For Your Own Safety

As I watched the armed soldiers of the National Guard patrol the New York City’s subway system, soldiers that could demand to rifle through someone’s purse or backpacks, for their own safety, mind you, I am reminded of the fact that New Yorkers strongly believe in gun control and have demanded that the police be defunded. Now that crime is escalating to a seeming point of no return, New Yorkers are changing their tunes and want more police protection.

New Yorkers are willing to give their freedom to armed soldiers, for their own protection. Is this another resigned submission to molestation, just like passengers have given up all their freedoms and rights to the TSA in order to board a plane? It is sad to see TSA employees groping children, handicapped people, and grandmas with walkers and canes for “their own safety.”

A friend who has not flown for many years until recently and had no idea how extensive the TSA body searches were, was outraged and felt violated when the TSA agents touched all her private parts. When she protested, she was told repeatedly that it was for her own safety. When this 70-year-old grandma’s protests almost got her arrested for no reason other than asking questions, she complied to the invasive groping.

I grew up under communism with armed soldiers and armed police surrounding us everywhere we went. We were never molested publicly like Americans are at airports but we had to show the content of our purses upon exiting grocery stores.  Clothing stores were exempted, I assumed because we could never reach them, they were placed behind counters.

It was ridiculous that women had to show the contents of their purses for three reasons. Few women owned purses, they were small, and could barely hold anything other than a handkerchief. Additionally, grocery stores also stored food behind tall counters and food was only given to customers after they paid for their purchases and showed the clerk their receipt.  If you did not have a receipt stamped “paid,” then no merchandise was given to you.

If you exited the store with your purse, that meant that you purchased nothing. Shopping bags were made of durable jute string and expanded into a larger fishing net with handles in which all women carried shopping items.

In clothing stores, there were no dressing rooms, so it was impossible to steal anything by walking out with it. You had to know your exact size, make sure of what you wanted to purchase because, once in your possession, it was yours to keep and was never returnable even if it did not fit or was damaged.

When the police checked our identification passes (papers, please) and purses, they exercised their power to humiliate, harass, and oppress us at will, showing us that the commies were in control, and we had no choice but to comply and obey.

Theft actually occurred in two places: a. at work and b. in people’s homes.

In order to survive the equally small wages paid to everyone by the police state, regardless of education and training, (we pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us) people took bribes and stole items from their work and bartered them with others for things they needed or sold them on the black market in order to earn additional money.  

Doctors and medical personnel accepted bribes to give some patients priority, quicker, or better service. The bribes came in the form of hard-to-find food, toiletries, cosmetics, soaps, needed medicines such as aspirin or cortisone shots, and an envelope with money called “walking around money.”  

If you did not have walking around money, you wasted your time going to see the socialist medicine doctor because you would wait forever. They would put you in the hospital, but they had no resources to treat you with or test you with. You got a chicken wire metal frame bed, a stained mattress, you had to bring your own sheets and towels and you had to wait in the 20-bed ward for days before a resident might see you.

Factory workers stole parts or finished products, traded services for others, stole bottles of wine to trade for sugar, cooking oil, rice, or meat; if they were truckers, siphoned milk or gasoline out of their big delivery trucks and bartered their loot with others. When someone was caught stealing, everyone who bought things or traded with him/her paid a fine or went to jail.

Even some family members stole from each other sometimes. Those in the country who had more and better food, were jealous of those who lived in the city and had a bathtub and indoor plumbing but empty pantries and starving.

The envy was real even though cold water was cut off sometimes all day, and, if we were lucky, hot water flowed two hours a day, usually when people were asleep.  

But the biggest thieves were the Communist Party high ranking members and their lackeys who confiscated the land, homes, savings, and wealth from citizens they deemed bourgeois, after throwing them in prison. Their only crimes were that they had accumulated wealth through hard work and did not subscribe to the Marxist ideology. People I knew and one great-uncle spent long years in prison for being anti-communists. One friend was sentenced to 17 years in a lead mine labor camp for inheriting from his parents a small hotel in a mountain resort.

Many people like my dad would not take anything from work that he had not earned and paid for.  He was a very hard-working, honorable, and honest man who deserved a much better life than the miserable existence and struggle under the communist oppression that ended his life much too early.