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| Bread line during the 1980s Photo credit: adevarul.com |
Commies lied to us in order to cover up their mismanagement
of the economy, the disastrous five-year plans, the gross misuse of the land, squandered
resources, sold produce and grain to the west for hard currency while people were
on rationing cards and hungry, and funds stolen from the treasury or from
citizens accused under dubious circumstances of treasonous activities such as
enemy of the proletariat.
The five-year plans had impossible to achieve goals set by those
apparatchiks with high ranking in the Communist Party. People would go to jail for not meeting these
goals in the time frame dictated by the Stalinist bureaucrats, illiterate community
organizers, who understood nothing about the economy, about industrial or
agricultural planning. When things went
missing in factories, and they did often, accountants and managers would go to
jail as theft occurred under their blind watch.
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| More tight lines for food Photo credit: adevarul.com |
At some point, they ran out of cattle feed and Ceausescu had
to distress-slaughter cows. I remember mom saying that beef was tough to chew
and purple-looking. To this day, we don’t eat beef. The meat was rationed to
2.5 kg per family per month. Butchers
would chop up bones in the meat which turned it into a purplish grey mass
thrown on the counter with contempt. We had to bring our own wrapping newspapers
and expandable jute shopping bags to carry food home. In addition to this
shopping jute bag, people carried extra cash in case a line developed somewhere
which meant that they could not pass up the opportunity to buy whatever was on
sale.
This type of pathological lying to the people is not unlike
the Democrats covering up their failed economic policies by telling Americans
for eight years now how the economic status quo is our new normal, we should
get used to the global economy, to the manufacturing sector moving entirely
outside of the U.S., and how our jobs are never coming back.
Living under the boot of communism, we could not compare our
meager existence with how other people lived because we were forbidden to
travel, television programming was tightly controlled, and so were radio broadcasting
and the press.
Once in a while those in power slipped and broadcast
successful mini-series like “Dallas” which gave us a glimpse of the opulent and
dreamy life of the Ewings in Texas, the faraway Shangri La where money grew on
trees and oil bubbled out of the ground. American movies were smuggled into Romania,
translated by a very courageous lady, and sold on the black market when VCRs
became available.
Romania was not the only Iron Curtain communist regime to
treat their people this way, but it was one of the worst. Joe Keller described in a recent post, “When
Victor Belenko defected and flew his Mig-25 Foxbat into Japan, he was taken to
a safe house in Warrenton, Virginia, for debriefing and subsequent
resettlement. Warrenton was not much of a town at the time. We had Peebles,
shoe stores, grocery stores, an IHop and a couple of other restaurants and a
bunch of gas stations. Belenko thought the Agency had staged the entire town
for his benefit and did not believe stores had clothes, and restaurants had
food in America. It ran against everything he had been told.”
The dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, a man with no formal
education, ordered in 1982 the passage of the “Program of Scientific Nutrition for
the Population,” a law that established the rationing of food, how many
calories a person could eat, and how much one could weigh. Two years later, the nutritional standards
were reduced even more.
Portions and consumption were controlled through the issuance
of cards which could only be used at the local neighborhood grocery store where
residents had to register each family member, present proof of identity and
residence, and the number of people living in the house, including renters or
temporary visitors. Food could only be bought
based on the number of people registered.
Lying was impossible as the police informers, the beat cops,
and the housing registration office knew exactly where each person lived or if
they moved and where. Cards were color-coded by cities and towns. Urban
residents could buy more food while farmers were given less rations on the assumption
that they grew some themselves. Those who tried to purchase in excess of their
rations, when found out, were sent to jail. It was considered speculation
punishable by law if a person tried to barter goods or sell food on the black
market. Many enterprising Romanians were
clever enough and were never caught. http://adevarul.ro/locale/alexandria/ce-mancau-romanii-vremea-ceausescu-jumatate-paine-zi-litru-ulei-kilogram-zahar-luna-pui-marimea-porumbeilor-1_555f0c0acfbe376e3578994d/index.html
Imagine how mesmerized I was when I first entered the one
and only grocery store in a small town in the south, population 3,000, Horn’s
Big Star. It was filled with food to the rafters. I was in awe and I kept filling the cart to
the brim. My husband was laughing, putting things back and telling me that they
will be there tomorrow. I did not believe him at first, I expected empty store
shelves on my second trip.
I was so incredulous! I went to the grocery store every day
to buy nectarines and Red Delicious apples. I was so shocked that I could buy
fresh fruit in early January. I just knew that it was all staged for my
benefit. Albert, the owner, who was a friend of the family, always greeted me
with a big smile which I thought odd. Why is this man always smiling? I was used to sour employees, shouting and
treating us like animals, while we pushed and shoved each other in endless
lines, often getting to the front of the line and finding out that they ran out
of whatever we were waiting to buy.
We have an abundance of food and people get irritated in the
U.S. when they can’t find their particular brand. Few have any idea that our
grocery stores only stock a three-day supply of food. When major storms strike or
even the potential of inclement weather in the U.S., shelves of milk, water,
and bread disappear really fast at Walmart.
Until you have to stand in endless lines to buy food and basics
for survival, such as bread, milk, sugar, oil, flour, butter, or toilet paper
and vitamins, until you have to live in the dark and cold when lights, heat, and
electricity go out daily, when you have no running water at all or hot water is
a rare occurrence, you cannot claim that you are poor, living in an “unjust
country.” What you really need is a lesson in history, a trip to Cuba, to some
other third world country, and an attitude adjustment to reality.
