Bumper Stickers and Cultural Marxism

I passed by a car yesterday on I-95, plastered with anti-Trump, anti-America bumper stickers and the COEXIST non-sense that the enemies of freedom laugh at while planning on stoning gays and infidels. The largest one was a RESIST sticker affixed in the middle of her rear window which, I am positive, reduced her road visibility behind considerably while driving.

I am still not sure exactly what these young useful idiots, she was a young black woman, are resisting. Usually the resisters I encounter in the D.C. area are Caucasian, suburban housewives, and students attending the many liberal universities in D.C. and Virginia, who are utterly confused as to which bathrooms to use and cannot tell which sex they are.  

I can venture an educated guess that these lefties are resisting the presidency of one successful businessman, non-Swamp dweller, Donald Trump who dared to defeat the leftist Hillary, their role model for socialism, crime, lies, abortion, failed multiculturalism, cultural Marxism, moral relativism, sexual deviancy, and totalitarianism.

They are also resisting the successful capitalism which provided them with all the smart devices and amenities they are trashing, the electric cars they drive, whose electricity, they think, materializes from the charger via the sun.

They are bent on replacing capitalism with the global communism of U.N. Agenda 2030, driven by the faux agenda of saving the earth from the manufactured global warming which the rest of us, who are sane and rational thinkers, call climate. These useful idiots consider themselves the global citizens who are going to rule the world their own way and silence and imprison those who disagree with them.

Liberals used to be normal people and scholars with a divergent point of view which they debated civilly with other individuals but now they’ve turned into irrational angry fascists who want to police your thoughts, ideas, and your life.

A young conservative said this recently in reference to the Yuengling beer boycott by the lefties who were unhappy with the CEO’s support of President Trump.

“It actually is a ‘shocker’ because most billionaires supported Hillary and Bernie...Under socialism their wealth would be redistributed amongst others. If they’re for the poor, they’d gladly live like middle class Americans and donate all their money to the cause.

Talk about irony at its finest! The entirety of Hollywood elite is liberal yet don’t practice what they preach. They get rich off making crappy movies and music, releasing their studio-made garbage, and are stealing from the unsuspecting poor to line the pocketbooks of these mediocre ‘celebrities.’

They also partake in the same tax breaks for which they chastise Trump. They’re all living in gated mansions in L.A. while the city has one of the highest homelessness rates in the country.

I’d rather be a deplorable than be a wealthy hypocrite. You’re fooling yourself if you think liberals are for the people and that Trump is the evil one. He’s far from perfect but everyone got a tax break this year (predominantly middle class) and are no longer penalized for not signing up for the ACA garbage insurance.

It’s easy for people to sit and judge situations they know absolutely nothing about, like foreign trade tariffs or any other economic principles that evaded you in high school or college. The truth is out there to be found, but not on social media, CNN, or Fox.

Bring on the Yuengling!”

 

Jamestown Foray into a Communist Failure

William Bradford

Our U.S. socialist public education system has produced the likes of AOC who espouse socialist programs without any historical backgrounds of the consequences of the Utopian nightmare. One of my readers commented at Canada Free Press:

"Even the Christian Puritan Pilgrims found that out in their foray into socialism in 1620's early America. Their Atlantic journey and colonial establishment was to rely upon the contractual funding of backers in London. A very key component of the contract with these wealthy backers said that all colonists were to get their food, clothing, and other essentials from a common storage stock. Additionally, the colonists were to accumulate all surpluses into a warehouse for the first seven years to be evenly distributed amongst the colonists.

This socialist commune was an utter failure. Their first winter in 1620 saw over half of the Pilgrims perishing. Local natives helped them survive, but the harvests of 1621 and 1622 were dismal.
William Bradford (Governor) wrote to the backers and explained that the socialist philosophy caused lack of progress in the colony and even death and disease. Young, strong men with families resented working for the benefit of other weaker men with families without due compensation. They considered themselves as slaves for their efforts and slacked off their duties. So, the dystopian nightmare of socialism was abandoned in 1623, land was parceled out and life was good again."

My response was as follows.

The Jamestown experiment with socialism and equal shares failed miserably because some people had a better work ethic and worked harder than others. Humans are generally not that altruistic by nature to continue working hard for those who don't.

We had a wise guy say during the communist era, "we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us." People hid at work, did not do their assigned jobs properly or at all, slept on the job, drank on the job, did jobs during work hours for themselves or for outside friends with whom they bartered for other commodities, took time off for weeks on end with dishonest medical excuses from doctors whom they bribed, while receiving their measly but equal pay like those who actually worked or at least showed up to work and made a minimum effort.

Resentment against the slackers was sky high but nobody could say anything because they always punished or killed the messengers.

Communists claimed that there was no class system under communism but there was, the communist elites and their lackey informers, and the proletariat.

