Twenty More Years of Socialism and No Good-Byes

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015 ASTRA

When I left Romania after twenty years of frugal subsistence and tyranny under Ceausescu’s communist regime, I thought the nightmare was over, I was moving to America, the land of freedom and opportunity, and everything would be all right. All I had to do is study and educate myself as fast as I could.

There were so many opportunities to succeed! I worked very hard and I eventually transformed these opportunities into success. Nothing was given to me on a silver platter and I certainly did not have white privilege, on the contrary, I was told time and time again when I looked for a job that I was not a protected minority. I watched classmates with lower grades and ability, who learned to milk the rigged system, get jobs they did not deserve simply because they had a different skin color.

Something did not feel quite right in the academic environment I chose. I felt that I had escaped one nightmare 7,000 miles away, leaving behind forever my beloved family, and jumped into another bad dream, one run by American academics and administrators.

If I were to survive, I had to learn new skills to cope in the more covert communistic environment rigged in favor of tenured liberals who protected, rewarded, promoted, and tenured nobody else but more liberals.

I am not sure I could endure it today, considering the appalling communism in the American academia, on every American campus, where free thought and divergent opinions are not allowed; the faculty and administrators are no longer hiding their communist agenda. Campuses have become breeding grounds for future anarchists of America who are carefully shaped and selected for their robotic ignorance of anything of value and vitriolic aggression.

I had spent my last contract weeks in 2008 in the vaunted hallways of academia shredding every Economics lesson I had ever taught to my college students and to my gifted 11^th and 12^th graders in a southern school, in preparation for my retirement.

By shredding all my papers and lesson plans, I somehow wanted to erase the twenty years of frustration and pain I had experienced with some of my socialist colleagues and one administrator after another who were eager to serve the collectivist cause of social justice rather than merit, uniqueness, and excellence. In retrospect I wish today that I had kept the lessons. I also left behind all the foreign language dictionaries and many lesson plans I had developed. I am sure they were thrown out as soon as I had vacated my office and turned in the key.

I was not surprised that none of my colleagues moved a finger to celebrate my retirement. But an active parent, who appreciated my teaching, organized a collective celebration for me, two other retiring colleagues, and an administrator.

At the time, I was the longest serving teacher since the founding of the school. I walked out the door, without fanfare, a thank you for my service, good-byes, appreciation, or even an “I love myself” certificate or plaques that were so generously given to my colleagues over the years. In the grand scheme of things it does not matter anyway.

I did not realize how bad it was until the liberal newspaper whose owners also controlled the mass-media in the small town, refused to run a paid ad about my retirement. It is impossible not to know in a small town who all the prominent teachers are, especially someone like me who did not promote their societally-regressive agenda which they euphemistically named progressivism. At the same time, they ran free one-page news stories on the retirement of the administrator after four years of “service” and of my two colleagues. I was persona-non-grata no matter how I sliced reality.

The sad reality was that a few highly progressive families in town owned pretty much anything of value, including the minds of current and future Americans.

Most of my former students, with few notable exceptions, became devoted liberals, lawyers, feminists, doctors, advocates for social justice, heavily involved in global citizenship efforts, international non-profits, and teachers who proudly impart Common Core “values” to their students, the new generations of “progressives.”

I was one of the best paid teachers in the state at the time, not because I was the darling of the socialists surrounding me, but because I deserved it and few if any could replace me. I could teach four entirely different subjects with ease and knowledge, Economics and three foreign languages. Nobody else could match that skill or take it away from me.

I walked out the door with a sense of personal accomplishment in the face of so much adversity but also of regret for my twenty years of service that I wasted on progressive ingrates. By the time they reached my classroom, most of the students had already been thoroughly indoctrinated into socialism/communism as a perfect societal ideology.

The moment I walked out the door, a sense of freedom overwhelmed me - I had successfully survived the second communist phase of my life. The first one was escaping from communist Romania in 1978.

The small southern town was a safe place at the time to raise a family even for a single parent like me. Colleagues had asked me repeatedly how I could be anything else but a Democrat, when I was a teacher, a woman, a single mom, and a foreigner.

We were not legal immigrants in the late seventies; we were foreigners/aliens with a green card. I did not mind the term “alien” as long as I was not going back to the communist Iron Curtain and the oppressing life. I still don’t find the term offensive today. We were alien to these lands and to its customs.

It was not an auspicious time to be a foreigner/alien then. Nobody fawned over us, we had to have legal papers to be in the country, and we had to be healthy. In other words, we were properly vetted because legal immigration was strictly enforced and was not meant to benefit the immigrants but the American people.

There were not exactly many Romanians in the south, we were pretty much oddities coming from a faraway country that nobody had any idea where it was geographically located, nor did they care. That feeling extended to my American children who eventually felt frustrated and perhaps understood the feeling of isolation, of being different.

