Communist “Perks” for the Proletariat

Bread Line 

Young generations today believe that communism is a much better form of government than capitalism. Their strong beliefs come from the fact that they have never studied communism in public schools and have no idea what happened to the population at large, the so-called proletariat under the oppressive regime of Bolsheviks.

All young Americans know is the indoctrination they received from their teachers who told them that in communism all their needs will be met, and they would never have to work for this faux security blanket which the government will provide.

Those who survived communism and those who were lucky enough to escape it know the heavy price they had to pay for living under the oppressive boot of the Communist Party.

What kind of “perks” did we receive from the Communist Party? For starters, they confiscated our guns by saying that we do not need them, we would be protected by the party. We just did not imagine at the time that we would be on the end of the raised guns if we did not obey their orders and laws.

The villagers’ parcels of land were confiscated without any payment and, if they had too much land, they were sent to prison and hard labor camps for being “bourgeois.” One uncle went to a lead mine for 17 years and another went to prison for 7 years. Grandpa escaped because he was smart enough to deed parcels of his land to his six children. They were still confiscated but he did not go to prison.

All jewelry, gold, coins, and cash were also confiscated; if the people tried to protest, they were summarily shot. If some had precious paintings that had been in the family for generations, their decreed “illicit” possessions were also confiscated and distributed to the homes of the upper echelon and faithful Communist Party leaders. And these fancy homes were the confiscated homes of citizens they sent to jail for having too many possessions.

Villagers were crowded near each other in order that the land be used strictly for agriculture for the benefit of the Communist Party and their scheme of hard currency exportation to the West of the best grain harvested on these lands.

One American politician who visited Romania during its communist heyday, asked from an airplane flying over Romania, upon seeing endless fields of wheat and corn, where are the farmers’ homes? He had no idea that they had all been herded into villages and their isolated farm homes destroyed. He did not get an answer, the translators accompanying him remained silent.

Another “benefit” of the proletariat was that they all received about the same pay regardless of qualifications or degrees. This forced most people, to survive, to look for other ways to make extra money:

-         Black market selling of extra food purchased legally or illegally.

-         Hoarding food even though it was punishable by law, then selling it for confiscatory prices.

-         Barter with stolen goods from the factories in which they worked; when certain individuals, who did not share what they had stolen with others, were found out, they were made harsh examples for the rest and were sent to jail as a theft deterrent. It never worked; people continued to steal to survive.

-         Bacșiș (bribes) for medical care, lab tests, x-rays, hospital stays, hotel rooms, tickets, beauty services, medicines in pharmacies, and even medical excuses to avoid going to work, longer post-natal stays at home with full pay, and many other bribes.

-         Doctors and other medical personnel received envelopes with “walking around money” which patients and their families carried to make sure that they received timely and proper medical treatment; the patients’ name was inscribed on the envelope. When my daddy died, his sister demanded the 5,000 lei which his doctor had pocketed to take better care of him. Since no medical care was given to him, she demanded the money back.

If one was not on the take, they were either stupidly poor and hungry, or honest to a fault, like my daddy. Today “bacșiș” is legal in restaurants, it is posted on the bill and represents 10 percent of the bill.

An important “privilege” of the proletariat was to stand in interminable lines for food and basics daily to find bread, dairy, and other items in short supply such as toilet paper, cooking oil, and medicine.

Each family member stood in one designated line daily. Even small children stood in lines and learned at an early age to be responsible and not leave their place.

It galls me when people in this country accuse us of “white privilege.” That was my “white privilege,” living poorly, starving, and standing in lines. Nobody gave us generous welfare. We had to be responsible for our own survival and it had nothing to do with skin color.

In summertime we had the “choice” to buy produce from peasants who grew a few extras in their home gardens. The prices were steep, and the average salary barely covered a family’s survival expenses even though natural gas and electricity prices were subsidized. We were not paid enough and never had enough food, medicine, heat, hot water, and medical care.

Like the skinny dog whose master just gave him enough food to survive from day to day, citizens living in misery became dependent on their Communist Party masters and had to chase food every day to survive.