Washing Clothes Under Communism

Hand Soap Cheia, type superior

I remember vividly having to do laundry by hand in our heavy bathtub because it was the only container large enough to wash sheets in our tiny apartment. In summertime we used the tub to chill watermelons by running water over them and adding ice if available.

My hands and my mom's were raw from washing clothes with lye soap (see the photo). It sounds like we lived in Dickensian times but it was the same in many ways.

We had to boil enough water to do the wash and to actually boil white clothes in another cooking pot on the stove with lye soap in hopes that stains might come out and the whites will be brighter. No such thing as bleach. We used some blue dye cubes to restore the blue tint to men's shirts and our school uniforms when the shirts faded. Mom starched our shirts with a mixture of flour and water, when flour was available. But we had plenty of DDT to kill pests with in the garden and even vitriol.

Pesticide pump called Flit - it was often used to spray DDT

My grandmother had a small carved wood oval tub to wash things in by hand. The reason it was so small was because she only had so much soap and water available. She washed the sheets at the crystal clear river. I am not sure if the resident fish liked that very much.

Photo: Wikipedia

Copaie de lemn

The tub doubled as a dishwasher, face wash, and a place for newborns to be rocked in. I remember being rocked to sleep in such a tub when I was a toddler and my legs and arms were hanging over the sides, like a chunk of meat too large for the cooking pot.

In case you wonder what prompted these memories, I had to do a lot of laundry this week, no scrubbing, just a lazy American folding them and putting them away, washer and dryer did all the work, God bless the person who invented them. But, I’m old, the arthritis hurts, and climbing stairs with a laundry basket is not so much fun as it once was when the novelty of modernity was amazing. 

And we have abundant electricity and water thanks to the hard-working entrepreneurs and inventors who were allowed to be individual thinkers instead of serfs to the collective.

Exclusion and Depletion of Goods

Going global - Photo: Ileana Johnson

Keynesian economists talk about market failures such as public goods and private goods. Public goods are, in their description, “socially valuable commodities” which cannot be financed by private enterprise because the prices would not be “socially desirable.” (read that as very expensive)

It is their opinion that the “government must pay for public goods.” Examples of public goods they give include “everything from national defense to coastal lighthouses.”

Public goods are identified as any goods that cannot be depleted by the users or that can exclude people from using them. Spraying an area for mosquitoes that cause malaria and other diseases benefits everyone and so does clearing a street of snow.

“If a country provides a strong military, every citizen receives its protection, even persons who do not want it.”

Foolishly rejecting border protection (public good) from illegal and dangerous intruders at the border, some of whom may harbor illnesses of public concern, falls under the category of irrational behavior of those who reject such protection for all but lock their own homes, surround them with fences, and have guns.

Non-paying users of public goods cannot be excluded from enjoying such goods, not to mention that it would be difficult to collect fees for the benefits public goods provide. That is what Keynesian economists call “free-rider problem.”

Illegal aliens, non-paying users of public goods, enjoy our roads, public parks, frolic disrespectfully in pools designed as memorials to our WWI and WWII veterans, and send their children to public schools.

Additionally, they receive Social Security Income even though they’ve never paid into the trust fund and collect earned income tax credits for their children although they seldom pay income taxes to the IRS. They do pay sales taxes. They also have free medical care through Medicaid and Medicare, depending on age, police protection, fire protection, and can use public libraries.

Would people pay, let’s say $10,000 a year each, to support national defense?  Without government involvement, such a public good would not be provided, argue Keynesian economists. Would it not? What about mercenary soldiers?

Another misleading implication is that the supply of a public good is not depleted by an additional user and thus the marginal opportunity cost of serving an additional user is zero. It is certainly true in some instances.

But is that true if an additional illegal alien child is added to a classroom and he/she does not speak English, needs translators, specialized teachers, specialized textbooks, tutoring, religious accommodations, and are carriers of diseases such as measles, TB, hepatitis, Chagas disease, Honduran flu, just to name a few?

What about public health providers in counties’ health departments who become overwhelmed with non-paying customers who take advantage of “free” services? What about ER rooms in many hospitals, flooded with non-paying illegal alien customers?

Who pays the bill for these public goods? Does an additional user of free medical care or welfare programs cost the generous society at large zero? One could argue that by treating them for free, we prevent further spread of disease and it is thus a necessary cost to society.

Do illegal aliens who use state parks and public beaches really cost society nothing for its use? Ask the people who must clean behind their picnics on the beach or at the park. And how much damage do they really do to the environment? Does that bear no additional cost to society?

A private good is explained by Keynesian economists as depletable and excludable – depletable as in ‘used up’ when someone consumes it and excludable when someone who does not pay for it can be kept from enjoying it.

