Mom Lived a Life Filled with Hope and Love

The room is mostly empty. Her bed and favorite pillows are gone, donated to patients at the nursing home who don’t have relatives to care enough to visit them or are long gone. Her clothes have been donated as well, the new stuff she did not have a chance to wear still hanging in her closet.

The nightstand holds her glass case and her favorite knick-knacks she could not part with. The dresser and the chest of drawers contain memorabilia she collected over the years, photos, and a few frames with her portraits and those of her two granddaughters and two great-grandsons.

The room is white walled with oil paintings of landscapes and an icon with her favorite rosary blessed by the Pope which we brought back from the Vatican years ago. She liked to pray every night and sometimes in the morning. She crossed herself at every meal like a good Orthodox would do.

She never wore the scarf required by modesty and church attendance for married women in her country – she loved her soft, thick hair colored auburn and we jokingly called her Lucy.

Her baptism name was Niculina (Nicole), but her two brothers and three sisters called her Bibica. Her husband of seven decades called her his Mimi, a term of endearment. To the rest of the family, she was Mimi as well. To her granddaughters, she was Maia, short for Mamaia (Grandma).

Mom loved to walk her oldest granddaughter, a precocious three-year-old, in the nearby cemetery at the university. And Eileen asked her with the innocence of toddlers, “Maia, when are you going to die so I can come see you at the cemetery?” That innocent question has finally come to pass, and mom’s soul flew into the starlight; grief enveloped all of us like a thick fog.

Her semi-bare bedroom and the bathroom, have an echo of emptiness as I step on the cold marble tiles. It is not just hollow of her earthly presence, but it is empty of her happy soul, of her laughter, her chatter, of her tears, her pain, and her loving advice. Bogart can no longer jump and purr in her lap when she watched TV. Her Romanian soap operas were legendary, and she loved to watch them with her adult granddaughter.

Gone is her zest for life and her almost childish happiness at Christmas when she strung the lights everywhere and placed ornaments in the fir tree. Gone is her soothing voice that seldom rose in anger. Her suite is quiet, so quiet that I can hear the rain drops outside. It is an almost eerie quiet, as if rejecting every earthly sound.

She is no longer coming down the steps slowly and carefully, afraid of falling. She is gone in the light, energy that is no longer here. If physicists are correct that energy is never lost but transferred, then where is she?

If something cannot come from nothing, energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but rather transformed into various forms, then where is her power? There was so much light and energy about my mother, what was she transformed into? Is she our guardian angel? Is she the monarch butterfly who found us in the cold October day at Lake Champlain in Vermont? Is she the black and white butterfly who flew about and around our bodies and faces when we took a walk in the woods the morning that my mother died? Is she the dragon fly that surrounds us on the deck, her favorite spot to watch nature and animals?

I talk to her every day, but it is a lonely monologue, not a spirited day-by-day dialog with a human being with a heart, mind, and soul. People tell me that she is in a better place, but what does that mean? What better place? I miss her laughter and her voice. Despite the many hardships she experienced under communism, she always kept a positive outlook – nothing phased her too much and always joked about it.

Mom’s ashes rest in a box in her favorite room to sit down and relax after a walk with Bogart at the edge of the woods. The small altar contains a lock of her hair on top of the urn, her last photo, a large candle which burned at her memorial, her glasses, the last doily she crocheted without a pattern, from the memory jumbled in her dying brain, the crochet needle, her favorite icon and rosary, and her straw hat. She tended to many vegetable and flower gardens wearing that hat.

Mom wanted to be with her siblings, in the family crypt in Romania. The war in Ukraine and the fear of traveling so close to a war zone is depriving mom for now of having her final wishes fulfilled. When the war is over, I hope to be able to carry her urn then to Romania and have mom finally laid to rest in her chosen spot.

For now, I feel like she is home, where she wanted to be before she developed dementia. She was a home body, the perfect domestic engineer who kept us fed, in clean clothes, and a home that was spotless.

My children’s friends were always welcome in our home even though mom could not speak English. But she spoke the language of welcoming strangers in our home, offering them good food, an occasional coke hidden in the unused dishwasher, and simple desserts. Nobody knew her recipes, they were in her head, a pinch of this, and a spoon of that. Once her brain started dying, the recipes were gone too.