Last, but a "perk" nevertheless, was the subsidized vacations by yourself once a year at the government-sanctioned spas where one took the mineral waters "cure." Spouses vacationed separately as only one spouse was allowed to buy the subsidized vacation ticket.

There was a minority group who were paid informants of the Communist Party; they lived well, shopped at special stores reserved for the members and were paid extra for their snitching. Shamefully, they often snitched on their own families for more crumbs. The communist life was a survival of the fittest existence.

 

 

 

Communist "Perks" at the Top

The communists at the top lived lavishly under Ceausescu’s regime of terror and oppression. But none lived as extravagantly as the dear leader himself, his wife, and their progeny whose excesses were legendary.

Starting with their clothes, the Ceausescus wore different outfits for her and suits for him every day and burned everything, including shoes, at the end of the day in case the clothing and shoes may have been poisoned.

The lavish parties were obscene and always ended with the out-of-control bad son Nicu attacking an unsuspecting waitress or young woman who happened to be in the vicinity where the party was held.

Their food and drink were expensive, brought daily by planes from abroad, including Elena’s favorite flower, the orchid.

According to Gen. Pacepa, when a fake diamond plant started industrial production in January 1978, Elena, after seeing the first samples of clear diamonds, asked for a huge jar (20 pounds) filled with synthetic diamonds for the dear leaders’ sixtieth birthday party on January 26, 1978. The jar stayed only a few days on his desk. He tired easily of his unearned and excessive abundance.

And this was nothing when compared to the demands Elena made of all Romanian institutions, including co-operative farms, to send valuable and expensive gifts to her dictator husband. She encouraged her minions to influence Western powers to send him expensive gifts as well. Ceausescu’s presents were then placed in a hurriedly opened museum in which the most valuable items were displayed in photographs.

Among the excessive gifts, Gen. Pacepa recounted, was a massive 24-karat ingot with the words, “Ceausescu and the People,” the letters carved in bas-relief. It came from the Ministry of Mines.

Solid gold ears of hybrid corn came from the Ministry of Agriculture. The people were struggling to find corn to grind it into cornmeal for their daily “mamaliga,” a corn mash substitute for bread.

A television set with a hi-fi stereo with a platinum remote control came from the Ministry of Interior.

The intelligence ministry donated a Holland & Holland custom made rifle. Ceausescu loved to “hunt” brown bears that his minions had herded close to where he was waiting to mow them down with his many guns.

While we could not find food on grocery store shelves and had to stand in interminable lines every day to survive, Ceausescu “has never received a penny of wages during his entire adult life.”

According to Gen. Pacepa, “before World War II he was an apprentice to a shoemaker, who paid him with room and board and Marxist indoctrination.”  He was proud that, as an activist, in and out of jail, he had never been paid for what he had done. “My whole life has been devoted to the World Revolution of the Proletariat,” he said. It was the same proletariat he condemned to a life of misery, suffering, and hunger every day of his existence as a dictator.

Ceausescu, upon the urging of his wife, finally set foot in a department store in October 1970 for the first time in his life. It was Macy’s in New York, on an official visit there. He never believed that the merchandise was available to all. He called American stores “window dressing” because Americans cannot buy anything without borrowing money and they slept in the streets. He genuinely believed that Macy’s was specially stocked for his visit.

To save his ill-gotten money “for a rainy day,” Ceausescu set up a secret account which Gen. Pacepa said, was code-named “TA” with cash obtained from “Operatiuni Valutare” or OV (foreign currency operations). This account, Gen. Pacepa alleged, held upwards of $400 million. Not a bad sum of “rainy day” cash for a man who was never paid a salary in his life. He allegedly spent $4 million from this account to buy his wife jewelry for her collection during trips abroad.

Ceausecu also kept secret bank accounts and safe deposit boxes in Switzerland. He used the cash generated from his secret deals to buy his children expensive automobiles and other luxuries from abroad and a custom-built, armored Mercedes for himself. He thought he needed it because most of the population hated his guts. Not that they had guns to threaten him in any way, they had been confiscated at the beginning of the Bolshevik takeover of the country. And he was constantly surrounded by entire armies.

