Assimilate into American Culture, Important for Our Survival

Photo: Ileana Johnson

When I lived in several towns in rural Mississippi, we had to drive 59-67 miles, about an hour, to get to the nearest decent-sized mall or grocery store, or an hour to two hours to Alabama, to shop in a large mall or to see a medical specialist in Birmingham. They have since built larger local hospitals in rural MS.

Then super Walmart came to town and made grocery shopping much easier. A Costco and Sam’s Club were added an hour away. But driving was a breeze – the highways were good, well-marked with fluorescent paint for night and inclement weather driving, and there was no congestion, or rush hours except at Christmas. Living in the northeast now, I can drive 8 miles and it takes an hour or longer, depending on how clogged highways are.

No restaurant chains could come to town for decades because commercial land was owned by seven wealthy old-moneyed families who also had small mom and pop businesses in town and did not want competition from big chain restaurants or stores.

They had strong allies in the worshipping community.  Besides, nobody wanted to sell the land, they just wanted to lease it. What business would want to build on leased land, knowing that, when the lease ended, they could change their minds about the land and the building owner would have some hard choices to make.

There were many churches and parishioners objected to new buildings going up too close to them, especially restaurant establishments that had the potential to sell alcoholic beverages. Liquor laws were strict, nobody could sell alcohol within so many hundred feet from a church, or so we were told. Nobody bothered to check, we just believed the preachers.

There was one Mexican restaurant that ran a good business and very few foreigners like me and mom. We were ostracized as “European trash” and by extension our daughters were ostracized as well. Parents seldom allowed their children to socialize with ours because their grandmother spoke a foreign tongue and we were neither Baptist, nor Methodist, nor Episcopalian.

Some parents were more open-minded and allowed their children to forge friendships with ours, but they were few and far-between. They were the punished children of the “exotic” me who did not look like them and came from a communist country they had no idea where it was located on a map.

One Chinese man who opened a popular and very successful restaurant in town, tried to build a home he designed in an affluent neighborhood where homes were quite pricey. He encountered problems turning his dream home into reality as the resident objected to the height of his “mansion” and the possibility that he would bring in too many red Chinese among them.

Today in northeastern neighborhoods of relatively pricey homes, some owners transfer to other jobs, towns, and states, and have no choice but to rent their property if it does not sell quickly. Several south of the border families and Muslim families rent one home, trashing the place, its yard and surroundings, and filling the street with garbage. One Mexican illegal woman, in order to avoid deportation, converted from Catholicism to Islam. She then sub-leased the basement of her rented home to a Muslim family of ten.

Many litter the local parks when they picnic there even though there are plenty of trashcans posted nearby. In their culture, they have no garbage cans or garbage pickup, so they throw their refuse out the door, out the window, into the street, parks, etc. They think that water and rivers will cleanse it all. Except it all dumps into the Chesapeake Bay.

The other day, a Spanish speaking man was changing his car’s oil and dumping the dirty oil into the nearby drain, even though the posted signs clearly said in English, “do not dump anything into the drain.” Perhaps our government should have translated those signs into Spanish too, they do translate everything else.

A former academic colleague from Venezuela said to me years ago (she was a member of the local La Rasa), “they are just too dumb to learn English, they are illiterate in their own language, so, we must teach our American children to speak Spanish in order to help them function in our society.”

To show their benevolence, the local southern Baptists sponsored a few defectors from countries like China, Poland, East Germany, and the former Czechoslovakia. They paraded them in church every Sunday as if they were the heathens saved from the clutches of atheistic communism. Mom and I made a point in befriending them and truly helping them to get a better start and to understand what expected them in a southern town leery of foreigners. In the south then, you could also be from another part of America and not be fully accepted either. That is probably true of many places in the world who do not like outsiders.

They stayed just long enough to learn some English and a place to live, then started job hunting, saved enough cash, and left for greener pastures and opportunities as soon as they were financially able. A town with high unemployment rate and high welfare rates was no place to set roots, especially since they would be forever looked upon as outsiders.

Since then, the south, like other parts of the country, has been invaded by illegal aliens, Catholics from the south of the border, and Muslims from other parts of the world, some brought in by Obama as economic refugees, others crossing the border illegally, posing as Mexicans.

I cannot imagine what the city leaders and the town’s residents think about these new arrivals who have no intention of assimilating and becoming Americans, or respecting its traditions, on the contrary, want to change them to the life and culture where they fled from.