When they were smaller, they would beg my mom and me not to speak Romanian in public because people stared at us. My children were quite embarrassed to speak a foreign language fluently but they appreciated that skill as adults. Many families would not allow their children to play with mine and we were followed in stores as if we were going to rob it at gunpoint.

They did not know how many times, while I was pushing a stroller with mom, we were asked to leave mom and pop stores as our business was not welcome there. I swallowed my pride and went about my business. Mom, even though she did not speak English, intuitively understood the insults. But we did not allow that offensive and ignorant behavior to define who we were. These people were not xenophobic; they were ignorant and fearful.

But one store welcomed our business with open arms, and the owner’s son became our friend to this day. Of Jewish faith, perhaps he understood more than he let on the difficulty of being different in a small southern town.

Times have changed and now illegal immigrants and economic refugees from non-Christian lands rule the country; southerners and Americans in general bend over backwards to please them, rolling the red carpet and spreading their hard-earned wealth to economic refugees through generous welfare programs. I wished they had extended just a smidgen of kindness to us; we would have felt so much better.

I was lucky to find Lois and Harold, with their two lovely daughters. Through a twist of fate, they became our adopted family. We had spent many holidays with them and visited them through the years. I am not sure I could have adjusted so well to southern life without their help and advice.

There were other legal immigrants like us and they were treated the same. We formed our own club and helped each other the best we could with advice, food, clothes, rental money for expensive apartments in a college town, adjustment to a foreign life, and translation services for citizenship papers.

We cooked ethnic foods and had monthly pot luck suppers in the homes of those who were lucky enough to have afforded to purchase a home. Most of us were poor students hailing from communist and other totalitarian regimes, often struggling to raise and feed a family in a small apartment or a tiny rented house.

To my knowledge, those friends I made became contributing members to our society and, I am almost certain, they never promoted utopian communism.

Sunscreen

Piz Buin Photo: Wikipedia

Coco Chanel made tanning fashionable when she returned from a vacation with glowing skin. Up to that point, the rich wore hats, long sleeves, and parasols to shade them from the sun's rays. Having pale skin was a sign of nobility and wealth; it meant that those people did not do manual labor in the outdoors.

In 1938 a Swiss chemistry student named Franz Greiter suffered severe sunburn while climbing Mount Piz Buin on the Swiss-Austrian border. In the process of trying to heal his bad sunburn he invented an effective sunscreen which is still sold today.

I often wish we had sunscreen when I was growing up. I might have to make less trips to the dermatologist in my old age. During summers in Constanta at the Black Sea, we would get so sun-burned every year and used, after the fact, plain yogurt to draw out the heat from burned skin. When we could not find yogurt, which was often the case, the skin would bubble up painfully and several layers of burned skin would peel off. Who knew at the time that we were exposing ourselves needlessly to potential skin cancer?

I saved my ex-husband’s life with several tubs of plain yogurt. He thought the northern hemisphere sun would not be as strong as the southern sun, but it was, especially for those with very fair skin like him.

My friend Mary, even though she always wore hats in the sun, and, as a black person had lots of melanin in her skin, died of melanoma. My former mother-in-law also died of melanoma. She was partly Native American and her tribe was particularly susceptible to certain cancers.

With Gratitude and Honor

Apuseni Mountains
Photo: Wikipedia

Gratitude and honor are remarkable character traits that I’ve always searched for in my fellow humans. Imagine my pleasant surprise when I found them in a millennial! It was not a millennial born and raised in this country but in Romania, in the beautiful Apuseni Mountains of western Transylvania.

In Rosia Montana, the county of Alba, Tica Darie, a 25-year old entrepreneur, saw locally produced merino wool and artisan knitting skills as a source of golden opportunity, fleeced from the flock of merino sheep and turned into socks, sweaters, scarves, and other accessories that the fashionably young and other customers could wear. The label is Made in Rosia Montana.

Rosia Montana
Photo: Wikipedia

Rosia Montana is the same village that was embroiled in a bitter battle in 2013 between western developers who wanted to dynamite four mountains and flood the village and its waters with cyanide in order to extract the rich vines of gold, the miners who wanted such development, and the rest of the village who wanted to preserve their beautiful area, unspoiled by gold mining. The young entrepreneur, Tica Darie, was caught in the middle and suffered at times physical and verbal threats and the wrath of the miners.

Darie realized that people were being forced to sell their ancestral lands and, in some cases, expropriated from their homes by the government eager to cash in on the western gold development “bonanza.”

Darie felt compelled to help the locals who wanted to save their village. He ran marathons and participated in bike tours across Europe to Rosia Montana, in order to draw attention to the plight of the villagers. He even biked 2533 km from Copenhagen to Rosia Montana, carrying the Romanian flag.

Applying the skills he learned in Denmark in multi-media design, Darie made videos and developed sites for his own online store. Ever the optimist, the future looks bright for this young entrepreneur. He moved to Rosia Montana four years ago and, in the meantime became a father to a beautiful little girl and bought a property for his shop which he is going to restore.

