Gray, Concrete Gray, and More Depressing Gray

In 2020 I was looking to purchase a new SUV and, repeatedly, the dealers stocked only black, silver, and gray.

I attributed at the time the lack of color and choices to the reduced inventories and manufacturing shortages due to the Covid 2019 pandemic Necessary chips for cars were in short supply. It would be four years before I could buy my desired red color but not necessarily the make and model I wanted.

Perhaps car manufacturers want to move cars quicker and thus the bland choices of paint colors.

Perhaps Minimalism has blanketed the world, and we are just now noticing the trend. Maybe the many shades of gray indicate 21^st century sophistication.

Healthy subjects in a study conducted by the University of Manchester in 2010 chose yellow as the color that governed their mood. Anxious and depressed subjects participating in the study chose the color gray because it represented “a dark state of mind, a colorless and monotonous life, gloom, misery or disinterest in life.” Depressed people “tend to describe life as ‘monochromatic’ or as having ‘lost its color.’

Then I started seeing a lack of color in department stores and furniture upholstery – offerings were grey, beige, black, and greyer. The furniture, whether plastic or wood, was gray.

Accessories were gray, towels were gray, shoes and tennis shoes were gray, plates, napkins, carpets, backpacks, coolers, tapestries, plastic, and glassware were all gray. There was so much gray to give a survivor of communism a permanent headache and depression. The color gray was even declared the “color of the decade.”

It was apparent to me that corporate globalists have decided in the last few years to transform the face of our colorful society into a drab and communist-looking tapestry.

The buildings’ exterior, the depressing colors, the lack of colors and offerings in stores, the promotion of gray, ash, concrete gray, puke gray, drab gray, beige-gray, petroleum gray, black, white, and brown, became a bothersome uniformity which I recognized from my previous twenty years lived under communism.

Why would communism pick such drab, dark, dull, and uninspired colors? Because they wanted to keep the population under their control, oppressed, sad, and depressed. Everything became a soul-less gray and darker gray, light gray, medium gray, with barely lit train stations and stores as if to conceal the stains of gray misery.

After the lockdowns many public buildings, restaurants, fast food chains, and even apartment complexes and homes had undergone a similar transformation to dark gray, various shades of gray, black, brown, and beige. Maybe paint was only offered in gray and it was cheap?

Fast food buildings removed large windows and added small, prison-like windows, and the previously happy colors and signs disappeared. The choices of towels, furniture, cars, clothes, and other products have narrowed to the same basic hues of gray, black, beige, and brown. People excused this trend as minimalism. I knew it as Bauhaus utilitarian ugly.

Granted that lighter colors are less showy and easier to match more tastes, then why the previous opulence of colors and choices? Was it that the well-heeled wanted simpler and minimalist lines to show off their good taste? There is no denying that something painted in less showy colors sells much easier and quicker.

Austrian architect Adolf Loos said in his 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime” that “evolved people gravitated toward clean lines and plain surfaces,” unornamented and clutter-free.

Le Corbusier, the “father” of modern architecture, wrote that “color is suited to simple races, peasants, and savages.”  Well-to-do Americans call those who like bright colors, “Lilly Pulitzer people.” The Lilly clothing line is famous for bright hues of pink, blue, yellow, orange, and green.

The Bauhaus was a German art school which existed between 1919 and 1933. Its vision of mass production and function was adopted by all former Iron Curtain countries in Europe; they started churning out ugly concrete block apartments where the helpless populations were herded into from their former homes and farms which the Communist Party had confiscated. An occasional crumbling concrete piece looked like a loose tooth hanging from its dirty gray façade.

Walter Gropius’s (1883-1969) vision from Weimar spread into modern design, modernist architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography. The Bauhaus school was closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi regime who considered it “a center of communist intellectualism.”

Bauhaus spread internationally to the United States and to Tel Aviv via Jewish Bauhaus architect immigrants. According to sources, “The White City of Tel Aviv has the highest concentration of Bauhaus architecture in the world.”

