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MWW
....I still suspect that she is the reason, "McKay Zombie" Roland was at the very least, able to physically escape the JC's, though....and the fact that they were deliberately EXCLUDED from the Cruise (obviously then already displeasing Lord and Master McKay, in some way).....DOES say something for her.
(...as I refuse to believe that Roland had either the "brains" or the "stomach" to say no to McKay, in any respect.....)
That' why I don't really buy the line that says that everybody who has been involved with the McKays is somehow a "victim" of the McKays.
Yes, the McKays created the conditions through which these decisions are made, and yes, these folks are in a psychological state of "bounded choice," but at the end of the day I still say that somebody is responsible for his or her own behavior. Nobody got hit by the Hypno-Beam and was mesmerized by Dave McKay into a thoughtless zombie. What he does could not work, without some degree of the participants' complicity.
This is not to blame the victim, or to minimize the experiences of the second generation. That's a whole other ball of wax, so to speak.
But for people like Roland and Sue...in my mind, no, they're not victims, they're participant/perpetrators now too. Cherry as well.
I know a guy who once regretfully told me (when describing a certain circumstance he found himself in while a member of the Roberts cult), "I could have listened to the voice of my conscience, or I could have listened to Jim Roberts. I listened to Jim Roberts."
Now he lives with the painful consequences of his bad decision every single day of his life, and he has slowly learned to quit blaming Jim Roberts for the way things turned out.
Twenty years from now Joe or Trevor or any of them might wake up and say "I could have listened to the voice of my conscience, or I could have listened to Dave and Cherry. Dammit, I listened to Dave and Cherry."
Let's hope that they "snap" out of it, sooner rather than later.