Now, there's a difference between "paranoia" and "due diligence". The main difference between the two is that while both are defined as being suspicious of the possibility of very bad things going on which are entirely possible in the real world, due-diligence actually can and does discover proof, while paranoia cannot discover proof yet continues to believe.
Due diligence on DC-area -- and this specifically includes Montgomery County -- youth outreach programs that focus on addiction recovery will inevitably cause the name of "Midtown AA" to surface.
Due diligence on Midtown will inevitably cause the subject of cult-like activity to arise, especially in the context of vulnerable young females being exploited by older male group leaders.
I wonder what a deep due-diligence research would show about people associated with Midtown infiltrating addiction-recovery or youth-outreach programs? Not far from Aspen Hill is the "Avery Road" facility, and Midtown was barred from operating there... but allegations continue to recur that Midtown -- or elements of Midtown -- keep trying to bring AA/NA meetings into the Avery Road facility under fake names... and to try to assign their own "sponsors" and to redirect the resident inpatients in recovery to attend meetings run by Midtown once they're in halfway-house or placed into residences out in the community.
How long has Midtown been carrying on with the whole sex-cult thing? One young woman, Kristin, claims that she was passed around from older man to older man for 8 years, and this statement was made in 2007. So, let's say that this was going on for at least a decade, as it's now 2009.
What really bothers me is this: the Avery Road facility, operated by Montgomery County, is right down the road from the Rock Creek Village Shopping Center in Aspen Hill.
I have tended to avoid the Rock Creek Village Shopping Center, as a rule, simply because it's a clear victim of a certain bit of bad bus-route planning on the part of Montgomery's "Ride On" bus system.
The "48 Route" of Ride-On has one terminus at the Rockville Metro Station, and the other is at Glenmont in the modern day, though it used to be at the Wheaton Metro Station. The route used to go straight down Veirs Mill and turn north onto Parkland Drive. It then traveled a very short distance on Marianna Street before following Bauer Drive past the Rock Creek Village Shopping Center, following MD-28 from there, via Gude Drive and various backroads through the Rockville Industrial District.
This route left a bus-stop in my front yard, and also along this route were Veirs Mill Village, South Aspen Hill (which in the mid-1990s had not yet become totally ghetto), the Manna Food Bank, and Lincoln Park. Also along the 48 route, the Mark Twain School (for emotionally disturbed kids, in this timeframe) and the Avery Road addiction/recovery center.
This meant that for the homeless people getting free bus passes and food handouts from Manna, and for the "mental" kids at Mark Twain, and for addicts-in-recovery at the Avery Road facility, Rock Creek Village Shopping Center was either on the bus route, or within walking distance.
For the shopkeepers at Rock Creek Village Shopping Center, that means that they get deluged with rather more than their reasonably-expected share of people who are "mental", homeless, addicts/alcoholics, or some combination thereof or variation thereupon.
Oh, they're also right across Rock Creek and "just around the corner", from the outpatient and addiction and mental-health offices at 751 Twinbrook Parkway...
Some months ago I covered the mysterious phenomenon of the "welcome wagon walking tour of weirdos and wackos" here in Aspen Hill, subsidiary to a much larger expansion on widespread, if half-hearted, Aspen Hill community opposition to taxpayer-funded Group Homes.
Honestly, I can't imagine why I never considered the possibility of Midtown as a factor in this noxious mix. I came close:
[ ... ]
You'd think that there would be enough housing to go around, for the mentally disabled, wouldn't you? But there's not.
Most people who have been homeless for any extended length of time can qualify as mentally-ill by most reasonable standards. Depression is almost guaranteed, but it's actually a functional depression in most cases. Remove the cause of the depression and the depression itself goes away. Yet living on the streets is almost certain to induce paranoia, and paranoia isn't an emotional response; it's a way of looking at things. A certain amount of unscrupulousness tends to emerge as well, after enough time on the streets; having to fight for every last scrap of food or for a fairly secure campsite will tend to promote that outlook as much as it promotes paranoia. Yet most of these will go away -- mostly -- when the person is taken off of the streets and placed into housing.
One thing that does not much go away, in all too many cases, is vindictiveness... but here we're discussing the psychological responses to homelessness in otherwise mentally non-disabled people.
[ ... ]
The vindictiveness of sociopaths is endless, and in people who have made a career of not getting caught at dirty tricks while honing their repertoire of said dirty tricks, vindictiveness can take frightful -- or relentlessly petty -- turns. Sociopaths, you will recall, regard anything they want as theirs by right; they just have to figure out how to evade or remove any obstacles such as police, credit checks, employment histories, or people who are breathing their air or taking up space that they covet.
If the best way to obtain a space that they covet is by seeking out people with Histrionic Personality Disorder and enlisting them to help trumpet their cause, that's what they'll do. If the best way to get people to stop breathing their air is to rile up all of the Borderline disorder personalities they can find, to act as the cats-paw to pull their chestnuts out of the fire (as the classic fable tells), that will work fine and they themselves don't get burnt.
If they can set it up so that they get paid for doing this, so much the better.
Could it be that people who knew of Midtown's leadership's peccadillos -- but who weren't going to openly discuss it lest they be asked how they could know -- knew that Midtown was planning to open at least one group home for sex-cult addicts in recovery? Several such group homes exist, notably in Bethesda, Silver Spring, and Germantown.
How many might be operating here in Aspen Hill, I wonder? And how many of them would tend to shop in Rock Creek Village Shopping Center?
And just how tired of them, and the homeless, and the "mental", and the others, would have become the shopkeepers of that shopping center?
And how would things have turned out had Midtown -- or even other comparable groups not actually affiliated with Midtown -- stepped up as a group to offer their services in matters of "security"?
More to come?
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