The Waiting Is The Hardest Part (One Of Them)

Ah yes, this sounds all too familiar:

"Her daughter disowned her as a devil-worshiping witch. Police didn't believe her allegations of brainwashing. And social services said they weren't equipped to deal with a cult."

Those first important days, when you're frantically trying to get help for your loved one and are, instead, forced to realize you've entered one of society's Twilight Zones, a gray cloudy area where speaking openly of cults and cultism are just as likely to get you deemed dangerous or crazy - or dangerously crazy - depending on how accepting of cultism's tenets your newly self-appointed interrogators are. And so, while you're coping with "you're just saying that because you don't believe" or "9-1-1 is a joke", events are allowed to proceed on their disastrous course, partially because you - the only advocate your mixed-up loved one has - have now been given reason to fear for your own safety and mental well-being. Meanwhile, the believers have gotten away with all you love and more. Inhale of it deeply, children, taste it like war. You'll never forget it:

"But Seeta Newton still would not let her grandson Javon go. Her dreams pushed her to hold on."

I've written too many times how the power of dreams undermine surrender. And can wreck whole days. Hell, the cult experience starts off surreal, which gets you to screaming in your sleep, and then becomes a mind-numbing day-to-day Banality of Evil kind of thing, much like watching a Nazi movie in slow motion; so, no, while they may subside for a while, dreams don't "move on", not when this type of belief is such a huge part of the zeitgeist.

"Two years later, police would find the petite young woman in a New York apartment, first mistaking her for a catatonic little girl. The mummified remains of her baby - starved because he wouldn't say 'amen' - would turn up in an old man's Pennsylvania shed, packed carefully in a green suitcase among mothballs and fabric-softener sheets."

Well, Surprise! Surprise! Surprise! The truth comes out and everybody swings into action, the publicity apparatus coiling around the latest bad news as it refused to do of the warnings that could've prevented them. Not a happy day, by any stretch, because this is now about facing the dead, and/or divorce, and/or financial ruin, or any number of other severe severings. I don't think dreams end, about anything of that magnitude, until something is somehow resolved. That's my experience anyway.

"It would take another two years for justice to be done."

Yea, like I said, it's all too familiar.