All these obscene expenditures and theft happened while the proletariat starved and lived an extremely hard life because of his communist economic policies, lack of basic freedoms, and political oppression.

Mamaia's Stove

I recently found online a lovely photograph which brought back so many memories of my grandmother Elena. I called my maternal grandmother, mamaia, which derives from ‘mama,’ mom.

Dressed in a folk costume, an elderly lady is cooking in her dark kitchen adorned with a white stove made of mud and manure bricks. The cooking top was made of cast iron with different size openings (eyes) to accommodate various size pots. The openings had three concentric circles which could be removed one at a time with a ‘cleste’ (tongs) to fit small and large pots. The fire burned wood if the wood reserves lasted for the winter.

Mamaia bent over the stove for most of her nine decades of life. As the eldest child, her parents would have given her the task of bringing wood into the house and start the fire in the morning before all her other siblings woke up. Nothing about country life was easy. Women, men, and children toiled all day until it was too dark, and everybody had been fed, including the animals in the yard, the pig, the chicken, the geese, the rabbits, the horse, the cow, and the ducks. They all served a purpose to keep the family growing and thriving.

The second floor of the barn, accessed by a ladder, was used to store grain, wheat, and corn; an army of cats kept the mouse and rat population to a manageable size. I can still hear the mice colony running through the walls at night. No matter how many cats infested with fleas grandma amassed in the yard, they could not keep up with the fast-multiplying rodents who ate the corn and the wheat stored for winter.

Occasionally, I would get to ride with grandpa in a horse-drawn cart to the grist mill at the edge of the village. He would turn wheat and corn into flour and cornmeal. I could only hope that the grain had been separated from the mice droppings before it was ground into cornmeal and flour. Mamaia’s many cats could barely keep up eating and killing the mice colony resident in the barn loft and the walls.

As for me, it was a treat to ride on soft hay to the mill. It was not a smooth ride on the unpaved road filled with potholes created by heavy wagons. But then the twice a day bus running to the city six miles away was no smooth ride either. The rickety bus was full of Diesel engine pollution fumes and had holes in the floor sometimes, a fascinating way to watch the road underneath run over the cloddy roads.

Mamaia’s yard was seldom clear of mud and barnyard animals’ poop. We did not care much after a while. We ran barefoot and the mud and bird poop squished between our toes. It drove Mamaia nuts because many of the kids running around eventually developed worms from the contaminated bird droppings. Many died without treatment, and I lost quite a few friends except Stella. Mom brought us disgusting medicine from the city to treat the infestation.

Life was hard in the village and people worked from sun rise until sundown just to survive, providing food for their families, and to contribute their required “fair” share to the communist co-operative farm. There was, of course, no such thing as “fair” when it came to the Communist Party. Their leaders required sometimes the impossible and a pound of flesh from their subjects.

Mamaia had to sew to supplement the meager income and provisions and Tataia (maternal grandpa) repaired bicycles, tractors, flat tires, wagons, and anything villagers brought him to fix.

Water pump I photographed in 2015; it belonged to my aunt and

was almost as old as my Mamaia's

I wished I had a camera when I was a child; I would have captured Tataia in his shop, a large bench with tools, and an awning leaning from the mud brick house. I would have photographed Mamaia hand-washing clothes in a small wooden tub carved out of a large tree trunk, after getting iced water from the pump in the yard. She had to pour first a pot of hot water in order to melt the ice clogging the cast iron pipe above ground.

I do have a picture of her from 1985 with my daughter Mimi, who is almost 5 years old, pumping water for her. I posted this picture on my first book, Echoes of Communism. The pump is still there, a decorative relic, no longer connected to the underground well.

Mamaia’s iron cast top stove cooked many delicious meals in wintertime and warmed the tiny adjacent bedroom where I used to sleep; an air duct from the mud brick stove guided the hot air into the room.

Mamaia’s mud brick house has been demolished after she passed away at the age of 90. Her grandson Sorin, who inherited the property, built a modern home thanks to his earnings in Italy. Mamaia would have been happy and proud.