This is certainly abomination to leftist collectivism where everyone should “share” everything.  (the Latin word “communis” means “shared, common”). In the reality of collectivism, the communists pay lip service to “everyone owns everything” but nobody can lay claim to anything, not even an apple picked off a tree from a large orchard if one is hungry. There are harsh legal penalties for picking food or for taking anything from the collectivist farm or factory for one’s personal use.

Keynesian economists agree that “communities” have devoted a large proportion of government expenditures and of municipal budgets to finance public goods because they “generate substantial external benefits,” i.e. national defense, public health, police and fire protection, and research.

It appears that the sanctuary state of California is now devoting large expenditures to providing free medical care and insurance to “low income illegal aliens” (if they are in our country illegally, how do they know their income is low?) while American veterans are homeless, cannot find the promised medical care they need in VA hospitals, or are paying doctors in cash for visits, tests, and procedures because they cannot afford medical insurance premiums.

Collectivist economists view private goods with a jaundiced eye as people who cannot pay for private goods are being kept from enjoying them: a fancy yacht, a private airplane, membership in a private club, a golf club, or the country club.

There are “clubs” which exclude others for economic and non-economic motives. These “clubs” or “organizations” exclude others for reasons such as:

-          Pettiness (good ole boys’ and girls’ clubs)

-          Desire to control an issue(s) and outcome(s)

-          Greed (controlling seats on the exchange and Wall Street for example)

-          Specialty guilds for status, perceived skill, nobility, influence, and wealth

-          Vaunted academia membership and tenure for lefties

-          Economic exclusion to maintain high demand and earnings (lawyers, doctors, and others by limiting licensing)

-          Alumni and big donor clubs to sport teams

-          Influential church membership exclusions

-          World stage political exclusion (limiting membership)

-          Award winner’s member clubs

-          Peace, literature, art, film, and science prizes reserved almost exclusively for the political left

The most vociferous complainers about the existence of private goods and the dearth of public goods are lefties. Yet the left controls and “owns” the entire education system, most of the mainstream media, technology, social media, Wall Street, the justice system, the entertainment industry, most government departments, and the military industrial complex. Yet they keep whining in front of microphones and cameras that the downtrodden and illegals are abused and economically oppressed by capitalism and therefore socialism is a much better alternative. But none of them are in a hurry to move to Cuba and other socialist paradis they idolize.

I do not see any bleeding-heart lefties giving up their private goods to redress their constant complaints against capitalism.

Population Control and Social Engineering on a Vast Migratory Scale

The New American flag

Wikipedia Commons Photo

Western politicians, diplomats, heads of state, and other EU officials have agreed and signed on to U.N.’s Agenda 2030, a social engineering plan of population control; this includes every aspect of their daily lives and all business activity.

This onerous U.N. Agenda 2030, for which no “global citizens” have voted, had been deployed around the globe at the beginning of the Obama administration and had accelerated the “fundamental transformation of America” he had promised before he took office.

The massive exodus of third world populations, Muslims, Africans, Central Americans, Asians, and Middle Easterners, mostly young men, to Europe and to the United States has been socially engineered by the United Nations and by the IOM office, a U.N. affiliate, with the blessing of EU leaders, government officials at all levels, and many presidents.

When the current batch of politicians of all stripes will be long gone, a borderless America will be drastically different and unrecognizable to the present generations. The left has won the battle and the war for the hearts and minds of “progressive” America.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (NY-D) compares the situation on the U.S. southern border where migrants are housed, awaiting the disposition of their illegal crossing into the U.S., with a “concentration camp.”

The housing facilities are clean, serve three free meals a day, clean showers, TVs, pool tables, soccer, play areas, toys, clean clothes, medical care, and other amenities.  These illegal migrants have broken our laws when crossing the border and are demanding asylum.

It is an insult to Holocaust survivors to diminish the hell, torture, and suffering they endured at the hands of their Nazi captors who brought them into concentration camps by train to force them into dehumanizing work, starvation, and eventual genocide as part of Hitler’s final solution. 

To paraphrase Daniel Krygier, when the West colonized the East, it was called “imperialism.” But now that the Muslim East is colonizing the West with the blessing of the U.N.’s International Office for Migration (IOM), it is called “multiculturalism.”

If we defend Western nations and our sovereignty, we are “racists” even though border protection from enemy invasion has nothing to do with skin color. But those who “embrace despotic and xenophobic Muslim societies that oppress women, gays, and minorities,” call themselves “progressives” and “human rights champions.”

It is fine to criticize Israel, its existence, and “other free societies,” but when we criticize oppressive, totalitarian and terrorist-sponsoring societies, then we are Islamophobic and hate mongers.

The Orwellian dystopia of “1984” Eric Arthur Blair wrote about in 1949 is alive and well today. His invented diabolical social world order took 70 years to become reality.

Self-appointed global leaders have met on June 18, 2019 in Brussels to debate their planned migratory invasion which they call “forced displacement.” It is tied in very closely with their 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of Agenda 2030.