Mom and I were “Euro trash” forty years ago when we became Americans and contributed to society, respecting and embracing its culture, its traditions, its people, and its history. If I could only see some of these people face to face and ask them, what now? We were not good enough for you, what are you going to do to protect your precious American culture and children now? How long can you ostracize and ignore these new arrivals, who refuse to assimilate, before they overwhelm you through demographics of the womb?

Brimming with Christmas Spirit

Wikipedia photo

I recently met a young couple giddy with the jubilant spirit of Christmas. It was a rare encounter as Christmas traditions are under assault and condemned on the altar of progressivism and Islam. He wore a red and green elf vest and a Santa hat over his regular clothes and a big smile of good cheer. His lovely wife had donned a beautiful red dress with sparkling tinsel on the left collar. He told me how much he enjoyed Christmas and decorating trees which he left up every year late into January, even past the Russian Orthodox Christmas on January 6.

We started talking and I told them about our Christmas celebration and our fir tree, thin and puny on branches and ornaments, but high on spirits. They listened politely but then I realized from the expression on their faces and the look in their eyes that neither one could relate to the description that followed.  They were millennial young and recently married.

I told them how we decorated the blue spruce with real candles, apples, cookies, and home-made shiny paper ornaments, with a few and rare Bohemian glass ornaments, and how we lit the tiny candles every night for a few minutes - they were clipped as far to the outside branches as possible to avoid catching the tree on fire. To mom’s exasperation, Daddy would nail the base of the tree stand to the parquet floor. A few oranges, apples, and cookies were hung on each branch with colorful string, and chocolate bonbons and plump raisins filled home-made cardboard tiny baskets decorated with red and green crepe paper.

Larger cities decorated a huge tree in the center of town with colorful lightbulbs and organized a winter carnival with rides on St. Nicholas Day, December 6. New Year’s Day was a secular holiday decreed so by the Communist party but Christmas was not really a holiday at all.

People who lived in villages stuck to tradition and celebrated Christmas. Priests opened the modest and very cold churches for services on Christmas Eve. I attended services with my aunt Leana who was a deacon and a cantor. Churches in the mountainous areas were more active so far away from the prying eyes of communists.   

Caroling, donations of food to people less fortunate, and having an extended family meal to celebrate Christmas was the highlight of our year.  During certain days, we went from house to house with elaborately prepared plates of food and baskets of goodies for those less fortunate, widowed, old, or sick.

Villagers learned to care for each other in good times and bad.  They bartered services and things they had in excess with other neighbors since money was so tight. People learned to adjust to their communist-imposed poverty in so many creative ways.

My parents, my secret Santa (Mos Craciun), would put a small food item by my pillow which I would find on Christmas morning – an unwrinkled apple, a fragrant orange from Israel, a green banana from Greece, or a bittersweet chocolate bar. Christmas was good for us kids because we were oblivious to our state in life. We had no idea how hard adults struggled to make ends meet.

How could I make this well-off American couple understand that Christmas was a gift of prayer and time to be with the extended family to share love and abundant food that was otherwise missing the rest of the year?

Nobody can comprehend that an entire nation can be held hostage for decades and suffer so much in a fight for survival every day to find food we take for granted here, bread, milk, butter, flour, sugar, rice, cooking oil, and needful things such as toilet paper, vitamins, and basic medicines. It is hard to believe when the shelves in America’s grocery stores are brimming with food.

As Oleg Atbashian said in his book, Hotel USSR, after he legally immigrated to the U.S., he cried when he saw the abundance surrounding him, not tears of happiness, mind you, but of anguish for all the unnecessary and cruel pain the proletariat endured for decades at the hands of communist autocrats who enjoyed making the population suffer for many generations through constant shortages of food, long lines, lack of basic necessities like hot water, heat, having to depend on bribes, black markets, kickbacks, and bartering to survive.

An artist, Atbashian entered an art supplies store in Manhattan and wrote, “Rows upon rows of shelves brimmed with products that catered to every artistic need. No gatekeeper was checking permissions, and no Artists Union card was required to make a purchase… After the first floor, I went to the second, and then to the third. And then I imagined how different my life could have been and broke down in tears.”

