Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015 ASTRA |
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 11th
and 12th 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.