Dread Pirate Alice

What is wrong with this world?

So I’ve been popping around the blogoverse and I came across 63 Days. At first I thought this girl was just making this whole thing up, but as I did some research on the subject I’ve come to realize that she’s not making this up (and if you read the comments from people that’ll tell you too. I recommend starting at the beginning. She’s not too far along yet so you’ll catch up quickly.) If you don’t feel like clicking the links, this girl is telling her true tale of how her parents sent her to a boot camp to scare her straight cuz she was an out of hand teenager. Instead it seems that her parents unknowingly paid this outfit to abuse their daughter. As in, starve her for 5 days while hiking through the desert, not allow the kids to stop to pee, instead expect them to pee in their pants and walk around in the soiled clothes for the 5 days it takes to get to base camp…etc. One girl in the group is anorexic. Her parents thought sending her to this place would get her to eat…yeah, lets starve an anorexic for 5 days and force her to hike through the desert… Do a Google search on Steve Cartisano and you’ll learn all about the guy who owned the place she was sent and then you’ll get a full picture of the hell she went through.

I saw on Oprah and Maury Povich when they’d bring in this army sergant guy to scream and yell at the “troubled kids” who’s parents didn’t know what to do anymore. At the time I thought, “excellent get those kids in line” but after reading this girl’s story and then the following reports on these boot camp style things… That type of tactic is just abuse. A kid with behavorial or drug problems has something more going on inside and in his life that some strange man 3x his size isn’t going to fix by yelling at him.

Take for example a girl who’s being sexually abused by her brother/father/step-father since she was…let’s say…11 years old. She’s 14 now. She’s built up some defense mechanisims inside to deal with this daily abuse. She’s doing poorly in school, she’s acting out, etc. Her Mother can’t understand why her daughter is so angry and why her otherwise “good girl” has gone crazy. So because this mother isn’t paying attention or is in denial she sees this boot camp on TV thinks it’s a good thing. And because it was on TV it MUST be a good thing….right? So she sends her daugheter to these people to “fix her”. Little does she know her daughter is going to continue to be raped because now she’s got the “counselors” raping her while out hiking in the desert…but not only is she still getting molested but now she’s being starved, yelled at, dragged through the dirt…yeah…that’s going to heal her wounds…that’s going to make everything better…

The whole fact that these places exist because parents aren’t willing to take responsibility for their children or they feel therapy wont help or they just don’t know what to do….is absolutely revolting. And this girl’s story breaks my heart each time she posts another piece.

The prodigal kitty returns!

I was up at 6:45am to let the dogs out and then I took another look out the front door. There was Bijou in the landscaping pressed up against the house as if she thought she could just melt right through the wall to get back in. She looked up at me and gave a small “merowr” as if to say, “it’s about time!” I picked her up and held her close to me as she purred loudly and brought her in. She was a little damp and had some of the mulch stuck in her fur, but otherwise she is fine. She was far more interested in food than my company when I brought her in and sat on the couch with her. She got a nice little treat and now she’s laying in the sun from the sliding glass doors.

I was so worried she’d get hit by a car, caught in something and stuck or frozen to death. But my biggest fear was that someone would pick her up and bring her in, keeping her then I’d never see her again and I’d never know what happened to her. She’d be safe, but not with me.

So now, the boy needs to be taught to be as paranoid as I am with shutting that front door. That’s the only way she could have possibly gotten out of the house. And now that she’s been out, we’ve got to be doubly paranoid about closing that door because she’s going to want out even more now.