The greedy corporatists, who locked the population down for two years to sell their vaccines, have robbed mom and me of the opportunity to see each other as much as we wanted. I could not touch her, I had to see her through a window and on Face Time. As her mind died faster for lack of conversation with me or the staff and complete lack of any mental stimulation from the nursing home which used the Covid lockdown as an excuse to abuse and neglect all elderly by locking them up in their rooms, she sunk into total inability to recognize us. Some days I was her mom, other days her sister, a friend, and even though it was painful to see her decline and the complete erasure of our shared past, I knew her and loved her and that is all that mattered.

I fought hard to force the nursing home to bring her out onto the patio for fresh air while I was made to sit six feet away from her, both with a mask on. When nobody watched, we removed the masks and we talked, smiled, and was able to touch my mom and give her kisses on her forehead and cheek. I read her Romanian fairytales and showed her family pictures. It was the only time that the nursing home treated her with humanity – they washed her and dressed her.

Maybe she is in a better place, without pain and neglect from the abusive west African nurses’ aides and CNAs. No matter how many times a week, each week, I would go to visit mom, varying the times, I would always find them lacking in their care.

After mom’s passing, I made a complaint to the Virginia Department of Health, the department of nursing home certification, they made a two-day unannounced visit, and they found all my allegations to be true. Unfortunately, they stopped short of accessing her medical records since she was deceased, and the nursing home declined them access to mom’s records.

If mom is in a better place, I hope that she knows that I tried my best to care for her health and needs, but my hardest was not good enough against the blatant neglect and abuse of Manor Care Health Services.

Mom lived a life filled with hope and love. She never gave up! Mom’s memory on this earth is eternal in the minds of her immediate family and the friends she made in America.

Many of her extended family members have already passed on. We will all eventually pass into anonymity and oblivion as if we never existed, our names inscribed on a cross, a plaque, a brick, a bench, or a columbarium nest. Our lives are transitory.

We are not exactly sure why God created us, gave us life in the first place, and why He takes it away when the time comes. Mom’s time was on June 9, 2022, at 12:12 a.m. She is probably in Heaven, teaching the Angels how to crochet her favorite pattern, grapes and leaves, and how to garden properly and share the vegetables with neighbors. She fed and cared for so many people during her ninety years of life.

America the Broken Beacon?

Cape Meares
Photo: Wikipedia

America used to be the country of freedom where people dreamed of immigrating to if only they could get a passport, a visa, enough money to fly or sail across the ocean, if only the border guards would not arrest them in the U.S. if they had no papers, if only the military guards in their own countries would not shoot them on sight.

Cubans have risked their lives for decades to cross the 90 miles into Florida, fleeing a life of communist dictatorship, and a life of oppression and imprisonment in Castro’s regime, sometimes drowning in makeshift dinghies and other crafts, close to the shores of freedom, a beacon so close to the dirty fog of communism.

The drowning death toll in 2015 of immigrants from Libya, trying to reach the shores of Europe, has climbed to 1,500 according to the Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/19/700-migrants-feared-dead-mediterranean-shipwreck-worst-yet

Other reports describe the murder of African Christian immigrants sailing to Europe on same boats with African Muslims. They were slaughtered by Muslims during the voyage on the Mediterranean. Some survived to tell the gruesome tale when rescued.

If they could only survive all these trials and tribulations and have enough skills necessary to fend for themselves financially, not become a ward of the state the moment they entered this shiny city on the hill, their dreams would come true. Those were the distant dreamers of the 1970s. The Beacon of America was awaiting talent and skills from around the world to contribute to a nation of citizens, not a nation of immigrants with allegiance to their former countries.

Now the President’s Dreamers are the “anchor babies” birthed on American soil by illegal mothers who cross the border, fly in their last month of pregnancy, or visit Disney World; the Dreamers are the illegals bussed or flown in by our administration and fanned across the country overnight because we are not diverse enough; the Dreamers are the Syrian and Somali “war refugees” who are brought in each month and dumped unceremoniously on unsuspecting small towns; the Dreamers are the drug gang members who are allowed into the country, no questions asked; the Dreamers are mostly uneducated, illiterate in their own language, and placed immediately on welfare, an undue burden on Americans who are struggling with unemployment, underemployment, and a bad economy.

