scientology killed Lisa McPherson", written on a 24" x 36" piece of poster board I held in my hands.. This was a spur-of-the-moment picket in response to the CoS treatment to Keith Henson I read about last week, & I'd like to dedicate this brief picket - my first - to him.

I have to admit that I had a case of butteflies before I got out of the car & walked over to the front of the building. To actually confront someone is always tougher than one imagines, but I had the presence of someone who is willing to support me in my unusual hobbies. And I thought of Wayne Whitney's own pickets, & of the words he used to describe his experiences at them, words that always made me feel I was right there on the street with him.

CoS reaction: two guys were seated inside the windows, one in a dark winter coat the other in a white shirt & tie. After a pass or two, the guy in the white shirt finaly noticed me. He decided to react by taking the man he was talking with to another room deeper in the small building the CoS offices were located in. After about five minutes, a twentyish male in a sweater & glasses stood at the door & looked out at me, in what appeared to be curiousity. I smiled & nodded at him. After reading the sign, he went to another room inside also deeper inside the building.

Public reaction: mostly positive, which amazed me. Royal Oak is a suburb of Detroit, & the neighborhood is not as threatening as one within the city could be. Detroit is a city so ruined that almost all life & business - it seems - has moved to the suburbs. Skyscrapers stand empty, their lower floors boarded up. Apparently even the Scienos have fled Detroit for the suburbs. Since their "tech" can't save Detroit, maybe now they'll admit it won't save the world. Since no one came out of the CoS offices, I turned my attention to the empty street, smiled & nodded to passers-by. A few smiled back, one woman in a truck (leaving the drive-thru teller machines across Williams street from the CoS offices), asked to read my sign, then waved encouragement at me.

My reaction: after the first hurried walks back & forth in front of the small building on the corner, I found that it was actually easier to picket than I had thought. I was disappointed when my 10 minutes were up, & had to leave with my girlfriend to continue my sight-seeing in Michigan.

I'm not fooling myself that a quick, hit-&-run picket like this will hurt the CoS in the least. But doing this gave me the courage to do a more substantial one - say 30 minutes, or maybe an hour - later. Somewhere. (I do a lot of traveling, so it could be anywhere at all.) There's unfinished work here.

Afterwards, as I talked about this to my girlfriend, I thought about the man in the sweater & glasses at the door. He is close to Lisa's age, Lisa the woman who should not have died in Clearwater. I wished he had come out & talked to me, & I could have told him about Lisa. How a woman was killed by the very people whom she trusted, because they would rather believe the words of a man who died in hiding rather than what their eyes & ears told them: that by applying a quack diet to this helpless woman, they were killing her. And when they could not deny what they knew any longer, they dumped her body at the ER of a hospital like a sack of garbage, & fled.

I wanted to help someone with my actions. Maybe I stirred some doubts in this man's mind by picketting. Maybe the woman who asked to read my picket sign will take heart that the CoS will one day die. Maybe someone reading this post, who lives in the Detroit area, will picket there after me & finish what I started. (I don't know if this will help Keith in his fight with the CoS, but I hope it does.) But if I hadn't done this, there would not have been anything to start with, & there would be one more storefront from whence the CoS could send its poisonous vapors forth & ruin more lives. Geoff, Olympic-Class Bore