Question:
This may seem off-topic at first, but there is some KROQcontent at the end.

Back in March of this year, about three days after mysecond daughter was born, the city of Los Angeles heldits thirteenth annual Marathon.

If you happened to attend the race and wander into thepost-race area, just a block up the hill from the finishline,you will have seen about two hundred massage tablesand sports massage therapists crammed together prettytightly in a roped-off area under the Third Streetbridge. At any given time between noon and five pm, youalso will have seen a hundred and fifty runners waitingin line for their fifteen-minute session.

I am a student at the Healing Hands School of HolisticHealth in Laguna Hills. About twenty of us, along withabout 180 students from six other local massage schools,volunteered to work in the massage area.

To be a massage volunteer, one had to sign up a couplemonths before the race, had to get a badge showing one’scredentials, and above all had to demonstrate a certainfamiliarity with sports massage, cramp relief, andprofessional ethics.

Steve Jackson, the Marathon Committee’s perennial massagecoordinator required us to check in at 6:00 in the morning,remain there all day, and wear standard issue white MarathonVounteer T-shirts instead of our own school’s shirts.

Our task was to help relieve the runners of their tightmuscles and cramps after the race, and not to promoteour own causes or organizations.

Answer: More below, but if you think of all of the bad things that happenaround all of us each day, it's not necessarily surprising. I'llgrant that we're normally not near drownings or robberies (unlesswe hang out near dangerous waters or rough parts of town), but wecould probably all stand to take our blinders off and help thosearound us. OK. I'm not necessarily enamored of the Scientologists, but I'm notnecessarily convinced that they're a monolithic organization marchingto the beat of a single drummer. If they were, the Central Commandwould have just grabbed some qualified massage therapists and sentthem to the event. My guess is:

(1) This was a group of a couple of overzealous Scientologists.

(2) This was a group of a couple of anti-Scientologists. (Do Scientologistshave "ministers"?).