"Democracy Has Gone to Your Head"

Mrs. Avram was my high school teacher, a smart and beautiful Jewish woman who did the best she could to impart lessons of history to the children of mostly proletarians, all made equally poor, miserable, and oppressed by the communist regime.

She tip-toed carefully in our class in selecting which topics to emphasize and which to leave unspoken because she knew, the fear of being ratted out to the party apparatchiks and being sent to a gulag was very real.

She never discussed democracy per se, as the definition would have not clearly explained what was going on in the socialist republic ruled by the tyrannical Communist Party which made rules, laws, and decrees as they saw fit, twisting the law to their needs and ends, by planting fear among the masses with the possibility of arrest and imprisonment for non-compliance to their agenda.

Our history lessons contained half or partial truths, manufactured events, and glorifications of the Communist Party and its most worshipped leaders. We were required to memorize dates and people lionized by the party as the revolutionaries who brought about change and helped install the communist dictatorship we were forced to endure.

History books never called the dear leader’s reign a dictatorship and our country was not a democracy; it was instead a socialist republic. The dictator was glorified in every medium as the father of the nation and his wife the mother of every child alive. The children belonged to her and to the state.

To impress whoever was listening, Mrs. Avram made sure that her star students in each class would read verbatim special paragraphs from the history books, textbooks written in language approved and supervised by the Communist Party activists and librarians working for and informing the Security Police.

Students were not encouraged to ask questions during class or any other time. We were to write down everything the teacher said ad litteram and we were to repeat her statements exactly if asked orally or if we had to write essays for “teza,” a semester exam.

I do not know why, but one day I decided to ask her a poignant question, and it took her by surprise. As she did not have a previously approved paragraph to recite back to me, she said the only thing that she could think of, that would not get her in trouble, Ileana, democracy has gone to your head.

Did she mean that I had gone too far with my question, it was too deep for an actual classroom discussion that had not been approved by the Ministry of Education, did she not want to get in trouble by straying from the exact pre-planned lesson, or was it a hot potato that she did not want to touch?

She never answered my question, leaving me to wonder to this day what she meant exactly or how she defined “democracy.” Did she mean demos, Greek for people, and kratos, Greek for power, power to the people? Did she mean the principles of social equality?

Surely, she knew that we were not socially equal by any stretch of imagination as we lived in a state of communist dictatorship and there were two classes, one of communists and their informers favored by the party, and the poor and subjugated proletariat. Intellectuals like her were skirting a narrow ledge of peaceful co-existence to be left alone by those terrorizing the rest of us.

I never got a chance to ask her personally or see her again on my visits to Romania after the Ceausescu tyrannical regime was no longer in power. As a Jewish person, her relatives from Israel had bought her freedom with a $5,000 fee Ceausescu’s government levied on each Jewish person whose relatives had the money to buy relatives’ departure to Israel.

After 1990, people had better lives, more food, more light, religious freedom, mobility, travel, voting, and could speak their minds freely. But the globalists in power no longer listen or care about what people have to say; politicians beholden to the highest bidder do whatever their handlers order them to do. Politicians have a price and do not listen to their voters.