As Bauhaus spread increasingly across the world, selected and pushed by globalist corporate controllers, it is no surprise that the color chosen for this decade is gray and the style is Bauhaus utilitarian.

When I visited my favorite department store which was always decorated with red, white, and green way before the Christmas season, decorations displayed a gray table with gray chairs, gray plates, black glasses, and white napkin holders. One solitaire painting of a red bush surrounded by green background was overlooking the funereal décor.

This is not just about depressing the population with ugly buildings, cars, and shades of gray, it is about the global transformation of the west into a socialist/communist society to better control the naïve population in every way. And the quickest way will be via digital currency sold as convenience.

The Bright Colors of Freedom

Nature's palette Wikipedia

The shelves are bursting at the seams with colorful merchandise. Spring is here and there is something new for everyone’s budget, no lines anywhere. I picked my favorite color, teal, and took it to the cash register. The young man, a Millennial no doubt, smiled and casually asked me if I liked bright colors.

How could I explain in a sentence or two to this child of abundance, who’s never suffered for anything in his life, who always finds stores full of delicious food and beautifully crafted merchandise from around the world, that life has not always been the same for millions and millions around the world, and it can turn ugly here too if people made bad political choices? Would this young man truly understand poverty and exploitation of the human body and spirit by a handful of elites?

I explained briefly that, to this day, I own very little navy, black, brown, or grey, the traditional colors offered to us as part of school uniforms for twelve years and as very limited choices in stores for everyday clothes.

Every family member had one outfit which he/she wore every day for the entire week and, it was laundered on Sunday if water was running that day and if we could find detergent or Cheia soap, an unpleasant-smelling and caustic soap that lasted a while and turned our hands red and cracking from the hand-scrubbing. If we were lucky, we had hot water on Saturdays for our weekly luxurious baths after hunting for days for bath soap and shampoo, eventually buying them on the black market at ten times the price.

He would not understand how much people were so starved for color, in the granite dirty grey environment built by the communist regime; he would not comprehend that people picked colorful materials and made dresses that seldom matched anything else in their scant wardrobe. It was a splash of color, of daring to live and enjoy life vicariously through brightness, the light and color that was denied and missing in our lives, suffocated by the communist regime and its totalitarian control over every aspect of our existence.

We envied our neighbors Hungary and Bulgaria, even the Russians for their more abundant lives. If we were lucky to get a permit to travel there, we felt like we arrived in the land of elegance and plenty, that’s how bad we lived by comparison.  We bought color at random, pairing pink with red, purple with green, and other seemingly clashing colors. It’s not that we did not know the fine art of matching; we just wanted to have the entire color palette in our lives, not just drabness.

And I was told that, after I left in 1978, the Ceausescu regime turned so much more brutal that the 1980s were described by Dennis Deletant as a time period when Romania had been reduced “to an animal state, concerned only with the problems of day-to-day survival.”

The ideological repression was so bad that, one of my cousins, who was in line at Otopeni Airport to board a plane for a crew job in the Middle East, with passport, visa, and plane ticket in hand, was pulled minutes before boarding and told that he could not go because he had a cousin in America – guilty by association and by birth with me, the “big capitalist.”

I have a bright wardrobe today that expresses my carefree spirit. I can go for a week or so and not wear the same outfit twice. That is because I can find a job, the pay is competitive based on qualifications and skill, not a flat low and equal pay as we used to have under communism, and there is competition for goods and services that makes supply meet the demand from consumers, and prices are relatively low.

This young man would not understand the night and day difference between my life under socialism and my life today under a relatively free market economy; most Millennials are economically illiterate. They just repeat ignorant slogans they’ve been taught in school by their socialist professors with an agenda, with no reflection on truth and reality whatsoever.

I guess I am not a wardrobe minimalist and will never be. Teal, pink, bright green, bright colors, light, and sunshine will always be the center of my life. When you spend the first twenty years of your life in drab grey and dirty surroundings, pollution, and darkness of spirit, you want to live in Floridian colors for the rest of your life, in bright hues and in free spirit, basking in the sun, white sand, salty ocean surf, and the scent of freedom.