 “You have to become a responsible citizen, no matter where you live,” said Darie. There are now signs permanently attached to the front of homes stating, “This property is not for sale.” http://recorder.ro/antreprenoriatul-salveaza-rosia-montana/

In the battle between those seeking gold in the veins of the mountain and those who wanted to remain in their own beds and their own homes, surrounded by beautiful and pristine mountains, peace has settled over the poor village for now. When Darie becomes successful in his enterprise, fifty or more families will have a chance to make a living with dignity and suitable pay, not slave wages.

Rosia Montana has lost half of its population since the Revolution of 1989 when communism “fell.” There are ruins everywhere for sure, some from the communist era, others homes bought by the Gold Corporation and left to sink into the ground, and even houses abandoned by their former owners who were bought out and now these ruins are inhabited by rats. But there are homes left that are maintained with pride by their owners.

The entire village had been slated to become a decanting lake for the Gold Corporation. The gas station, post office, the bank, mobile phone office and few but scarce amenities are scattered here and there. Generations across centuries guarded their pastoral lifestyle with pride.

It is certainly not an easy place to start a business but the perennial optimist Darie is undaunted and hopes to succeed with Made in Rosia Montana for the sake of his adopted home. It will take a millennial with determination, gratitude and honor like Darie to make it happen. http://bit.ly/2z3P4bY

 

 

The Right Man for Healing and a Rare Find

Hippocrates of the Hippocratic Oath

I was not sure my ENT specialist was a good fit for me even though I read the glowing praises framed on his office walls, praises coming from his patients, colleagues, and other doctors. The young man seemed to know what he was doing but his bedside manner was brief and rather cold.

I attributed his demeanor to his introverted personality, his professionalism, and to his respect for his patients’ time. Very punctual, he very seldom made anybody wait to see him, he was always on time.

One day I realized that he was much more caring on the inside than he let people see. A young woman with her mom and a three-year old in tow had an appointment to see the doctor. The receptionist, Lupe, asked her if she was prepared to pay for that day’s visit. The young woman had a grief-stricken look on her face and wondered how much the visit was going to be. The receptionist told her that she did not know because each patient was different, depending on the problem. The prospective patient replied in a sad and disappointed voice that she will reschedule until such a time that she would have enough cash on hand to pay for the visit.

Lupe kindly explained that her insurance, Obamacare, had a huge deductible, and unless she met this deductible for the year, it will not pay the doctor anything. She offered to ask the physician, left the young woman waiting, and returned to tell her that the good doctor will see her anyway.

I decided then that this man was the right person to see in an ENT medical emergency or a problem requiring a caring specialist. His humanity, in addition to his medical professionalism, punctuality, and his education in the U.S., made him, in my opinion, an exceptional doctor, a rare find.

At the other end of the spectrum was the endocrinologist’s office in Fairfax who told me, they are no longer taking any new Medicare patients, just the already established ones who were in transition to Medicare. The receptionist’s explanation was that Medicare does not allow their patients to be seen every three to six months as needed.

I was told previously by a doctor friend that Medicare made low and very slow reimbursements to physicians because of Obamacare; therefore I did not believe the office’s explanation. Personally, I would not want to be seen by a doctor who put her profit motive above the care for a patient, any patient.

But I pressed on. What if I paid in cash, could I then see the doctor? The answer was again no because, she said, they had a contract with Medicare and thus could not accept cash payment.

Having read the pertinent section of the law, I knew this was part of the Affordable Care Act as well, the euphemistically named piece of legislation Obama’s administration and Nancy Pelosi’s Congress forced down middle class America in the middle of the night, “pass the bill to find out what’s in it.”

We did find out all right, and we did not like the price we had to pay for it in order that the Democrat Party could unilaterally force an entire nation, one fifth of the economy, to become a socialized medicine nightmare for decades to come.

More insultingly, members of Congress have their own subsidized and separate health care insurance and can see whatever doctors they wish to see.

It used to be the case in America once when patients could pay cash for doctors’ visits and the fees were affordable. But that gradually changed thanks to modifications in health insurance, new cafeteria health insurance plans, in-network and out-of-network type of employer insurance, and health savings accounts that disappeared at the end of the year if unused.

If you lost your job or quit, the insurance terminated, and you were at the mercy of Cobra insurance for a while, at confiscatory monthly premiums, but nothing as expensive as Obamacare premiums today that can easily exceed a family’s mortgage and car payments combined.

Lack of insurance portability across state lines had always been a problem for Americans seeking affordable insurance. Aggressive law suits against doctors and medical malpractice awards by the courts, forced doctors to drastically buy more and more expensive malpractice insurance, making care more expensive for the average patient who did have insurance. The infamous $50 aspirin in a hospital setting was legendary.

