Sigh It is So Much Bigger than Any of Us can battle on our own, and there is No Network...

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People call one person getting his name in the news thousands of times great progress for survivors. Re Pew Research:

PHEW PEW
June 13th, 2010, by Jerry Berger, St. Louis Blogger: A new Pew Research Center study of clergy sex abuse media coverage lists our town’s David Clohessy, director of SNAP, as #6 on a list of “Abuse Scandal Lead Newsmakers.” Based on appearances in 52 mainstream news outlets, in a six-week period in April and March.... On the same day the study was released, SNAP’s founder, SLU-grad Barbara Blaine of ChiTown, was deemed “Most intriguing Person of the Day” on CNN’s Rick Sanchez show.

In reality, every time DC is quoted in the news it's one less survivor's story getting out. SNAP has stood in the way, as an obstruction, between survivors and the media, from the start. Almost every one of those thousands of DC quotes are inane and vetted at a corporate level (by whom?). Clohessy never says anything more than what has already been in the news, then gives it a nice "survivors'" touch like, "Keep Kids Safe." I mean, who can argue with that?

SNAP has been saying the same thing from the start, and the media has been writing it down. The result was to keep things insular. SNAP continues to call for the bishops and church hierarchy to change, as if they ever would. Still SNAP leaflets churches.

And the same two to three people are about the only voice the public has ever heard across the USA: David Clohessy and Barbara Blaine, and occasionally one or two more.

So to me, all this attention to two people who run a group that should be representing hundreds of thousands of crime victims shows the group was set up, from the start, to keep the true story of these crimes from surfacing. And they succeeded.

Basically, across the country, the crime victims went to the Church expecting help and got none. Then we went to SNAP expecting help and were told yes, you are getting help. But then we never saw it, but if we pointed that out we were called crazy. Then they continued to be quoted in the media about all the help they were giving.

None of the support is really there, it's all a hologram. Reach out for it and it disappears.

Now most North American victims are isolated, marginalized, out here trying to do things on our own with little or no resources, almost worse off than we were before we got our hopes up that as a group we would accomplish great things. The settlements put a big schism in the middle of us, creating two groups, the ones who got money and the rest of us.

President Obama, almost every state house, state supreme courts, news media, all of them got the wrong message, that this issue was about money. Across the country, the image of survivors is that we bankrupted the Church and it was all about lawsuits. And SNAP ran that message.

Yes, SNAP was about lawsuits, not all the victims wanted lawsuits. I never thought of a lawsuit until I'd been in SNAP for years and realized that's all that was ever goign to happen, then it was too late. But to the world, this whole thing was about suing the church.

And now, at least in L.A., SNAP is gone, now that their work is finished here. They're off to Europe, to do the great job there that they did here.

No. Clohessy's name in the news does not show what a great job he did, unless the job was to put all the focus in one small little area, until the story blew over. Keep most of the crimes from ever surfacing, and keep the ones that did surface as little exposed as possible. If that was the goal, then yes, SNAP deserves awards.

But the victims have nothing, got nothing, ended up with nothing but an odd shared sense of justice interruptus as we watch the news media, like blithering idiots, continue to copy down and repeat every thing SNAP says, and call it reporting.

I'm going to the movies.
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