Moderator of the debates was Marta Foresti, Principal Research Fellow and Director of the Overseas Development Institute’s (ODI) Human Mobility Initiative. The ODI is self-described as the U.K.’s leading independent think tank on international development and humanitarian issues. One of the goals of the Human Mobility Initiative is to shape global migration narratives.

 “The 2030 Agenda represents the first time that migration, mobility and global inequality are interlinked under the global development framework. While debate has often focused on the needs of the most vulnerable migrants, less discussed is the decisive role that migrants and forcibly displaced populations play in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially when it comes to their contribution to the host communities.”

I am not sure how the migrants sneaking into our country illegally across the southern border or brought in by buses and planes by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), with the knowledge and blessing of our own government which gives them the money to settle these “refugees,” constitutes displacement and how they contribute to our unwilling “host” communities. These individuals become welfare recipients as soon as they are enrolled for all handouts our government can provide, to the detriment of our poor citizens and veterans who must struggle to find and pay for medical care and housing.

Organizations participating in this event include:

-          the International Organization for Migration (IOM)

-          International Rescue Committee (IRC)

-          High Commissioner of the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR)

-          the European Commission

The event is organized by:

-          the International Organization for Migration (IOM)

-          the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)

-          the International Rescue Committee (IRC)

-          the Danish Refugee Council (DRC). 

Antonio Vitorino said, “By embracing this reality, we can open up the potential for migrants to be agents of change at local, national, and global levels. Safe, orderly, and regular migration can be a powerful force to truly ensure that no one is left behind.”

How exactly is our problem to make sure that no one is left behind? Is it not the problem of their governments to provide for the welfare of their citizens? We certainly send enough humanitarian aid to many third world nations. Why must we foot the bill for all their failures on a personal and national level? Are women not accepting their submissive and second-class citizen role and do they not continue that submission even when they migrate to western and free societies?

“Women and girls in crisis are suffering a double disadvantage – because of where they live and because of their gender. It’s clear that the humanitarian sector needs to take more seriously the inequalities of power between men and women that drive unequal outcomes. The sector should try to create a double dividend – tackling the symptoms of disadvantage, as well as the power imbalances that generate them – by setting clear targets for women and girls in crisis as part of the Sustainable Development Goals and establishing a sector-wide Gender Equality Scorecard with shared metrics for success.” (David Miliband, IRC President and CEO)

It is important to note that there are few women and girls among the throng of male economic invaders. They do not seem to have suffered much in their countries as they are well dressed, fed, clean, and sporting the latest electronic gadgets, including expensive iPhones.

Kelly T. Clements, Deputy High Commissioner for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR)  made remarks about “the critical role of development actors to include refugees as important contributors to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in host countries.”

Why must we accept these 17 SDG goals which were developed mostly by U.N. representatives from third world countries interested in the redistribution of western wealth, supposedly worried about the fate of our globally warming planet which humans allegedly caused.

And speaking of population control, western nations already engage in demographic suicide through low birth rates while third world nations have much higher birthrates.

At the end of the day, no matter what euphemisms the U.N. and its affiliated NGOs create and use, the forced global migration and the forced flooding of the west with people inimical to our civilized society and to Christianity, are forms of population control. You will be socially engineered as U.N. desires, you will give up your hard-earned wealth to those less fortunate and less hard-working than you, give up your sovereignty, and you will like it.

A Rare ‘Thank You’ from a Former Student

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

I don’t often get messages from students like this because most of my former students are hard-core lefties, not American patriots who love their country.

“Did you see Tucker Carlson say ‘The DC swamp corruption fighting Trump is the same as the corruption of Ceausescu?’  If it wasn't for you I wouldn't have gotten the reference. I'm grateful I had you as a teacher. I didn't realize as a high school student why you worked yourself so hard to push us to learn to our fullest. I'm grateful for it now. Most teachers didn't work that hard.”

It is a rare moment that a former student thanks me for my teaching years when I really did care about their education and tried my hardest to deliver stellar teaching which was never recognized by my peers and administrators.  As a life-long Adjunct Professor, we always had to fight for our contracts each year because conservatives never got tenure or special privileges like the rest of the leftist brigade of teachers.

Many of my former students, too wrapped up in the leftist ideology indoctrinated into their brains full of mush since kindergarten, wore t-shirts with shocking messages or supporting appalling leftist causes. They did not understand reality and some even wore Marxist-worshipping and Che Guevara t-shirts to class because he was such a “cool” revolutionary.  

They continued to wear them to class even though I told them who he really was, how many innocents he had butchered in Castro’s regime and in South America.  I gave them lectures on Marx and what his professorial ideology did to millions around the world who became oppressed under communism and how 100 million innocents died under such ideology simply because they held divergent opinions from the ruling communist party line and dared to express them publicly or to their snitching families. My own father was killed by commies in 1989. The messages flew over their heads filled with brains that had been too brainwashed to leave room for truth and reality.

