Writing Archive: September 17, 2010, 6:29 pm

(After leaving Elan, I kept various journals of my thoughts, I am going to start posting ones that I can dig up. This is exclusively for you Patrons because I truly appreciate your support.)

The thing about getting Shotdown in the Elan school was the randomness of it. One day Fred was COD (Coordinator On Duty), running the house and maybe making your life miserable and the next day Fred was Shotdown cleaning the toilets before and after you used them. Many would get Shotdown for making a single mistake (a mistake that everyone knew you would get Shotdown for doing). Like if you are the Razor Rabbit in charge of shaving razors (a High-Strength duty during the hygiene times) and you lose one, you get Shotdown. If you don’t make your bed in the morning, you get Shotdown. There were tons of these "fuck up once and you're Shotdown" situations.

But you could also get Shotdown like a 3-strike rule. If you happened to be having a bad day and you made a couple minor errors, making the third would get you Shotdown, even if it was something minor, like not sweeping as hard as everyone else or asking to use the bathroom too aggressively. Some people were essentially always Shotdown, for years, and they went through small periods of time where they held a House position instead of the other way around (holding a position and being Shotdown sometimes). People like this were usually people who knew they would turn eighteen within the year, or people who walked that thin line between open rebellion (which would land you in The Corner) and passive rebellion.

These children would be constantly held up to everyone else as the antithesis of the kind of dis-functional person who would never be able to ‘hold a job’ in the real world (or as we called it in Elan "Out There"). Though we were all in the Elan program and very aware of it, it seemed like the Staff members were always making and encouraging comparisons between being a loser in the program and being a loser in real life - a loser before and after you left the program without "graduating".

I make this distinction because it was obvious, in the programs eyes, that you were a loser before you entered the program. It was a cornerstone of the Elan program to convince you that you had to be a loser to be accepted to Elan. This gave them a holding to convince you of your first mission, like AA, to give up your former self to the will of the program, while begging for change.

It was also important for them to convince you that you were a loser because it helped, in their favor, to convince you that the horrors you would be witness to in Elan were all deserved and dished out only to the worst of the worst. It is like saying the 5th level of hell has been reserved only for those who deserve it, and that is why it is so bad. That is why you need to change, because the person that you were before led you into the hands of Elan. And Elan is so bad that you could not help but accept that mistakes were made, because you ended up in such a bad place.

The Staff’s attitude was that Elan was going to be a bad place and that this fact was somehow out of their hands. So it is almost like they were trying to convince us that they had their hands tied, and now we were at the mercy of the ‘program’. But one of the many things that the Elan staff would tell you was that you were bound to end up being the person that you were before Elan, if you didn't "graduate Elan". 

In Elan, who you were before was such a strong concept that it was one of the many things not open to interpretation. You were a loser. Elan will change you, if you let it. If you do not let it, then you will remain who you were, a complete loser, and you will also lose two to three years in your life in the process.

Elan was a very abstract place. They trained us residents to accept the idea that things weren’t fair in Elan because we, the inmates, made it that way. And it was not going to be fair until we learned how to break down those who were holding us back. The Staff enforced this kind of thinking by routinely turning the entire house against one or two people in a General Meeting. Also, Staff would routinely punish the entire house because of the actions of one or two people. 

This was a big part of Elan’s basic foundation, the idea of one person’s guilt affecting the whole. The program itself was conceived and built upon this idea. So when one person was given a GM, the program itself would designate that it would cut into meal time. One person gets a GM and the entire house goes hungry. So if our meal time was supposed to be 10 minutes, because of Mike and Steve it was now 2 minutes.

The program was rigid when it came to the schedule. Every part of every day was set, seven days a week, down to the half hour. So any time the house was not ‘functioning right’, the only parts of the schedule that would be affected dealt with our meal time, hygiene time, time to use the bathroom, and time to sleep (the only pleasurable parts of our Elan existence). 

Basically, when we were not running like a well-oiled machine, we were suffering. And ‘running like a well-oiled machine’ meant properly and effectively punishing newer residents who were not accepting the program or older residents who were not actively indoctrinating other people into the program.