Opinionated

In September 2009, after admitting to my parents that I was atheist, I was abruptly woken in the middle of the night by two strange men who subsequently threw me in a van and drove me 200 mi. to a facility that I would later find out serves the sole purpose of eliminating free thinking adolescents.

These places exist IN AMERICA, they’re completely legal, and they’re only growing. It’s the new solution for parents who have kids that don’t conform blindly to their religious and political views, let me explain: After the initial shock of what I thought was a kidnapping, it was explained to me that my parents had arranged for me to attend Horizon Academy (http://www.horizonacademy.us/) because I admitted to them that I was atheist and didn’t agree with a lot of their hateful views. Let me give you a detailed run-down of my experience here: To start off it’s a boarding school where there is literally no communication with the outside world, the people who work here can do anything they want, and the students can do absolutely nothing about it. The basic idea is that you’re not allowed to leave until you believably adopt their viewpoints and push them off on others. The minimum stay at these places is a year, an ENTIRE YEAR, that means no birthday, no christmas, no thanksgiving etc.; my stay lasted 2 years. The day to day functioning of this facility is based on a very strict set of rules and regulations: you eat what they give you, do what they tell you (often just pointless things just to brand mindless submission in your brain), and believe what they tell you to believe. Consequences for not adhering to these regulations include not eating for that day, being locked in small rooms for extended periods of time and the long term consequence of an extended stay. There’s a lot more detail and intricacies I could get into, but my main purpose was to spread awareness to the only group of people I feel like could do something about this. Feel free to ask me anything about my stay, I could go on for days about some of the ridiculous things I went through.