One of the Che Guevara t-shirt wearers found me on Facebook a few years back and apologized for having worn the offensive t-shirt to class even after I had told him that my Dad died at the hands of communist goons and how that piece of cloth he displayed in front of me three times a week angered and saddened me so.

One particular student I remember to this day, worshipped Hitler openly and in occasional class projects about historical figures students admired. Despite the fact that the history teacher Judy placed gruesome posters of Hitler’s Holocaust victims when they studied modern European history, I could not fathom such a fixation. He must have been just as evil in his dark heart as Hitler was. It did not surprise me when I found out that he is now a staunch Democrat and a lawyer in a small southern town.

Psychological Dependence on Communism

"This is an orchestrated, communist assault on America to destroy America's borders, to create confusion in America, to overwhelm the system politically."  - Trevor Loudon, expert on communism

Trevor Loudon

Photo: Ileana Johnson

My adult daughter asked me one day what had driven me to leave behind my family in my home country, abandoning everything I’ve ever known and loved, to come to America, knowing that I may never return to see any of my family again, and how did I cope with such uprooting psychologically.

I am not sure that I had dealt well at all, for the longest time, with the abrupt separation, the anxiety, the forced loss of my Romanian citizenship, becoming an American legal alien, with my painful displacement, and the utter despair of finding myself in a foreign land, alone. It felt as if I had gone to outer space, landed safely on another populated planet, but everything around me seemed inhospitable and strange.

How did you know, she asked, if America was truly better? What if you were lied to by the western media? How could you have trusted their description of capitalism when today the mainstream media engages in constant lies and gross distortions of the truth?

Surely not everyone in America lived so well like the Texan oil tycoons that Hollywood had portrayed on television at the time. But the truth was, I left on faith, I just “knew” deep down that even the poorest Americans lived far better than we did and had a much better life, not just an existence.

The answer to her questions was more difficult than one could fathom. But a simplistic and superficial response would be that it was a mixture of foolish teenage courage, blind trust, naïve anticipation for a better future than the hopeless one we had, and desperation.

I just “knew” in my gut that things could not possibly be any worse than they already were. After all, America was the land of opportunity and freedom if one was willing to work hard to succeed and assimilate into the new culture. Little did I know how difficult and long drawn out this assimilation would be. And it was not for the lack of trying relentlessly to fit into the American southern culture where I was treated with suspicion and mostly rejected for being a foreigner.

She asked me if I would you do it again, if I was given the opportunity to come to America of today. I am not so sure. Who would want to exchange one form of totalitarian communism for a western version of global communism?

Decades after immigrating legally, going through the tedious and expensive paperwork process of becoming a naturalized American citizen, being criticized for my patriotism and my anti-communism stance, the awful attacks I receive daily from anti-American Democrats, leftists who call themselves “progressives” and other assorted online stalkers and trolls, who dislike my message and my writing, who attack everything I stand for, who I am, my education, my career, my family, my honor, my very being, my husband, it saddens me that America has educated so many generations of self-loathing citizens who would prefer to live under the oppression and tyranny of socialism and communism. They are sure that THEY can do it better.

Today economic refugees hailing from Central America and other third world countries claim political asylum and walk across the southern border by the thousands each day and nobody stops them. The lights are on, but nobody is home.

These migrants demand that America supports them and their extended families, pay for their children’s education, welfare, health care, and housing, and give them the same rights as any American citizen. Why wait to work hard and earn anything? They are the Dreamers of our worst nightmare, the demanding global citizens with rights given to them by the United Nations to occupy and inhabit any land they wish.

Could it be possible that the current batch of immigrants, legal and illegal, fall under the rubric of those who subscribe to the notion of the devil they know and that is ALL they know, sometimes being illiterate in their own language but voting here where they don’t speak English or understand the culture and the country’s history but they know that if they do vote Democrat, the generous welfare they receive is assured?

If someone would have told me that forty years later communism, as much as I had feared it, would have followed me in America, I would have probably advised that person to go to an insane asylum. Who would want to live under such an oppressive form of government, ideology, and economy?

Yet America’s youth are gripped by the ardent desire to live under socialism and communism and they view it quite favorably, probably because they have no clue what it is and neither do their western parents and teachers.

Parents who had escaped repressive socialist and communist regimes do know differently. Some teach their children; but others think, they are teaching their offspring to hate that form of government, but subliminally they are not, and are living their lives as if they are still dwelling in those countries they’ve left. 

Take for instance my mom’s hoarding. When my children were small, she used to hide bags of potato chips and cans of coke in the Maytag dishwasher that was broken. She still thought, we would starve if she did not have a stash of food even if it was junk food.

She lived in fear of the American government knocking on our door and taking our things just like she experienced under communism when they did confiscate all her personal possessions and bank accounts.

