So I had fun on Valentine’s Day, and it had nothing at all to do with love. After all, I am single, and all these couples getting kissy on Valentine’s Day makes me nauseous after a while. I am one of the many who calls the day “Singles Awareness Day” for that matter.
But yes, the fun came not from actually getting a date or something, but rather, I, along with a small group of other DC Anons, raided outside the Founding Church of Scientology. This was Part 2 of a two-part strategy for that day. Part 1 was a visit to Katsucon, which is an anime and manga convention for enthusiasts of the genre, being held at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City, where we had previously held AnonyCon. The mission there was basically trolling, going around and handing out literature in the non-paid areas to Katsucon participants. I’m told it went well until Anonymous was booted due to fire code issues – Katsucon was at capacity with the paid participants, and Anonymous trolling put them over the limit as far as occupancy loads went.
I skipped Katsucon mainly because of Metro. Metro took the entire Presidents’ Day weekend to do a major track maintenance project on the C&L Junction (where the Blue and Yellow Lines join just north of Pentagon), and thus Pentagon station was closed, cutting off Pentagon City and below from the rest of the system. I didn’t want to deal with a bus bridge between L’Enfant Plaza and Pentagon City, so I skipped it.
Part 2, now, was something we knew a little more about – flash raiding outside the Org on a Saturday night. We had planned to do the raid from 4-7, but then we stayed a while longer. That turned out to be a very good idea, because it was slow during the time we had said we’d be there, but then it picked up afterwards. However, we did have a great showing of our Anon regulars.
Beret and John McNonymous were out with awesome signs – one about self-love, and one about what Scientology really is in love with, that being your money.
Anonsparrow, meanwhile, held a large, laminated sign saying, “SCIENTOLOGY IS A CULT”, and Purple Hair Anon worked the cars.
And our literature took the form of “free valentines” on this February 14…
However, the win came around 7:30 or so. The Washington Hilton, up the street from the Org, was hosting a model UN conference, where a whole bunch of high schoolers from all over the country were in attendance. Once the model UN conference let out, the groups largely went down our way, past the Org, for dinner. It turned out a lot of these people had heard about Chanology, and were thrilled to see it in person. We couldn’t hand out the literature fast enough, it seemed, as we went through all of our brochures, all of our remaining “valentines”, and nearly all of our “You Found the Card” cards.
At around 8:30, as the school groups found a home at the various restaurants along Connecticut Avenue, we called it a night. We had SO much fun, handed out SO much literature, and hopefully, will keep an entire generation of kids from joining the terrible cult known as the Church of Scientology. After all, Scientology is a lot like Big Tobacco. They need young people to come in and get hooked on Scientology (smoking) so that they can keep the cash flowing in because their product is allegedly killing its older followers. Think about that…