Americans are so unappreciative of and spoiled by their abundance created through the hard work of many past generations, that they have no idea how other people live or that life can be any other way but good. But this American knows better and my Christmas spirit will always grow inside our Christian home and in my heart.

 

Church and State

Orthodox Church built after the fall of communism
Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

People in general do not seem to agree on much these days, split between their own confused ideas and the latest narrative promoted by the deceitful main stream media, beholden to the globalist ideology of Democrat Socialism and Cultural Marxism.

Often the thought processes of the voting masses are incoherent because their knowledge, the reality, and their basic instincts of survival and safety are perverted by the globalist agenda but they are too ignorant to realize that what they espouse is quite contradictory. So they vote into Congress frightening Millennials like Alexandria Occasio-Cortez, who will now have the power to fundamentally alter our collective future in the distorted image of her disordered and ill-informed mind.

It’s not just the political representatives who are working against the wishes of the people. The Christian clergy of all stripes are organizing on behalf of foreign invaders looking for welfare and against the best interests of the American people.  

Educators and academics are happy to shape the minds of young people in their own globalist Marxist vision. They’ve been indoctrinating us for decades that we cannot mix Church and State, we must tear down any symbol of Christianity that might offend others, while bending over backwards through threats and the courts to accommodate a few offended atheists, many offended Muslims, and other refugee “stock” as the U.N. defines them, mushrooming all over the world with help from the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR). https://www.unhcr.org/

Citizens in European countries are ahead of the curve in this indoctrination into Cultural Marxism, a world-wide phenomenon driven by controlling globalists with large pockets, aiming to erase borders and to destroy every country’s sovereignty. Ordinary people with good intentions are voting for their own demise, for the Socialist Democrats, who are short on knowledge and long on propaganda, corruption, and deceit.

Romanians fight bitterly over investment in the construction of Orthodox churches. They want instead to improve the declining education of their children, to build hospitals and roads which they were denied under Ceausescu’s bleak communist regime. Decades of communist indoctrination and terrible medical care has confused their priorities. The soul of a person or a nation cannot be healed through Marxist ideology and globalist education. Faith and church are needed.

Eastern Europeans admire the wonderful education system in Western European countries as a model of “global citizenship.” But they fail to see how morality has decayed there and how they’re losing their national identities, histories, and their borders to the demands of Angela Merkel’s EU.

European Union “globalist policies” (diversity, multi-culturalism, manufactured global warming, aggressive anti-fossil fuels environmentalism, border destruction, the right to unimpeded migrant movement across national borders) have destroyed smaller countries with “progressivism” that has instead regressed western civilization and allowed invaders from third world nations to take over. “While Europe slept,” Europeans lost their national independence and control over their respective nations’ monetary policies.

Romanians bemoan the fact that too many Orthodox Churches are being built, that the cost of one church could help build five badly needed kilometers of interstate.

The church was instrumental in founding universities across Europe and in the printing of books and educational materials.  The oldest universities in Europe were run and staffed by priests. And where would we be today if beautiful cathedrals were not built over the centuries by very poor and rich parishioners alike who donated to the construction funds?

Perhaps Romanians should be outraged not by the expenditures to build churches but by the 3,000 euros spent each month for every corrupt politician in Parliament, a financial waste that dwarfs any spending for the building of a church that would preserve the soul and character of the nation for generations to come.

People need both cathedrals and hospitals to care for their souls and their bodies. Churches must not be just museums for tourists, or places for baptisms, weddings, and last rites.

Additionally, the building of a school or of a library does not guarantee a proper education or the storing of real knowledge and ideas - both can be just places of indoctrination.

Why are we visiting in awe the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican, all gold-leafed and marbled with sarcophagi, religious statues, paintings, colonnades, murals, mosaics, and objects d’art, reaching sky-high to Heaven? Poor people suffered for the glory of God, the Church, and the Pope. Good or bad, it is our collective history, our collective civilization which has evolved over the centuries of human existence.

Atheists complain about megalomaniacal priests and too many churches, but who is to say what is too much? Priests have always been vectors of faith, education, and of the political class in order to steer society’s mind and soul in the desired direction. A few higher ranked priests like the current Pope have used their faith podium to dabble in the “scientific consensus” of climate change and social engineering.

Others argue that people can pray anywhere, they don’t need a golden church to do so, and money is much better spent on education. What kind of education would that be? Common Core Standards? Building a fancy library does not guarantee that people will suddenly start reading.  And what would they read and study?  “Progressive” propaganda?  Will they read the classics? Will they learn about documented and archived history or revisionist history? Will they learn civics? Will they learn national pride and to appreciate God and country?