There was no tangible evidence that the American government would take things away from her, but her frame of mind was psychologically shaped by what she saw and experienced. Such parents would certainly create false narratives in their households because they would be unable to recognize the communist indoctrination that had altered their behavior subconsciously.

I did not behave like my mom because I lived 20 years under communism and she 48. I was able to reject the status quo of communism that was forcing us to live our lives by their ideological design. Mom, on the other hand, accepted everything and anything she was told, never questioned anything, so the false narrative communism forced upon her became her reality.

Older Romanians today are so damaged psychologically that they are nostalgic for communism, for Ceausescu’s brutal regime. They were satisfied with the meager communist welfare and rations because it was a dependable constant in an otherwise destitute life. 

My older cousin said, “we got a salary every month, whether we tried hard or not, we could bribe doctors with a chicken, a pat of butter, a liter of cooking oil or fresh milk, a bar of soap, extra rationing coupons, for fake medical excuses, and we stayed home to rest for weeks on bogus medical diagnoses. The salary kept coming, and we still had a job when we returned. When we got pregnant, we stayed home for years to care for the newborn and the subsistence salary never stopped.”

There is the physical communism and the psychological communism that one experiences. People can flee the physical communism but are they able to erase their psychological and welfare dependence created by communist indoctrinators?

Why is it that some who escaped tyranny and poverty, despite living in a free nation, fail to denounce that tyranny and the poverty they had escaped from and instead criticize the free country and its citizens who took them in? Such is the case of Rep. Omar, who escaped Somalia, yet criticizes America, Christians, and those who took her in and gave her an education, freedom, and even a lawmaker’s seat in the House of Representatives.

Do oppressed/tortured people from a tyrannical society ever feel a sense of calm and welcome when they are given refuge in a freer society? Do they get better psychologically, or do they always remain in that dependent/oppressed state of mind no matter where they are? Do they tend to bite the hand that feeds them?

Are immigrant parents from communist countries somewhat subliminally responsible for their millennial children’s utopian ideas of socialism and communism? Were they raised in a manner that promoted those collectivist ideals?

Many immigrants, legal and illegal, fight very hard to leave oppression behind, yet they live in ghettos of their own making in the free country, dress in clothing that represents subjugation, away from the mainstream society, never learning English, as if they were still in their former countries or cultures.

Secrecy and hoarding of food and other necessary items like toilet paper, medicine, diapers, soap, food, become a problem. It is done to make sure that there is a steady supply in the future, just in case rationing ensues. One Romanian woman I met years ago had enough canned goods and toilet paper in her huge pantry to last her small family a decade.

My mom has been free in this country to do what she wants, when she wants, does not have to worry about her personal belongings being taken, confiscated, or seized by the government. But her years of living under socialism and communism became so oppressive psychologically that she transferred that reality to her life in America today, where she hoards everything imaginable, useful or not, in her room and the drawers of her dresser.

Rationing dictated by scarcity are alien concepts to many generations today who have never had to do without anything and who do not understand that, by any measure, Americans live the most privileged, worry-free, and want-free life than anybody else in the world. By any standards, we are wealthy beyond comparison and live a very good and advantaged life with the best healthcare in the world.

The communist country in which I was born and where I spent my formative years, has struggled with its ability to escape the metastasis of communism, a form of psychological dependence that is hard to erase even after thirty years since its declared “demise” in 1989.

There is still a steady daily diet of propaganda from the Social Democrat Party (PSD), from the socialist indoctrination centers called schools, with revisionist history written in textbooks by NGOs with generous funds from the Soros foundations, from the main stream media with the same globalist talking points, and from television programming which bombards people with false information and misdirection.

An IT person earns the same salary as a McDonald’s cashier or a LIDL grocery store chain employee while large crony EU corporations take advantage of the cheap and well-educated labor in Romania in a proverbial race to the bottom.

The elder Romanians, who are bombarded daily by false information in the news, truly believe that they are being robbed by inequality and unfair wages. Their collectivist victim mentality is still in the gutters of communism when the proletariat was told that communist wages were the only fair ones - everyone was equal, equally paid, and equally miserable. And the common enemy was capitalism and entrepreneurship.

Today people can express their opinions and complaints ad nauseam, without fear of retribution, but nobody listens to their gripes. During the Soviet style communist rule, they would have been sent to hard labor camps and prisons.

Since we are back to square one of communism, this time on a global scale, both here in America and in the former Soviet satellite countries, the simple answer to my daughter’s initial question would be, I would probably not leave my family behind again and embark upon a voyage to another world that used to value freedom and opposed communism with all its might but now embraces it with vivacity and determination because life has been so good in America, the brainwashed generations need a mindless and robotic “hope and change.”

We cannot convince a population of entitled privileged millennials that communism is not a good way to live; their teachers and parents did not do a good job of illustrating just how horrible communism was and how many millions have died under communism tortured and imprisoned for their divergent thoughts and ideas.