As a student without insurance in the early 1980s, I paid $10 cash per visit to my children’s pediatrician. Once we could afford and bought insurance, each visit was $85. The pediatrician made a comfortable living, had a thriving practice, but he was certainly not a millionaire.

If you ask most doctors today what they spend a good portion of resources and time, it is not patient face to face care time but electronic documentation, record keeping, and staff to handle insurance justifications and payments – bureaucracy.

Primary medical care, day-to-day healthcare, is now provided by a general practitioner, a family physician, a gerontology, pediatric, or family nurse practitioner, a physician assistant, a registered nurse, and even a pharmacist who coordinate and triage specialist care that a patient may need.

Secondary and tertiary care is harder to find as physicians are cutting their losses and focusing on accepting private insurance rather than Medicare and Medicaid.

We are headed to a single payer socialized medical insurance which will limit doctor visits and access to procedures based on rationed care. The entity that will hold the key to your ability to pay for and receive medical care when you need it will be the federal government, the same bloated, out of control entity that spent your Social Security lock-box savings and has doubled the national debt in eight years of the Obama’s administration.

How Free Are You?

Woodcut - "The Ship of Fools"

What happens if you live off-grid?

If you live independent of utilities, water, and sewer, and provide your own energy through solar panels, have your own sewer system, and use rainwater, you may run into problems with your local government. Robin Speroni of Cape Coral, Florida, was sued by local officials that her off-grid home was illegal, citing the International Property Maintenance Code. She was found guilty of not being hooked to the water supply.

“Speroni is still being hassled by the municipality of Cape Coral for not having a connection to city water or property sewage. This is in spite of the fact that the city capped her sewers themselves.”http://www.collective-evolution.com/2014/03/09/florida-makes-off-grid-living-illegal-mandates-all-homes-must-be-connected-to-an-electricity-grid/

What happens if you don’t send your kids to public school?

It is certainly against the law not to send your children to school and charges vary from state to state. You may lose public assistance such as food stamps. According to the U.S. Department of Education in some states you may have to go to jail. If you home-school, you have to follow laws specifically designed for home-schoolers. https://howtoadult.com/consequences-not-sending-kids-school-13544.html

What happens if you want to worship in a church that is not sanctioned as a church but deemed a cult?

To answer this question you must study both sides of what happened to the people at Ruby Ridge and Waco.  Here is a link for the liberal version of the fiery events that resulted in the deaths of many people, especially innocent children. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/oregon-standoff-fbi-negotiator_us_568a956ee4b014efe0daf42c

What happens if you don’t have a driver’s license?

Driving without a license is considered a crime in all 50 states. You have a right to travel but you cannot operate a vehicle without a license. If you are an illegal alien, the law is much laxer, as the law breaker will get a slap on the wrist and will be released back into the streets to repeat his/her behavior.

What happens if you jay walk?

Jaywalking is an infraction that requires in some states a fine but a misdemeanor with a court appearance in other states. Penalties vary by state and by municipalities. Fines range from $1 to $1,000.

What happens if you refuse to have your child vaccinated?

In most states, vaccines are required for your child to enter day care, schools, and universities. Laws vary from state to state.

What happens if you refuse to be molested by the TSA in an airport?

It is obvious that you cannot fly and you will be promptly escorted out of the airport by TSA agents. If you are belligerent and vocal in your refusal, you will be arrested in most states.

What happens if you disagree politically with a group?

You will be shunned, may lose your job, you will become a pariah, you will be tracked and possibly beaten by the opposition, your home and property, including your car, will be vandalized, and you will be forbidden from expressing your divergent opinion on an American campus. Those opposing you will resort to violence and fascistic means in order to prevent you from being on their campus to express your opinion guaranteed by our Constitution because your opinion hurts the feelings of campus snowflakes and they will label your views as “hate speech,” in essence cutting off your freedom of speech.

What happens if you go to college and dare to express your conservative or divergent opinions from those of the teachers and the majority of snowflakes?

Your teachers will prevent you from speaking in class, you will be ridiculed, marginalized, and possibly given a lower grade in class than you actually earned. You will be relegated to a designated corner on campus where you might be able to express your opinion without being physically assaulted and verbally insulted.

What happens if you protect your property and shoot an intruder?

It depends on the state. The intruders have been known to hire eager attorneys who successfully prosecuted those protecting their homes, resulting in the loss of their homes and land which is awarded to the intruder and his family and even jail time for those who engaged in self-defense.

What happens if illegal aliens try to steal from you and you shoot them?

The most recent case in Kansas City, Missouri, involves David Jungerman, a business owner who shot a home intruder in the leg. A 39-year old attorney, Tom Pickert, who represented the home invader and won millions of dollars in a civil lawsuit against Jungerman, was shot and killed in his front yard. http://heavy.com/news/2017/10/david-jungerman-kansas-city-trump-raytown/

What happens if you express your opinion that illegal immigration is illegal and should be stopped by building a wall?