Strangers Stranded on Shackleford Island

We reached Harkers Island via the new curved bridge. I’ve never experienced driving on a curved bridge before and I was struggling to understand why it was built this way; was it the terrain, was it politics, finance, or all of them?

The glossy brochure told us that Harkers Island is three miles long, one mile wide, and located at the southern end of the Outer Banks with amazing views of the furious Atlantic Ocean. The island is covered with maritime forests, salt marshes, and sandy shores. I counted at least three brick churches, a mom-and-pop grill, and several modest homes built decades ago but maintained and painted by their owners to prevent them from being decayed and eaten away by the oceanic salty spray.

Harkers Island is surrounded by the Core Sound in the west and Back Sound in the east. This thin stretch of land is now connected to the mainland by the Harkers Island Bridge, completed a year ahead of schedule in December 2023, and made of carbon-fiber reinforced steel which makes it more resistant to oceanic environments.

Previously inhabited by indigenous people, European settlers arrived on Harkers Island in the 18^th century, and they built a thriving fishing and boat-building industry. During the Civil War, Harkers was even a base for Confederate troops.

A visitor center at the end of the Harkers Island Road started our visit to the Cape Lookout National Seashore. On a cloudy and drizzly day, we were the only passengers on the 25-minute ferry to Shackleford Island and Cape Lookout Island.

Shackelford Island is certainly wild and undeveloped, and visitors must prepare everything they need – water, bug repellant, snacks, trash bags to bring refuse back, and everything else they may need to survive.

There are restrooms on Cape Lookout, but nothing on Shackleford Island except a herd of wild horses and a maritime forest and marshes. May through October, we were warned, there are voracious biting insects, mosquitoes, sand gnats, chiggers, and ticks.

Cape Lookout National Seashore with the Lighthouse

Constant rip currents make swimming a dangerous activity and boating is a challenge as the sound is shallow and it is possible to run aground as we have witnessed a beached boat on Cape Lookout. The husband, wife, and kid were waiting for high tide to float their boat again out to sea.

The tiny ferry which took us to Shackleford and Cape Lookout

After we left the main visitor center located on the eastern end of Harkers Island, we boarded the ferry. As we approached Shackleford Island, we saw two human figures waiting on the beach and they looked absolutely stranded and lost. Through the haze and drizzling rain, they looked marooned; the tune of Gilligan’s Island was dancing in my head. The man was clutching an expensive camera around his neck, and she had a smaller camera. 

Once aboard, the man explained meekly that they had hiked for 45 minutes across the island in search of wild horses, and they found four and they took pictures. I am not sure I would have been so brave to walk so far on an uninhabited island for a few pictures on a very cloudy and misty day.

Photo: Tripadvisor wild horses on Shackleford Island

Shackleford Banks is home to more than 100 wild horses whose behavior is highly unpredictable. They live in marshes on the island, and they have survived alone for more than 400 years. In recent times, they are monitored by the National Park Service which has partnered with the Foundation for Shackleford Horses, Inc.

Just like the herd on Corolla Island in the north, if a horse is treated by a vet for serious injuries when the stallions fight over a harem, they cannot be returned to the herd, they are domesticated and moved to a special ranch which cares for them for the rest of their lives.

Shackleford Banks was once attached to Cape Lookout. A 1780 map shows it connected to Cape Lookout and Portsmouth, but hurricanes and other storms separated it from Cape Lookout by Barden Inlet.

Shackleford is 9-miles long and less than a mile wide. The island has the largest maritime forest, long stretches of saltmarsh, and beautiful white sandy beaches on the southwest shore.

Historical Portsmouth Village was planned and laid out in 1753. According to the Archives, for more than a hundred years, it was the busiest seaport in North Carolina. Storms, hurricanes, and the endless motion of the sea changed the landscape over time and in 1846 a hurricane opened a new, deeper inlet at Hatteras and shipping routes shifted north.