Young Americans may have understood the horrors of the Holocaust but not the horrors of Stalinism, Marxism, Castroism, and their sanctioned genocides such as Holodomor during the Soviet regime. Holodomor (Голодомор) means “murder by hunger.” It was a man-made famine, a genocide perpetrated by Joseph Stalin’s communist goons on the Ukrainian people in 1933. About 4.5 million people were starved to death in Holodomor.

Most teachers who have bought into the Common Core sub-standards of education, have agreed to dumb down American children’s education to conform to the globalist world view of collectivism and worship of Islam to the detriment of Christianity.

Those students who have escaped psychologically the clutches of indoctrination in public schools or their parents’ inability to teach them how tyrannical communism was, will be subjugated by other means such as:

-          social credit scores (where they can and cannot travel, whether they can keep their jobs, use social media, practice their Christian faith, and tracking their world view)

-          National I.D. cards with a strip and computer chip with private data, tracking them everywhere

-          Collectivism

-          Social Marxism

-          Moral relativism

-          Environmentalism

America will undergo a merging of labor and education, modeling the dictates of U.N. Agenda 2030, tracking a student’s attitudes, values, feelings, and beliefs. Will preferential treatment be given to those who comply? What will happen to those who won’t comply?

Ultimately it will not matter how many Americans will buy into cultural Marxism and how many will wake up and refuse to give up their country, private property, civilization, wealth, and our country’s sovereignty.

Democrats, in alliance with environmental billionaires, the Church, technocrats, and the United Nations have figured out how to stay in power in perpetuity by flooding America with illegal aliens from third world countries inimical to our interests, thus acquiring future Democrat voters and church pew occupants. A single party rule, the Democrats, will be able to confiscate all guns and dissolve our borders, eliminating our sovereign nation.

Dandelions and a Chilly June Morning

The sun is filtering morning rays through the kitchen window, bathing my plants in a gentle hue. It’s 48 F, a bit chilly for June and global warming. The Christmas cactus on my counter soaks in the light – it has three pink blooms that keep turning their heads with the sun.

A heron flies from the river and lands at the lake’s edge with a flurry of wings and pollen. Thousands of little parasols float in the air, dancing up and down, carrying a small dandelion seed. There is no breeze but the air pushes them up and down in the dance of life.  The sun’s diagonal rays are outlined and punctuated by thousands of fluffy umbrellas.

A scrawny fox I’ve never seen before is walking slowly at the edge of the woods, bushy tail moving rhythmically. I can’t tell if she is stalking a prey or just wandering back to her den not far from the narrow boardwalk, the slats squishing softly underfoot.  

We got so much rain in the last few days that the low terrain is murky and soggy. The deer must be taking a different route, I have not seen them in days. Their hooves would get stuck and unstuck in the mud, making popping sounds with each step.

A very fat racoon was waddling last night down the hill and disappeared into the thick forest behind our house. Not sure if she was pregnant or just obese – there is plenty around to eat.

The fox has finished off the snapping turtle eggs in the nest she kept digging up for at least three days. She finally realized all the eggs were gone so she stopped digging up my flower bed. I had covered the remaining eggs with a protective net but the shrewd fox dug under it.  We kept playing a cat and mouse game – I would rebury the empty shells and the fox would dig them up each time.

I don’t need to go very far to visit a zoo – I have my own in the back yard. All I have to do is pull up a chair and wait for the critters to emerge.

Being Bogart

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A Good Morning for a Prayer for our President

Our resident squirrel

I am sitting on the deck - it’s a glorious morning, 65 F and a bearable 82 percent humidity with a pleasant breeze.

There are birds chirping in the dense foliage, a woodpecker breaking the forest sounds humming with life, hammering industriously like a machine gun in the tallest tree nearby.

The resident squirrel is foraging for nuts running up and down the same tree silently.  No agitated cries this morning, her enemies are not close by.

The fox gave up digging up my flower beds for more turtle eggs, she finally realized that she ate them all during the first two excavations.

A few daring birds are splashing in the bird bath. I filled the water earlier and they dive in with gusto.

It’s a magnificent Sunday morning, time to pray for our President and his family in nature’s cathedral, surrounded by lush vegetation and birds.

The Woods Still Stand Witness to Our History

Trail to Freestone Point

Photo: Ileana Johnson, May 2019

Leesylvania’s woods and hills met me with a lush green embrace of solitude and peace and the drifting fragrant smoke of the waterfront barbecue grills. The thick forest lies on a small peninsula overlooking the Potomac and Occoquan Rivers, rich with American history, fauna and flora.

Leesylvania is now a state park with a fishing pier and a picnic area much beloved by Central American residents and their families. The laughter of children bathing in the Potomac River echoes through the thick forest. Some of the mature trees giving us a welcoming cool shade grew first as tiny saplings in the Lee family garden.

