On Saturday morning last, my youngest son and I caught a train two stations up the line so he could go to Granma's house and earn his weekly $5 working in her garden for a couple of hours. The train got into "Granma's station" on time at 7:55am. It was an all stations to Sydney train, so noone got off to wait for another train to Sydney. My son and I were the only people who got off at that station. Being mid-Autumn, it was a pretty damned cold morning (although we'd had a pretty impressive "Indian Summer" the previous week). As we're leaving the station, who do I spy at the bottom of some steps, but two people holding up Awake!s and Watchtowers. We were the only people leaving the station, but we went in a different direction, so they didn't get to talk to us.
As we were going over the pedestrian bridge to Granma's, I pointed them out to my son. He hadn't noticed them, and asked why we hadn't gone and talked to them and got their "funny magazines". I said I wasn't in the mood because of what they were doing to Richie Rich. He went all wide-eyed and said "What are they doing to Richie Rich?" To him, Richie Rich is a cartoon character on Cartoon Network. I explained all the Dub-crap that's going on with our favourite poster, Richie Rich. He wasn't very impressed by the sound of it all. "That's not very nice", he said.
One thing that really bothered me about those train station Dubs was that one was a little girl, probably about 8, and the other was probably her father. Here they are, standing in the freezing cold before 8am on a Saturday morning, NOT handing out literature. The next train would stop and passengers would change trains to wait for the express to Sydney, but it wasn't due for another hour! This girl is trying very hard to please her Dad and Jehovah, but for what? What happens if she gets to Richie's age and starts asking too many of the wrong questions? Will she thrown back out onto the streets in the freezing cold?
You've got to understand that at the back of all this is the memory of my own deceased 8yo daughter, whom I loved dearly. She'd be not far off Richie's age, were she still with us.
What a system Dubdom is!