The last male resident of Portsmouth was Henry Pigott who died on Ocracoke in the care of friends. Afterwards, the last two elderly residents, Marion Babb, and Elma Dixon, relocated to the mainland shortly thereafter in 1971. They had been residents of Portsmouth Village for decades.

The village is now empty and the wind howls through its loneliness devoid of the laughter of children and the presence of humans, who had lovingly tended to its existence.

Returning from Shackleford Island and Cape Lookout, the horizon looks darker, bleaker, and more ominous; the choppy waves have picked up. We are tired and watch the angry ocean in silence and awe. Despite rain jackets, we are soaked by the drizzly rain and the splashing of the waves cresting over the side of the ferry but are happy to have experienced for a moment in time such constantly shifting beauty.

The couple who was temporarily lost on Shackleford, are clutching their cameras with the precious pictures of the four wild horses they went to so much trouble to find. It was not a Gilligan’s Island adventure, but they were lost for sure.

 

 

 

 

Outer Banks Adventure

Our Outer Banks adventure started in Kitty Hawk, NC. OBX, which is what most people call the Outer Banks, is a 200 mile stretch of barrier islands off the coast of southeastern Virginia and North Carolina. This magnificent string of island pearls separates Currituck Sound, Albemarle Sound, and Pamlico Sound from the Atlantic Ocean which is rough and unpredictable on any day and the water temperature is 58-degree Fahrenheit in May.

Our journeys are never just vacations, they are adventures of discovery, finding amazing jewels of geography, places of wonder, nature, reflection, introspection, memorials, forts, and our country’s rich history. We seek memories that enrich our souls, eyes, and minds.

We experienced the Atlantic Ocean’s fury enough to build a healthy fear and respect for the watery giant. My daughter and I were covered in black silt by the rough waves and my husband was picked up by a riptide and slammed onto the ocean floor, suffering cuts, abrasions, and bruises on his forehead and right shoulder. When he emerged from the bottom, he was bleeding from his injuries but lucky to be alive.

The beaches are lovely, with endless dunes covered in grasses, colorful blanket flowers, and sand crabs scurrying across into their hiding holes, but the water is so rough that only experienced surfers dare to enter the waves. Hundreds of skate egg black casings washed up on the yellow sand each morning. The Atlantic Ocean is quite different from the placid Gulf of Mexico in Florida with its sugary crystal white sand and emerald, green waters.

Cape Hatteras National Seashore represents the area’s rich biodiversity. Trees, shrubland, and beach grasses keep the ecosystem alive. Birds, turtles, rabbits, and other creatures inhabit the islands. Shackleford is home to a herd of wild horses just like further north on Corolla Island. I am not sure if the horses are from the same group that washed or swam ashore from the Spanish galleon five hundred years ago. Wherever they came from, they thrive here on their own just like on Corolla Island. There are no homes on Shackelford but there are homes behind the dunes on Corolla. Humans and wild horses share adjacent spaces and the beach without any problems.

Roanoke Island is famous as the site of the early English settlement of the United States where the Roanoke Colony vanished in 1587, including the first English subject born on the island, Virginia Dare, which lent her name to the Dare County and many other geographical points of interest. I am sad to say that the infamous Roanoke Colony which was left behind for three years without supplies and protection before the governor returned, is still missing.

Roanoke Botanical Gardens

Roanoke Island displays a monument on Fort Raleigh, First Light of Freedom, marking the existence of the Freedmen’s Colony. After the Union forces occupied the island in 1862, Roanoke Island became a haven for black families from the region and a Freedmen’s Colony was established there during the war.

The Outer Banks area has a darker name, the Graveyard of the Atlantic, on account of the more than 600 shipwrecks, victims of shallow sandbars, dangerous storms, shoals, and war, who lost their cargo and crew in the rough seas.

A shoal is a ridge, a bank, or a bar made up of sand or other shifting material, close to the surface or above it, which can create a dangerous situation for navigation and thus sink many ships loaded with cargo. One such cargo was, 500 years ago, released onto the ocean and it drifted or swam to the shore. Since then, wild Spanish horses make Corolla Island’s beaches and marshes their home.