At best you are considered a conspiracy theorist nut-job and heartless who does not understand that America was built by such illegal immigrants; at worst you are a xenophobe and racist. Irrational globalists will hide the fact that America was built by LEGAL immigrants who were vetted for their health in quarantine at Ellis Island and, who did not come to America for the welfare system because the welfare system did not exist at the time.

What happens if you criticize the theocracy of Islam, Sharia Law, and genital mutilation?

You will be publicly humiliated, accused of Islamo-phobia, and marginalized, your home and property vandalized, threatened with lawsuits, become a potential victim of a fatwa, and possibly fired from your job.

What happens if you try to home-school your children in certain states?

You must jump through incredible hoops in order to be allowed to home-school your child.

What happens if you object to your children being subjected to the Islamic curriculum indoctrination of Common Core?

You are ignored, you are banned from any school property or meetings, you are told that it is required by the Common Core Curricula, and security will be called to prevent you from entering the school building. You will not be allowed to attend or speak at public school board meetings. The principal and the teacher(s) in question will not answer your calls or letters.

What happens if you object, as a parent, to the teaching of your children in kindergarten and elementary schools about sexual perversions?

Your opinions and wishes will be overridden by the school, the principal, and the teacher. The curriculum will be taught as planned with or without your knowledge.

What happens if you object to mentally-ill grown men or boys, pretending they are women, use the restrooms and lockers that your little girls use?

You will be labeled a homophobe who does not respect their freedom of expressing who they are inside their heads. The fact that your child is in danger of molestation and rape does not matter. They have rights that supersede your rights or your children’s rights.

What happens if you object to the Common Core curricula and do not wish that your Christian children be indoctrinated into the Five Pillars of Islam?

Your child will still be made to wear hijab in order to feel what a Muslim feels like and they will attend a mosque despite your protests. They will be made to recite by heart the Five Pillars of Islam, and to pray in the mosque, thus indoctrinating them into Islam.

What happens if you refuse to bake a cake for a gay couple because of your religious beliefs?

You will pay huge fines, lose your business, your savings, and possibly serve time in jail for protecting your religious beliefs. http://www.gospelherald.com/articles/54265/20150205/christian-bakers-lose-business-face-150-000-fine-for-refusing-to-bake-same-sex-marriage-cake.htm

What happens if you refuse to pay taxes?

You will pay confiscatory fines, have property seized, and possibly go to jail.

What happens if you protest the takeover of your property via eminent domain or the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) shows up with agents to confiscate your land that has been in your family for generations?

You will lose your land and home. Cliven Bundy protected his ranch and grazing rights. Following a 21-year legal dispute between the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Cliven Bundy, for allegedly “failing to pay over $1 million in withheld grazing fees for Bundy’s use of federally owned land adjacent to Bundy’s ranch in southeastern Nevada,” an armed confrontation between supporters of the cattle rancher and law enforcement ensued in 2014. LaVoy Finicum was shot and killed in Oregon in 2016.  http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/18/politics/nevada-bundy-ranch-land-rights/index.html

What happens if you try to collect rain water or snowmelt on your property?

Gary Harrington from Oregon served 30-days in jail for nine misdemeanors and paid a fine of $1,500 for diverting snow runoff and rainwater into three reservoirs on his property, thus violating “an antiquated law governing personal water use.” https://www.naturalnews.com/046359_oregon_rainwater_collection_big_governemnt.html

What happens if you don’t pay HOA fees?

HOA will take you to court and eventually may foreclose on your home and sell it in order to pay overdue fees, depending on the state in which you reside. HOAs retain attorneys for such offenders. http://www.latimes.com/business/realestate/la-fi-associations-20141109-story.html

What happens if you try to fly the American flag and Muslim or hard-core liberal neighbors who hate America object?

You will be ordered to take it down, fined, and possibly told to move if you are renting the property. Crosses have been removed from churches and monuments in order to appease Muslims and atheists. Statues have been torn down to appease the racist BLM who were offended by the alleged racist intent of the monument. Large crosses that have been part of a landscape for decades, honoring the fallen or our Christianity, have been ordered removed by the courts in order to satisfy atheists.

What happens if your favorite NFL team players kneel during the National Anthem for the alleged “social injustices” and “deliberate police racism” against blacks, while insulting the veterans present?

The middle class white men will stop buying tickets and attending NFL games, buying jerseys and other football memorabilia, giving the owners and the overpaid players a clear message that their faux political antics do not have a place on a stadium where they are paid to entertain the public with a game, not give the public their two cents of misinformed opinions. Americans still have the power of the purse. You have the freedom to protest in a very public venue but expect consequences of your insulting behavior.

What happens when Hollywood bash conservatives? What happens when slutty starlets pretend to be paragons of virtue, lecturing the rest of us, and claim to be the ultimate source of knowledge because they played a role in a movie?