Many former Iron Countries citizens have left their homes and are building the library of the future in other countries, influencing the spread of Cultural Marxism they call Socialist Democracy, a sad perversion of reality which naïve humans believe blindly.

Church and State have been intrinsically connected throughout history and separating them is destroying the essence of who we are. We cannot separate the influence of the church from the foundation of the state no matter how many times atheists and their corrupt lawyers sue.

 

Defeating the Nemesis Within

“The Elephant does not have a spine right now.” - Trevor Loudon

Trevor Loudon, on a U.S. tour to promote his new book, “The Enemies Within,” began his speech to a packed crowd in Fairfax, Virginia, with the relevant question, “Why does a New Zealander from Christ Church care about America?”

The bestselling author encapsulated his answer into two reasons. First, it was simple gratitude to Americans, our fathers, brothers, and uncles, who sacrificed to save his country during WW II. Secondly, it was a selfish reason. “If America goes down so does the West.” Loudon echoed other patriotic editors like Judi McLeod, and her online publication, Canada Free Press, “… Because without America there is no Free World.”

Loudon, a conservative, knows that a socialist, left leaning country like New Zealand would be an easy target if America pulled out from the Pacific region. China would fill the vacuum and New Zealand would become a Chinese protectorate. He realizes that, if the evil Marxist forces at play succeed, Russia would dominate Europe, China would dominate the Far East, the Near East, and the Pacific regions, and Iran would dominate the Middle East.

America has been strong militarily in the last sixty years but that will change in the not so distant future considering all the cutbacks on military expenditures, equipment, personnel, nuclear arsenal, training, and readiness.

The average Americans don’t believe that communism exists. To them, communism is a fashionable Che Guevara t-shirt, with no real comprehension of the horrors it wrought to millions around the globe who had to live under the crushing boot of tyrannical dictatorships.

Communism is like a Phoenix bird rising from its hammer and sickle ashes, drenched in the blood of millions of innocents. In order to succeed this time, after having gone underground since 1989, “Marxists must get rid of America.”

We are witnessing a multi-front assault on the American Constitutional freedoms.  Loudon explained that there are two main Marxist Groups, the Communist Party USA (about 5,000 members) and the Democratic Socialists of America. Both organizations draw inspiration from Antonio Gramsci, the founding member of the Communist Party of Italy, imprisoned by Benito Mussolini regime, one fascist getting rid of another emerging tyrant.

According to Loudon, Marxists have infiltrated the American institutions of education, churches, and the military in order to bring about the revolution that is currently taking place in the United States. “Marxists have formulated policies for cap and trade, card check, Obamacare, and immigration reform.” Communists now control all the major labor unions, including the National Education Association (NEA). Unions influence and support the Democrat Party in elections through donations via forced dues, organized protests, sits-ins, boycotts, intimidation, strikes, and intense lobbying. The Democrat Party promotes and supports the labor unions through favorable legislation.

In 1984, an elected socialist labor government banned in New Zealand nuclear warships from its harbors. Overnight, the U.S.A/New Zealand military alliance was destroyed by keeping U.S. Navy warships away. This is an example of the stealth of communists. Before the ban, New Zealand was a pro-American country. The former relationship between the two countries has not been revived to this day.

According to Loudon, for a long time, hand-picked communist operatives from around the world were trained at the Lenin Institute for Higher Learning in the fine art of communist leadership and infiltration of capitalist countries, learning how to destroy them from within. As many as 6,500 students from every country in the world were studying “agitation, union organizing, propaganda techniques, how to be a labor union member, community organizer, how to influence the political process in their own countries and how to get Moscow’s policies implemented as law.”

Loudon’s source was a friend who infiltrated the school in 1993 and experienced firsthand the Lenin Institute’s activities. There were 200 South Africans there, 3 were members of Nelson Mandela’s government, himself a Communist Party member and “useful idiot.”

During the massive anti-NATO marches, the Soviets were encouraging and supporting the protesters because they wanted NATO broken up – the Soviet Communist Party elite apparatchiks wanted to control Europe.

Loudon continued, “The Soviets were so influential, powerful, and stealthy that New Zealanders had no idea that their very liberal, socialist, pro-union, anti-nuclear, labor party policies of 1984 were actually designed in Moscow.”