The turbulent ocean off Cape Hatteras sank many seafarers who risked these dangerous shoals to take advantage of the north- or south-flowing currents nearby. Hurricanes drove many ships aground. Other ships were lost in wars. The waters in this area were also called Torpedo Junction during WWII when German subs sank many Allied tankers and cargo ships. So many lives were claimed by the rough waters in this area!

The day we took the ferry from Cape Hatteras to Cape Lookout and Shackleford Islands, it was cloudy, chilly, and drizzly. We were the only passengers going to the islands, but several locals returned with us at dusk, on the last ferry ride of the day. We found the two islands peaceful; Shackleford looked deserted and lonely save for the wild horse herd; Cape Lookout Island had a tropical feel of a castaway island with a strange silence and utter loneliness sort of way even though there was evidence everywhere of human care and maintenance.

Kitty Hawk Memorial on the hill

The famous photographer immortalized on the spot 

Kitty Hawk was the place where the Wright brothers first took flight in their plane on December 17, 1903. A monument high on the hill commemorates their achievement and the actual location of the plane is adorned by a life-size flying machine and a statue of the witnesses and of John Daniels who happened to take the perfect picture of the lift-off. 

On the field of Kill Devil Hills, they mounted an engine on a 40-foot, 605-pound flyer with double tails and elevators. During the four tries, the brothers took turns at the controls. With Orville at the controls, on the first try, the flyer was aloft for 120 feet but, on the fourth try, with Wilbur at the controls, it traveled an impressive 852 feet in 59 seconds. What a remarkable feat to fly like the birds!

Cape Lookout Beach

The Outer Banks are made up of islands, shoals, and spits from Ocracoke Island northward. The beaches south of Cape Lookout are called the Southern Outer Banks. Our adventure ended at Cape Lookout on a cloudy day, with intermittent raindrops on the island and over the ocean.

Shackelford Island

These Outer Banks islands formed millions of years ago from sand dunes, after the melting of the Earth’s glaciers without any help from humans or their man-made global warming. They separate the Atlantic Ocean from the mainland North Carolina and protect the shores from raging storms and damaging waves.

The largest islands are Bodie Island (now a peninsula due to tropical storms and hurricanes which closed inlets that had formerly separated it from the Currituck banks), Pea Island, Hatteras Island, Ocracoke Island, Portsmouth Island, and the Core Banks. Over time, the number of islands and inlets changed due to closing or opening of inlets during violent storms, the gradual shifting of sands called beach evolution.

Mom and her philly

Corolla swamps where the wild horse herd lives

Majestic black stallion

Harem enjoying the beach on Corolla

A harem walking single file on the beach on Corolla

We did not start in Sandbridge in Virginia Beach where it is said that the line of the Outer Banks starts, we started instead in Kitty Hawk, NC. “Road access to the northern Outer Banks is cut off between Sandbridge and Corolla, North Carolina, with communities such as Carova Beach accessible only by four-wheel drive vehicles” like the Hummer which took us on Corolla Island safari to see the Spanish wild horses which roam the marshes and the beaches unafraid of humans, stallions tending to their harems.

The herd has about 126 wild horses which survive on their own without human intervention, feeding off the oat grasses. They are smaller than domesticated horses and arrived on this island from the Spanish galleons which wrecked on the shoals five hundred years ago. Occasionally stallions are found injured from fighting each other and, if necessary, the vets will intervene to save the injured animals, but they are never returned to their previous habitat after being cared for by humans.

People disagree as to where the Outer Banks end. Most agree that the Outer Banks include Cape Hatteras, Cape Lookout, and Cape Fear. Others limit it to Cape Hatteras and Cape Lookout with coastal areas in four counties, Currituck, Dare, Hyde, and Carteret. “Some authors exclude Carteret County’s Bogue Banks; others exclude the county entirely.”

The Outer Banks are constantly shifting and suffering erosion by storms as there are no coral reefs to anchor them to the mainland. One example was Hatteras Island which was cut in half by Hurricane Isabel in 2003 by a 2,000 feet wide and 15 feet deep channel running through Hatteras Village. Sand dredging repaired the damage and, in 2011, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers repaired a similar disaster.