Americans still have the power to stop buying tickets to their movies and concerts. Boycotts work quite nicely as many actors learned this summer when their movies tanked at the box office. You may fancy yourselves political gurus and know-it-all, but, at the end of the day, you are just script memorizers who act in a movie. You dropped out of high school because you did not have academic ability; you had talent to act in a movie and to impersonate a certain character.

What happens when academia and public schools turn your children into hard-core socialists/fascists who hate their country while you think they are getting an education?

The results are evident in the millennial generation joining ANTIFA, an organization run by communist anarchists who employ fascistic violence to protest those whose divergent opinions they want to squash yet they call them fascists and their organization anti-fascism when in reality they are the violent fascists.

The results are also evident in the brainwashing of several lost generations of American voters who believe that the communist Democrats are the “real” Americans, U.S. should be socialist/communist, and everything that made this country the success that is today must be destroyed. They spit, defecate on, and burn the American flag, demand the abolition of the National Anthem, of the Star-Spangled Banner, the replacing of the Constitution with their own Marxist version, and the Bill of Rights with the Socialist Bill of Rights.

What happens if you try to plant a bush or cut down a tree next to a rain puddle and environmental NGOs show up with paperwork telling you that you are not allowed to do so?

Martha Boneta can tell you volumes about her farm and the NGO’s interdictions that plagued her ownership rights in the rolling, gentrified hills of northern Virginia. http://www.conservativehq.com/article/14081-fitzgibbons-recounts-harassment-martha-boneta

Obama has promised that, if Obamacare was passed, you can keep your doctor and the insurance premiums would go down.

How many of you were actually able to keep your doctors and how many were unable to see doctors and specialists because they no longer accept Medicare patients due to low and slow reimbursement rates? Why would that be? Because the Obama administration robbed billions from Medicare in order to fund his socialized medicine jewel, Obamacare. And millions of Americans who previously had other forms of affordable medical insurance now cannot afford the high premiums and deductibles driven by Obamacare’s regulations. In essence, Obamacare insurance and regulations have destroyed middle class Americans' formerly stellar medical care and sky-rocketed their previously affordable insurance premiums.

As an American, can you cross the border without a passport?

International banks and the Federal Reserve which is neither federal nor a reserve control your money supply, interest rates, and gold reserves.

And there are many other freedoms that you think you still have but they are highly restricted or no longer exist except in theory.

Do you still think you are free?

 

Veterans Day 2017

(Written by my FB friend, Joe Keller, and posted with his permission)

 

Even though I am a vet myself, I have always assumed the work of veterans was appreciated by all Americans who live under the flag and enjoy the freedoms the veterans put their lives on the line to protect.  While it is nice to be recognized, being a vet is simply part of being an American who loves his country.

One of the reasons it always felt good to be a vet was to see sporting events, with their massive crowds, playing the Star Spangled Banner.  Out of respect to the flag, and all of the great things our country represents, everyone would rise to the National Anthem, face the flag and place their hand over their hearts, as a singer would try to reach all the notes of that dastardly song.  Whether they hit all the notes or not, when the song ended, an uproar from the crowd would erupt.

For this veteran, that was all the appreciation I ever needed.  It was an appreciation that was a tradition, but one I never took for granted.

And then along came a puny, insignificant little man with a cause. 

I despise puny,  insignificant people with causes.

In 2011, if memory serves correct, I got an email from a friend who asked for prayers for her nephew.  He had been hit by an IED in Iraq and suffered burns over 80% of his body.  He was on his way to the States for treatment.

I prayed. 

I thought about the “life” this boy was going to have.  I know the insufferable pain he was going to have to live with for the rest of his life.  His raw nerves exposed, everything was agonizing pain.  To get washed, to feel the sheets drop against his burned skin, even a gentle breeze would bring the most excruciating of pain.  I could see years of skin grafts he would need to endure.  After years and years of pain, it might subside.  He would still have a family that loved him but any semblance of a normal life was gone. 

He had sacrificed his life without dying. 

I cried.

Moments later I turned on the television and there was a puny, insignificant woman with a cause testifying before Congress.  She came from a wealthy family and went to an extremely expensive university in Washington, D.C.  She felt that no woman in her dormitory should have to pay for birth control.  That was her cause…birth control should be free to college women.   She was applauded and praised by the media as if she was the Second Coming.

I compared the bravery of my friend’s nephew and all of those soldiers and veterans who had died, suffered and served with this pathetic, sniveling excuse of an American woman whining on TV and being made a media hero all across the country.

And, I cried for hours.

Was this what my friend’s nephew sacrificed his life for? 

Over the space of a few minutes.  I had seen the best and the bravest this country had to offer in pain and ruins, to the attention of nobody.  And, I had seen the worst this country had to offer, someone who didn’t care about anything but her cause and self-importance.  A “giver” would live a life of pain and suffering.  The “taker” would get her law degree and champion other insignificant and selfish causes like her own.  She would no doubt become even more wealthy in the process. She risked nothing.  She showed no courage.  Self-importance is not courage.  Yet, to a misguided media she was the hero.