The bumpy hill leads up to the Confederate gun battery, the gravesite where Henry Lee II and his wife Lucy Grymes were buried. Closer to the bottom of the hill are the chimney remains of the former home of the Fairfax family.  Henry Fairfax purchased the property from the Lee family in 1825 and lived there until 1910.

Fairfax home chimney  

The Freestone Point, named after the porous quarried rock, juts out over the Potomac River, overlooking the current park’s fishing pier. On rainy days, tree roots ooze out mud below, washed out by a sudden deluge.

Confederate guns were placed here during the Civil War. In the early years of the war, General Robert E. Lee ordered a blockade of the Potomac River in order to cut off the Union’s access to Washington DC. The 32-pound cannons positioned here were part of the blockade that lasted almost six months.

Freestone Point drawing (Park archives)

The well-preserved northernmost battery at Freestone Point was used as a decoy while more effective batteries were placed down river at Possum Point, Cockpit Point and Evansport.

When in September 1861 Freestone Point was fired upon, Sgt. Walter Curry of the Washington Mounted Artillery of Hampton’s Legion wrote in his diary, “… as soon as the eleventh shot was fired, our Guns opened on the Lincolnite men of war which were floating majestically on the Broad Potomac.” The Confederates closed the commercial traffic on the Potomac by December. The blockade did not end until March 9, 1862.  (Leesylvania State Park Archives)

Close to the cemetery there are traces of the Alexandria and Fredericksburg Railroad tracks that used to carry necessary supplies to run a large estate growing corn and tobacco.

No trace remains today of the Lee’s ancestral home. Henry Lee II raised eight children here with his wife Lucy Grymes, including Light-Horse Harry Lee—Revolutionary War colonel, Virginia Governor, and father of Robert E. Lee. The Lees have left their imprint in the history of these lands and in the names of our modern landmarks.

Richard Lee, the original immigrant from England, was so determined to succeed in the New World that he became, in less than twenty years, an affluent fur trader, a colonel in the Virginia military, and a planter with prosperous land holdings and slaves. He owned fifteen thousand acres of land, more than any other man in the colony of Virginia. He was the colony’s attorney general and a member of the House of Burgesses.

In his old age, the “original Immigrant” returned to England, but his heirs were to come back to northern Virginia upon his death. Subsequently, generations of Lees made their homes and fortunes in Virginia after 1664.

Henry Lee II received from Henry Lee’s will in 1746 all his plantations and land in Prince William County at Freestone Point and at Neapsco (now called Neabsco, Doeg Indian for Point of Rocks) and Powell’s Creek.

The tobacco growing on the plantation was so lucrative that it was shipped to London from the wharf in Dumfries, three miles down from Freestone Point. Dumfries was the commercial hub in Prince William County. Today it remains the oldest incorporated small town in Virginia.

Henry II married in 1753 a “lowland beauty” named Lucy Grymes who is said to have been so popular with men of marrying age, she even became the object of marital aspirations of a young boy named George Washington.

Henry II cleared the land in Prince William County and built a new estate, Leesylvania (Lee’s Woods) the same year he married Lucy.  Modest by standards set by other plantations in the colony of Virginia, Leesylvania was built of brick on a stone foundation, with “double-tiered porticos wrapped around the front and rear of the building,” with twin chimneys, “two and half stories tall.” The home burned in 1797 and there is no image left of it.

Henry Lee was “the first citizen of Prince William County” in his capacity as its attorney general and militia commander. Washington asked him in 1755 to provide 100 men on horseback from Prince William County and bread provisions to “assist in the protection of our Frontiers.”

Henry Lee III monument

Lucy and Henry Lee lost their first child, a daughter. A year later, in 1756, another child was born of their union, Henry Lee III, a son who eventually became the famous Light Horse Harry (1756-1818). A statue at the foot of the rocky hill commemorates the revolutionary war hero and father of General Robert E. Lee.

View of the Occoquan River from the forested bluff

Photo: Ileana Johnson

Henry Lee III grew up riding horses, raising ponies, fencing, and practicing his marksmanship. Influential Virginians were frequent visitors at Lee’s Woods, dining and lodging there, including George Washington on his frequent trips from Mount Vernon estate to Fredericksburg and Williamsburg. (Ryan Cole, Light-Horse Harry Lee, The Rise and Fall of a Revolutionary Hero, 2019)

Henry Lee III was a cavalry commander (1776-1781), was awarded Congressional Medal in 1779, member of the Continental Congress (1786-1788), governor of Virginia (1791-1794), and member of the U.S. Congress (1799-1801).

Walking through the dense forest trails, I am in awe as my steps retrace the long-gone steps of so many famous American men and women who blazed this path through history, instrumental in the shaping of our country today.

Field of Dreams in Leesylvania State Park

Photo: Ileana Johnson