There are three main highways that enable visitors to reach the Outer Banks: NC 12, US 158, and US 64. NC 615 is the main route along Knotts Island in the extreme north where it connects only to Virginia by land.

Three state highway bridges connect the Outer Banks to the mainland:

-    1. The Wright Memorial Bridge, the oldest built in 1930 (US 158 between Point Harbor and Kitty Hawk)

-    2. William B. Umstead Bridge, second oldest built in 1957 (US 64 between Manns Harbor and the mainland and Manteo on Roanoke Island)

-    3. Virginia Dare Memorial Bridge, newest, finished in 2002 (US 64 Bypass between Manns Harbor and Roanoke Island between Manteo and Wanchese)

Roanoke Island and Nags Head are connected by US 64 and the Melvin R. Daniels Bridge. All three main highways of the Outer Banks (NC 12, US 158, and US 64) meet at Whalebone Junction.

Bald cypress in Duck

Our favorite tourist destination was the village of Duck with its quaint and diminutive feel of old-world charm. The Duck Town Park stretches for 11 acres of trails through maritime forest, willow swamp, open green spaces, sound side views, and access to the Duck Boardwalk. The six-mile-long Duck Trail traverses the entire length of town.

As we drove through village after village, ghost forests marked the landscape now and then, evidence of previously coastal forests lost to repeated exposure to saltwater due to hurricanes and drought. They had turned into a salt marsh habitat with dead tree trunks and stumps, an eerie sight found throughout Down East Carteret County and many low-lying NC shorelines.

Fort Macon is an example of the need for coastal defense. The region around Beaufort was very vulnerable to attacks and especially Beaufort Harbor, North Carolina’s only major deep-water ocean port. Blackbeard and many other pirates passed through Beaufort Inlet at will. Beaufort boat repair displayed ballast stones that were recovered from Queen Anne’s Revenge, Blackbeard’s most important ship which sank off the coast.

The war of 1812 showed the weaknesses of existing coastal defenses and the need for a fort in this area. Fort Macon was designed by Brig. Gen. Simon Bernard and built by the U.S. Corps of Engineers in 1826-1834 for a cost of $463,790 to guard Beaufort Inlet and Beaufort Harbor. According to the Archives, Fort Macon only had one ordnance sergeant acting as caretaker stationed by the Army at the fort.

Driving back to Virginia, we came upon the small waterfront town of Plymouth on the Roanoke. Founded in 1787, this tiny place that time forgot boasts a black bear festival every first Saturday in June and 4 bears per square mile. We drove for 45 minutes through unpaved roads with signs to not disturb the bears and all we saw was a couple of bear scats. The bears were asleep in the trees dotting the landscape between crop fields. It is true that Coastal NC has the world’s largest black bears, and the Albemarle/Pamlico Peninsula has the highest black bear density in the world, but we did not see any bears. Some beautiful specimens were taxidermized in the Bear-Ology Black Bear Museum in Plymouth. The glossy brochure welcomed us to Bear-olina. But the musty smell of the museum, however interesting, chased me away.

Cape Lookout Island Lighthouse

Our week-long remarkable adventure the length of beautiful NC barrier islands (OBX) came to an end, with regrets of places we missed like Portsmouth Village and Ocracoke. Ocracoke required a two-hour ferry ride one way, and the water was too rough to undertake such a long oceanic ride.

Discovering Social and Racial Justice at the History Colorado Center in Denver

On a snowy day in Denver last week, we drove to the History Colorado Center to learn more about the history of this magnificent prairie town encircled by the majestic Rocky Mountains. The 14s peaks were visible in the distance snow-capped and hard to access by ordinary people. They call them 14s because they reach to the sky upwards of 14,000 feet, too high to ski and too high for ordinary people to climb.

History Colorado Center is housed in the $111 million building finished and dedicated on 28 April 2012, replacing its predecessor, the Colorado History Museum which closed in 2010. The former Colorado Historical Society, rebranded as History Colorado, administers the center.