The juxtaposition of the two at almost the same moment caused me so much pain.  I knew he would leave the family emotionally and financially drained with years of care and support.

The thought crossed my mind was this a country even worth fighting for anymore?  Would I let my own son serve this kind of country?

And then this puny and insignificant man did one of the most horrible things a person could do to a veteran.  He sat down at the National Anthem at a football game, for a cause he must think rises in importance over all our nation stands for. 

Then he kneeled. 

Thick-headed members of the media painted this blockhead as courageous and his cause more important than the country.  This man wouldn’t know courage if it slapped him in the face.  Veterans know courage.  But, with the media leading the way, other players began to follow him kneeling in complete disrespect to our country and all the veterans who ever served to keep our flag flying.  With coaches all the way down to Pop Warner football teaching children that disrespect of the flag was acceptable, disrespect was becoming institutionalized.

And, the tears began to flow again. 

As much as I have loved the game of football for the past 55 years, to ease the pain, I have had to turn the games off.  Until the players who are participating in this assault against our flag and country realize their cause has hurt more people than it will ever help, the games will remain off.  Until they understand our country and veterans are worth spending one minute a week in reverent respect, their cause won’t get one iota of attention from me and, I hope, you.

The only way to appeal to the patriotism of these misguided players, with their causes, is to turn off the game and not attend at the stadiums.  The players shouldn’t have to be told to stand at attention.  When they see the response of all those who are offended by their actions, those whom they have hurt, I believe they will know to do the right thing.  Their cause is going nowhere until they do.  The future of the NFL is at stake if they don’t.

This Veteran’s Day weekend, out of respect to all veterans, please turn off NFL games.  Please do not go to games, even if you have tickets.  You can make a significant impact in just one week.  Those tickets you hold, you can look at in the future as a collector’s item as the day when you stood up for America and made a difference.

I feel like a puny person with a cause myself, but my cause is America itself.  It is worth fighting for. 

That is why I am a vet.

 

 

 

 

 

  

The Tyranny of the Oppressed and of Minorities

"We condemn freedom of speech that hurts other people’s feelings” – student poster photographed at a rally in California

Half of the U.S. population believes that it is a good idea and high time that our country became socialist, on the way to communism. We are told ad nauseam by the highly organized Marxist left that the other communist countries that failed so miserably, oppressed their own people, and killed millions of them, failed because they did not do it the right way. What this “right way” is, nobody really understands or can even attempt to explain. But they repeat it because it sounds right and progressively utopian.

They have carefully listened day and night to the propaganda coming from the labor unions, teacher unions, the academia indoctrinating college students, public school indoctrinating mills, Hollywood movies and immoral starlets who make millions and pretend to be paragons of virtue and knowledge, the main stream media indoctrination, the socialist Democrat Party and its race-baiting members, and NFL players who make millions while pretending to fight for social justice, code word for communism.

It will be interesting to see moronic football players lose their millions and lavish lifestyles while adhering to the communist-dictated equal pay across the board, regardless of effort, talent, training, skill, or education. Living in a two-bedroom apartment made of cinder blocks, without an expensive car and a huge bank account should teach them humility at the barrel of a gun held by the agents of daddy omnipotent government they so desire.

But none are as destructive to our society as the Democrat script readers of the main stream media, pretending to be journalists, graduates of the indoctrinating mills in our many colleges and universities around the country. The pretend-journalists continue the communist indoctrination that started in kindergarten, elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools in every state many decades ago.

The communist tree planted in this country is finally bearing fruit and these fruits are toxic and poisonous to our Constitutional Republic. These rotten fruits want to destroy and replace our Constitution, socially-engineer our demographics, black or white, by allowing any enemy into our country through open borders, and fundamentally changing our society by fascistic means.

I described in my book, Echoes of Communism, what life was like living under communism for twenty years. I have not made any converts though, even among my high school and college students; on the contrary, ever more young people think that how Scandinavian people live is the best – socialism for all.  After all, aren’t they supposed to be the happiest people on earth? I was told this recently by a naïve young lady with bright blue eyes. I asked her if that is true, how come Sweden pays such confiscatory taxes and has been taken over by Islam and has become the rape capital of the world? How is that happiness?

The indoctrination of political correctness (PC), her forfeiture of freedom of speech did not seem to ring a bell that she has lost the freedoms we are so proud of in America when we no longer can express a divergent opinion anywhere without being labeled racists, homophobes, Islamophobias, shunned, lose our jobs, pay fines, and even go to jail.

