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In Reply to: Re: exFamily members with notoriety trying to move on posted by Thinker reposted on September 01, 2007 at 21:58:08:
I think this is a very interesting subject, & one which I believe deserves hashing out, as I am an SGA who lived on pretty much every continent in the Family, & experience the full "running the gauntlet" experience of growing up & surviving life in the cult, one which I have now thankfully moved on to tell the tale of.
It was very interesting reading postings recently by Thinker, Jennifer, JAQ, & others, as it is evident that depending on your personal experience & whether you are an SGA or FGA feelings can range from exteme anger & revenge (understandably so) to wanting to make a clean break with the past like a bad dream, & start a new life (also understandable).
It is my feeling that, like most things in life, there are varying degrees of culpability when it comes to things that happened, starting at the very top with David Berg himself, who because he was a delusional control freak, with an abnormal infatuation with sex without legal limits or boundaries, this perpetrated a ripple effect of untold damage across the group. The extreme cases of this damage manifested itself through FGAs who became notoriously abusive when given this oportunity & "carte blanc" power through positions in leadership to have a "hey day" inflicting damage on those inferior to them, the most vulnerable of which being the second generation,-US! Then, at the other end of the spectrum, & this I belive to be a much larger group, were many FGAs both in & out of positions of leadership who were themselves just swept along by the incessant current of propoganda that was always flooding & prodding everyone along via the "Mo Letters" which most everyone simply followed blindly.
Having truly experienced almost everything imginable myself in the Family, it is my personal belief now being a husband & father, that we, as SGA victims, cannot completely level a blanket judgement on all of our parents generation evenly for the most severe abuses in the group, as it is hard for me to justify condemning pretty much an entire generation for their involvement, when they themselves were also vitims who themselves are also now trying with the strength left in them to start a new life regardless to how much of that "life" was already taken from them by the group.
I have done quite a bit of personal research in this regard, & when it comes to FGAs who had some form of sexual contact with minors the numbers are an extremely large percentile of FGAs that were in the Family from 1980-1990, & the saddest statistic of all being an even higher number of kids were on the receiving end of this "love fest".
I think that for the most part FGAs that have left if they are honest will tell you "Boy, I wish I could have some of those years back to do over", & like many of them will say both on & off the record (i.e. Watchman on CNN) that they were all in a "massive state of denial" to some extent or the other.
Even though we may feel like grabbing our parents sometimes & beating their heads against the wall when we are face to face with the challenges that being less than edequately prepared for facing real life has brought our way as SGAs, I still feel, that being careful when conducting any sort of "witch hunt" via the internet or otherwise for our own gratification may at times be counter productive to helping us as ALL move on & leave that nightmare behind. I would just hate to see 9 out of 10 FGAs severely hampered in moving on with their lives because they are lumped in with a handful of truly abusive pedophiles who I do wish we could get our hands on.