The modern 4-story building is adorned in the exterior right front corner with a life-size statue of a buffalo. The atrium vaults four stories in a rectangular shape with different themed exhibits.

Past the entrance and the museum store is the large statue of a Union soldier, marked here and there by flecks of spray paint, having rested too high on its pedestal for the BLM vandals to destroy it.

The museum plaque accompanying the statue explains, “This monument stood in front of the State Capitol until it was toppled in June 2020 during protests for Black lives.” This statue was installed in 1909 to memorialize Colorado’s role in the Civil War.

The museum’s description of this statue is that “it holds multiple meanings for viewers today: a tribute to those who’ve served and sacrificed in the nation’s armed forces, a reminder of atrocities committed against indigenous peoples, a symbol of white supremacy and injustice, a casualty of destructive lawlessness, and more.”

It appeared that an attempt had been made by the curators to clean the paint before it was placed there. There is a photograph of the spray-painted pedestal the statue once stood atop with an explanation for its location and fate.

“After the statue fell, when some people said, ‘monuments like these belong in a museum,’ we decided to take them up on the suggestion and give everyone an opportunity to discuss what the monument means to them.”

Never mind that the statue did not fall by itself, it was brought down by a violent BLM mob while the authorities stood by and allowed it to happen.

A quick reminder that Denver is a sanctuary city for illegal aliens and Colorado is a highly Democrat blue state with Marxist red blood flowing through its citizens’ veins.

The museum is a hodge-podge collection of artifacts, chock full of political posters and real historical statements and Marxist opinions, socialists, social justice and racial justice propaganda, interspersed with bits of interesting history such as mining, the hard and lonely life in the prairie, the first school in Colorado, and Dust Bowl facts as it affected the state.

Some of the posters in the museum

An entire floor is dedicated to social justice, racial justice, and “white supremacy” opinions by various leftist groups and museum curators who focused on the evils of “white supremacy,” a made-up construct by radical leftists with no intent of taking responsibility for their poor choices in life. The leading motif of the entire floor is that white people are bad and everybody else is good.

I learned sobering facts about the Dust Bowl which affected Colorado prairie residents during the 1930-1936 period. A particular room gave visitors a sense of what people must have encountered daily, the howling wind, the lung clogging by fine dust which settled everywhere inside and outside, in some places several feet deep, and inside on everything families owned and their bodies.

One section on the first floor was dedicated to the town of Keota, Colorado, established in 1880. It was the “iconic homesteading mecca that faced drought and famine but was also filled with kindness and community.” The resilience of Coloradoans was remarkable. The highlight of this floor’s exhibits were the school and the general store with photographs of descendants of the original residents alive today.

Artifacts, archives, and photographs are exhibited in the Stephen H. Hart Library and Research Center. The collection is comprised of maps, clothing, photos from the 1850s, teapots, newspapers, marriage and death records, political posters, etc.

Mining and the hard life of miners is a most interesting feature of the museum center. Photographs of former miners from different times, their daily lives, descriptions and quotes from real people, how gold and silver ore were exploited, how the mountain was blasted, and how the buckets to retrieve said ores from the mines gave birth to the ski lifts and gondolas of today.

Several areas contained a lot of political propaganda about social and racial justice. All the nine principles of propaganda were used:

1.     The big lie was always chosen over the small lie because people tend to believe it more readily.

2.     The selling points were focused on two – social and racial justice which demanded that the land be returned to its rightful owners, the indigenous peoples and the Mexicans.

3.     The social and racial justice mantra was repeated so much that any visitors had no choice but to believe both.

4.     Blame was fully placed on white people who were debased, defamed, and dehumanized for their alleged wrongful deeds.

5.     Exhibits appealed to emotion only.

6.     Issues presented were not grey, they were life/death, good/evil, freedom/slavery, love/hate.

7.    Posters with slogans had no literal meaning, they appealed to strong emotions.

8.     Pandering ignored intellectual and reasonable arguments; statements had strong emotional tones.

9.     Moral limits were ignored in order to make an useful case for the construct of “white supremacy.”