New Yorkers are
willing to give their freedom to armed soldiers, for their own protection. Is
this another resigned submission to molestation, just like passengers have
given up all their freedoms and rights to the TSA in order to board a plane? It
is sad to see TSA employees groping children, handicapped people, and grandmas with
walkers and canes for “their own safety.”
A friend who
has not flown for many years until recently and had no idea how extensive the
TSA body searches were, was outraged and felt violated when the TSA agents
touched all her private parts. When she protested, she was told repeatedly that
it was for her own safety. When this 70-year-old grandma’s protests almost got
her arrested for no reason other than asking questions, she complied to the
invasive groping.
I grew up
under communism with armed soldiers and armed police surrounding us everywhere
we went. We were never molested publicly like Americans are at airports but we
had to show the content of our purses upon exiting grocery stores. Clothing stores were exempted, I assumed
because we could never reach them, they were placed behind counters.
It was ridiculous
that women had to show the contents of their purses for three reasons. Few
women owned purses, they were small, and could barely hold anything other than
a handkerchief. Additionally, grocery stores also stored food behind tall
counters and food was only given to customers after they paid for their
purchases and showed the clerk their receipt.
If you did not have a receipt stamped “paid,” then no merchandise was given
to you.
If you exited
the store with your purse, that meant that you purchased nothing. Shopping bags
were made of durable jute string and expanded into a larger fishing net with
handles in which all women carried shopping items.
In clothing
stores, there were no dressing rooms, so it was impossible to steal anything by
walking out with it. You had to know your exact size, make sure of what you
wanted to purchase because, once in your possession, it was yours to keep and
was never returnable even if it did not fit or was damaged.
When the
police checked our identification passes (papers, please) and purses, they
exercised their power to humiliate, harass, and oppress us at will, showing us
that the commies were in control, and we had no choice but to comply and obey.
Theft
actually occurred in two places: a. at work and b. in people’s homes.
In order to
survive the equally small wages paid to everyone by the police state,
regardless of education and training, (we pretended to work, and they pretended
to pay us) people took bribes and stole items from their work and bartered them
with others for things they needed or sold them on the black market in order
to earn additional money.
Doctors and
medical personnel accepted bribes to give some patients priority, quicker, or
better service. The bribes came in the form of hard-to-find food, toiletries,
cosmetics, soaps, needed medicines such as aspirin or cortisone shots, and an envelope
with money called “walking around money.”
If you did
not have walking around money, you wasted your time going to see the socialist
medicine doctor because you would wait forever. They would put you in the
hospital, but they had no resources to treat you with or test you with. You got
a chicken wire metal frame bed, a stained mattress, you had to bring your own
sheets and towels and you had to wait in the 20-bed ward for days before a
resident might see you.
Factory
workers stole parts or finished products, traded services for others, stole
bottles of wine to trade for sugar, cooking oil, rice, or meat; if they were
truckers, siphoned milk or gasoline out of their big delivery trucks and bartered
their loot with others. When someone was caught stealing, everyone who bought
things or traded with him/her paid a fine or went to jail.
Even some family
members stole from each other sometimes. Those in the country who had more and better
food, were jealous of those who lived in the city and had a bathtub and indoor
plumbing but empty pantries and starving.
The envy was
real even though cold water was cut off sometimes all day, and, if we were
lucky, hot water flowed two hours a day, usually when people were asleep.
But the biggest thieves were the Communist Party high ranking members and their lackeys who confiscated the land, homes, savings, and wealth from citizens they deemed bourgeois, after throwing them in prison. Their only crimes were that they had accumulated wealth through hard work and did not subscribe to the Marxist ideology. People I knew and one great-uncle spent long years in prison for being anti-communists. One friend was sentenced to 17 years in a lead mine labor camp for inheriting from his parents a small hotel in a mountain resort.
Many people
like my dad would not take anything from work that he had not earned and paid
for. He was a very hard-working, honorable,
and honest man who deserved a much better life than the miserable existence and
struggle under the communist oppression that ended his life much too early.