Political Correctness originated as a joke in a comic strip but it has devolved into Cultural Marxism.  Bill Lind correctly identified Political Correctness and Classical Marxism as totalitarian ideologies. He said,

“The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered North Koreas, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists, or the local black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted ‘victims’ groups that PC revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble.” https://www.academia.org/the-origins-of-political-correctness/

The tyranny of the virtuous and imagined “oppressed” and of minorities has transformed our country into a basket of totalitarian control through fascist and communist methods.

It is no coincidence that PC (Cultural Marxism) uses powerful tools to indoctrinate such as revisionist history, pop culture, environmentalism, and sex. They have been used before by Marxists during the communist revolution of 100 years ago.

During my years of teaching, we made fun of political correctness – nobody took it really serious but people knew how to disguise certain ideas or lest they’d never get promoted, get tenure, better offices, or cushy conference circuits.

PC has become today an ideology that is guarded in the halls of academia and enforced in many cases by the power of the state. We now have “hate crimes” with jail sentences which are nothing but punishing people for their political views and thoughts. The prisoners during WWII used to sing a song that is no longer true today, Die Gedanken sind frei (Thoughts are free), meaning that they can imprison your body but not your thoughts. Well, they are imprisoning people’s bodies for their thoughts today.

Conservative students and faculty are terrorized on campuses for their thoughts if they diverge from the approved campus Political Correctness. This happened in communist Russia, fascist Germany, communist China, and fascist Italy and it is still happening in Cuba and North Korea.

PC is destroying our culture and our freedoms, bringing down our tolerant Western culture and capitalism. The idea that wealthy billionaire athletes are kneeling for social justice in a country with the highest standard of living in the world and anarchists in the streets and in academia are shaming Caucasians for their imagined “white privilege,” is appalling.

College professors naming white families and their children and the laws of inheritance as a root cause in perpetuating white supremacy in tolerant America is an unbelievable farcical development that nobody seems willing to address.

We have become a lawless, irrational society ruled by a mob of tyrant collegiate snowflakes, aggressive professors, activist judges, the non-existent “oppressed” and tyrannical minorities who are not satisfied with tolerance, diversity, and Affirmative Action.

Communists groomed by the teachers’ and labor unions are exalting the Soviet Union as the role model of the first socialist state, with no unemployment, no illiteracy, free education from kindergarten to college, free medical care, and living in peace with one hundred different nationalities. These are lies on all fronts but most Americans, who did not pay much attention to factual history or stayed awake in a history class, would never know the truth if it slapped them in the face.

None of the countries where socialism/communism existed had full employment - people pretended to work and the state pretended to pay them. Everybody had a right to a job but the job was not worth having and it did not pay much. People were abused on the job and often killed when they were sent to do dangerous jobs without any protective gear.

Most people could read but were not able to advance to higher education; the number of places in college were limited and reserved for the elites and their children. The rest, if lucky, went to technical middle schools and high schools.

Medical care was appalling and millions died of simple surgical procedures and treatable conditions, died on the operating table, or from lack of simple drugs or vitamins due to chronic shortages. Insufficiently educated communist apparatchiks were not particularly adept at planning centralized economies even five years ahead.

The proletariat and multiple ethnicities lived in peace because the very powerful police and secret police kept an armed iron fist on all citizens, watched them 24/7 and threw them in gulags at the earliest sign of dissention or misbehavior. The police state was very adept at keeping peace through murder and hard prison time.

Individualism and the desire to succeed and invent were squashed while group-think was demanded for the collective good.

The communists and anarchists in this country make promises and set goals they cannot possibly deliver. Overcoming alleged racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia through state laws is not freedom, it is tyranny. The Communist Party USA wants to replace our Bill of Rights with a “Bill of Rights Socialism.”

Just because we are a seemingly wealthy country today with a robust GDP and still have a powerful military, will not guarantee that our foray into totalitarian socialism will be successful. It will be just another form of tyranny that appeared good in speeches and on paper.  The U.S. will not be different than any other country that has tried socialism/communism.  Additionally, America is in debt up to its collective eye-balls, $20 trillion and counting, because Congress cannot stop spending us into unpayable national debt. Even if we confiscate all the wealth ever created in this country, it will only last a mere month at the current rate of spending. And then, what will we do?

Anarchist community organizers and communist labor union leaders do not mention that the wealth that has been created in this country and the powerful military have been bought and paid for by successful capitalism, not communism or socialism. If you look at the Fabian socialist economies of Europe, their governments are bankrupt despite high taxes, and have little military to defend them and not enough police to protect citizens from the enemies within.

America under totalitarian socialism/communism will not be a society of free individuals; it will be a society akin to the college campuses where any dissention and divergent opinion will be silenced through violence and oppression using fascistic tactics.

Communism has never worked and will never work because individuals are not altruistic enough to give up all their work and their free time in the service and enslavement to other individuals who are lazy and unmotivated to work or to contribute their fair and equal share. Communism breeds a welfare- dependent society that looks up to the omnipotent government to care for them from cradle to grave. That is not freedom.

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