The dirt is shouting out for us to come back here and rescue our town.

September 20, 2018 4:16 PM

Paedophile cult leader Warren Jeffs tore this town apart. Now his victims are putting it back together
posted by Uncle (5 comments total)

1. I love that the women of Short Creek are the ones who are rebuilding and revitalizing this community now that Jeffs is essentially gone and their patriarchy is falling to pieces around them.

2. Life without the FLDS may have its moments of strangeness, but Leona is managing to cope with her own adjustments by assisting others in the community through their transitions. In 2013, she started a group called Creekers to help former members of the cult assimilate back into society. She also set up a weekly meeting of former FLDS women she playfully calls the Girlfriend Club, where they process their trauma by supporting and sharing their experiences with one another. And last summer, Leona held a “Brave Woman Camp” for female members of the group who have survived sexual abuse.

See above. What a brave woman and an inspiration to her community. She could have just left and started a new life life outside the Crick, but she chose to stay and try to improve things for her community. Bless her. And bless Donia Jessop and Alyssa Wall for continuing to work hard to improve the Short Creek community despite having left the FLDS.

3. "They’ve ... opened businesses – including a brand-new microbrewery, Hildale’s very first alcohol-serving establishment, brazenly situated right next to the most popular casual food joint in town."

That's flipping impressive considering the way the Word of Wisdom is generally interpreted.

I've always wanted to visit Short Creek and now I feel like when I do it won't be such a terrifying prospect as it might have been 10+ years ago. Not everyone's keeping sweet these days. To say nothing of the Prophet's bedroom being rented out on AirB&B.
posted by elsietheeel at 5:03 PM on September 20, 2018 [20 favorites]

"When it came time to elect a new mayor of Hildale, Donia jumped at the chance to run. She was up against two men and experienced much resistance from the FLDS. During the race, she says her signs were defaced with obscenities and she was almost run off the road by a man screaming insults at her. But despite the group’s opposition, she won the election."

You send young men and boys away so you can keep all the women for yourself, and eventually your demographics are so screwed that the women outnumber you, and then you wind up with a lady mayor. There's a delicious irony to that. I hope the women there keep finding their voices like this.
posted by Jilder at 8:29 PM on September 20, 2018 [29 favorites]

The end of the story takes a weird turn:

“There were no sounds out here; it was very creepy,” Musser says. “You couldn’t hear anything out here other than just the wind, and the kids would climb up on the roofs of all the houses around me. It was like a scary movie. All those kids, and it's quiet and they're not saying anything. They’re just climbing up on the roofs looking at you.”

Yeesh. OK, that's how the town used to be, what do people think of it now?

We came from the dirt here,” Donia says, looking out the window at the stretch of canyons in the distance. “When you’re from the dirt, that's why you're called back. You can't help it. People leave, and they’re like, ‘I’m never going back to that place.’ But the dirt calls your soul back. The dirt will not be unheard.

It's as if the author didn't think the rapes and mind control were disturbing enough, they needed to channel the ghost of H P Lovecraft himself.
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:32 PM on September 20, 2018 [7 favorites]

I had heard of Jeffs before, but I hadn't read much about him. He put me in mind of Lavrentiy Beria, if Beria hadn't been quite so busy with the Gulag and the atomic bomb.
posted by clawsoon at 8:33 AM on September 21, 2018

There is a service project in October to help the residents of the community. I heard about it from Lindsay Hansen Park from the Year of Polygamy podcast. The volunteers seem to be secular and exmormons and former FLDS members.

I've always been curious about visiting a polygamist community and I might make a weekend of it for a good cause.
posted by ShakeyJake at 9:56 AM on September 21, 2018 [3 favorites]