Could this happen in the U.S.? It already is happening and Trevor Loudon gave three examples.

Obamacare is a classic example of a communist designed and written law. If we don’t defund Obamacare, Loudon said, we will have the kind of socialized medicine that forced his wife in New Zealand to wait 2 years for an operation, gave her blood poisoning, and many life-threatening issues; she had to wait 2 years for a simple infected hernia. “Rationing is the only way that socialized medicine works. You are a liability. There’s a limited budget and you have to be fitted into that. If you are old, don’t work, don’t pay taxes, you die.”

Doctors are paid so low in New Zealand that, upon graduation, “50 percent of them leave the most beautiful country in the world” to work elsewhere. “There are 6 bureaucrats for every doctor or nurse.” This mirrors the National Healthcare in the U.K. where nationalized medicine is the largest employer.

“The father of the single-payer healthcare, Obama’s personal Chicago physician, Quentin Young, has worked his entire life for socialized medicine to move bills forward. He is a 40 year veteran of the Communist Party USA.” The aim of the communists is to get control of the middle class through healthcare.

Loudon explained that the Massachusetts government is controlled by the Democratic Socialists for America and they pushed through socialized medicine. “Mitt Romney tried to push back but they reached a compromise. A Marxist designed Romneycare and Obamacare, is a successful attempt to control your life and your death.”

A second example of how public policy is run in the U.S. by Marxists (through dirty and underhanded deals, infiltration to affect large numbers of people) is the illegal immigration “reform,” a.k.a. amnesty.

For 15 years, AFL-CIO lobbied Congress heavily to stop illegal immigration and to secure our borders. But in 1995 the Marxists engineered a coup and took over the leadership of the AFL-CIO and they changed the union’s stance on illegal immigration. “All unions are now controlled by the hard left.”(Medina, Gutierrez) AFL-CIO and SEIU now lead the charge for legalization of illegals because they need new Democrat voters and new dues-paying members.

California is already Democrat; the Marxists are going after Texas now. Eight million more votes from the illegal rank means “A governing majority for the future, a one party Democrat state.” Loudon explained that “It is mathematically impossible for a Republican to ever win the Presidency again.”

Even churches are infiltrated by Marxists. The Catholic Church leadership goes along with Marxists because they need to fill the pews with new parishioners.

Loudon continued, “If you think how arrogant they are now, with the IRS scandal, the victimization of their enemies, think what they’ll be like with 8 million illegal voters, they’ll be on steroids. There will be no stopping them.”

Taking over a country from within is not hard to do. “The Democrats are in the Marxists’ pockets.” You just need patience and the right slogans. In Russia, “2,000 Bolsheviks took over a country of 2 million people.”

Loudon’s third example of public policy run in the U.S. by Marxists is our President’s meeting with Vietnamese officials who, with the help of Congressmen like Tom Harkin, Sheila Jackson Lee, and John Conyers are lobbying Congress to pass Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange reparations. Three hundred Congress members are already on board. Loudon expressed his outrage. “Vietnam invaded another nation (our ally) which we defended. The true victims of agent orange are our American veterans.” Trying to repair Ho Chi Min’s reputation by saying that he was an admirer of Thomas Jefferson is a stretch and a Marxist ploy, in Loudon’s opinion.

“We have a serious problem because the 60s generation are now running the media and academia, labor unions, the Democrat Party; they want their revolution and they are not going to die without it.”

If we manage to take our country back from the clutches of Marxism, said Loudon, freedom movements will be inspired around the world. “If America goes down, we all go down.” To do this, Americans don’t have 20 years, we have 2 election cycles; we must abolish the Department of Education, avoid a third party, stand for the Constitution, unite the conservative GOP to take over and get rid of K Street, RINOs, and Carl Rove. The traditional GOP has been taken over by Marxists. “Stand behind people like Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and John Bolton.”

Loudon continued that voters in this country do not understand the four Marxist goals:

1.      Take out your military

2.      Take your guns

3.      Destroy your borders

4.      Destroy your economy

The Marxists’ number one goal, said Loudon, is to destroy your military. Once that is accomplished, Russia, China, and Iran will be powerful enough to take U.S. out. There is a reason why Japan is rearming itself. It can no longer count on its allies to defend it in such close proximity to China.

During the question and answer session, one astute former cryptologist made the comment that unless we restore the paper ballots, conservatives will not win another election until the electronic voting is stopped. “A ninth grader can create a hacking device to change the outcome of the electoral process.”

Loudon concluded his speech to thunderous applause following the last remarks that we still have freedom of speech; we must exercise it because voters do not understand the crisis this country is experiencing and the assaults on many fronts, including the threat of jihad and Sharia Law. “Be the lions; do not lie with the lambs! Take over the GOP!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

First trip to the Mall

What a novel concept to shopping - the Mall! I liken it to the Sunday Promenade in Europe minus the shops. Every Sunday afternoon, we dressed up in our only good dresses and shoes, and took a bus to downtown's Republic Boulevard, flanked by beautiful old chestnut trees. At one end was the main train station terminal, at the other end, the Art Museum, the Marriage House, and a Parisian like bakery with tasty confections of chocolate that we could only afford once in a very long while. Families dressed in their Sunday best paraded their children up and down or stopped if a bench was available. We admired or envied each other in a sad display of people watching in place of going to church. Church was "verboten" by the communists and priests barely made enough money from donations and a meager state stipend to keep the church open for baptisms, weddings, and burials. I am not sure how many people would have gone to church instead of the weekly promenade up and down the gorgeous boulevard had God worship been allowed by the communist state. Come to think of it, since we had state sponsored marriage houses, I think the only reason the communists kept some churches open was to bury its dead. We did not have funeral homes so the logical location to place the deceased in state was the church. I say this because the regime had no qualms about demolishing beautiful old churches, 300-400 years old some of them, to make room for gaudy concrete buildings, headquarters of the local chapters of the communist party or the unions (syndicates as they were called).
You can imagine my glee to be introduced to the Mall. I did not have any money to shop, but it was fun to look. I was surprised that shoppers could actually try things on in a very cozy dressing room, helped by polite ladies and, most shocking of all, could actually return things if you changed your mind. I was used to the communist central planning when they would produce half a million white boots when the market demanded 10 million pairs of black and brown boots. People would fight in long lines for the white boots anyway, sometimes grabbing the first pair on the rack, not knowing whether that was the right size or not. Not that it mattered, you were not allowed to try them on, you might get them dirty. Neither were you allowed to return them if they did not fit. Once you bought them, they were yours to keep. No returns, no exchanges, no credit. I can only imagine that there were many customers with sore feet and bunions. Romanian shoes were not exactly made for comfort or durability.

Cultural differences crept along the way in my daily existence and a trip to the mall was no different. I had to apologize to a poor girl who was politely trying to sell spoon rings, silver rings wrapped around the finger made from the end of a spoon. Coming from such a poor country, it seemed excessive to me to destroy a perfectly good spoon in order to create such a gaudy ring. I wasted no time telling the girl the truth, after all, Europeans are very blunt, not necessarily schooled in the fine art of tactfulness. Needless to say, I brought the girl to tears and was forced to apologize. My husband insisted and I complied, although I did not understand why I had to apologize for expressing my opinion and telling the truth.

Speaking of being truthful and blunt, you never ask an European how they feel, unless you are prepared to listen exactly to what ails them, why, and what they are going to do about it.

I was shocked when few people were paying with cash, mostly with checks and credit cards. I could not understand the concept of paper checks or plastic credit cards very well. At that time, department stores did not have an instant connection with a bank clearinghouse for checks or credit cards. They were mostly accepted on faith and in some instances, by making phone calls. My Egyptian friend, Lula, used to laugh that the country was run on paper and plastic, not fiat money. She had no idea how true her jocular statement was.
I loved the colorful department store bags and was amazed that they were given free of charge with each purchase. I saved them for a while, hoping to find other uses for them. I did the same with Styrofoam containers, plastic forks and spoons, I could not throw them away - I washed them over and over until they broke. My husband chided me that I was McDonald's bag lady.
I found the mall to be very peaceful, a place to meet friends, a place to relax, not necessarily to shop. Back in the late seventies, there were no restaurants inside the mall or a food court and no coffee shops. If you wanted coffee, you had to percolate it yourself. The biggest department stores inside the mall in Tupelo, MS were Sears and Roebuck and J. C. Penney. There was a McRae's but rather small. I was sad when the mall was destroyed by a tornado a year later and abandoned.