It used to be that America wanted the best and the brightest immigrants who were willing to work, to assimilate, and to pledge allegiance to our country, to be useful to society, to make it better. That is no longer the case.

America was a tolerant Christian country full of patriotic Americans who loved their country. We keep hearing from progressives that we are a nation of immigrants. As Mark Levin said, we are not a nation of immigrants; we are a nation of citizens. Now it is on the slippery road of Western Europe which has allowed a deliberate failed multiculturalist policy to destroy many countries that find themselves now overrun by Muslim zealots who have only one scope in mind, to establish a world caliphate and to convert by any means necessary all the infidels to Islamic theology and theocracy.

Unchecked diversity and tolerance is destroying our western culture, replacing it stealthily with Islam and Sharia Law. Look at all the proselytizing for Islam lessons in our high schools across the country and the many chapters devoted to Islam in World History, while Christianity is hardly mentioned in the curriculum. Was it not progressives who demanded for decades the “separation of church and state” and now they have written Common Core textbooks to indoctrinate our children into Islam? The social engineering architects of this Islamic invasion into the U.K. are now coming to the U.S. to repeat their plans of destroying America as well. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249797/Labour-threw-open-doors-mass-migration-secret-plot-make-multicultural-UK.html

If Islam is not the curriculum topic in social studies, English, or history, it is the indoctrination into the green religion of environmentalism, of Gaia, or Mother Earth, masqueraded as climate change. Skeptics are labeled terrorists. America had the best universities in the world where dialog and divergent thoughts and creative minds worked together to make things better for the world. Universities are now bastions of progressive intolerance where free speech and individual thought are stifled and persecuted.

There is nothing like the celebrated murderer and founder Ira Einhorn’s Earth Day to bring out the best and the not-so-brightest celebrants and worshippers of the global environmental movement – pretending to be green on the outside but rotten red on the inside. Just check out the photos of piles of trash they left behind around the National Mall in Washington, D.C. this past weekend.
Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2015
 

Do Not Underestimate the Value of Culture as a Power of Change

Hope and Change, Hope and Change, Hope and Change… Millions of Americans were chanting totally mesmerized. Change at the speed of light is here and accelerating. Hope is fading away. How did we get here so fast? It did not happen overnight. We just failed to pay attention.

We underestimated the value of culture as a power of change, irreversible change. We were too busy building nations and democracy in countries living by seventh century rules written in one book to notice that our culture was being changed from within and without, partly by theocratic and totalitarian cultures, partly by globalists, and their human tools and institutions, and partly by illegally-domiciled cultures.

You cannot change “hearts and minds” in a culture that values death more than life; you cannot absorb a banana republic culture with “family values” of God and the pursuit of happiness in which happiness is not self-generated but expected from a benevolent government.

Changing “hearts and minds” of nations requires time and arduous indoctrination. It is a process similar to underground water burrowing through stone, shaping magnificent rocks, tunnels, caves, stalactites and stalagmites.

“Cultura animi” as Cicero described it in “Tusculan Disputations” is the cultivation of the soul and mind. (“Animus” is Latin for soul or mind.) The American soul and mind have been cultivated in the direction of socialism for a long time. We are noticing the change now because it has finally come to fruition after more than a century of constant scholastic, moral, social, and political programming.

Culture encompasses the material culture of a nation and the non-material culture such as language, customs, traditions, and its unique identity. A culture exhibits a group-specific acquired behavior which can be changed over time with the right tools. A culture is multifaceted; it includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by humans as members of society.

W. C. McGrew defined culture as a six-step process:

1. A new pattern of behavior is invented, or an existing one is modified.
2. The innovator transmits this pattern to another person.
3. The form of the pattern is consistent.
4. The one who acquires the pattern retains the ability to perform it long after having acquired it.
5. The pattern spreads across a population: families, clans, troops, or bands.
6. The pattern endures across generations.

Language, a very important element of culture, is the direct expression of a people’s national character. Johann Gottfried Herder said, "Denn jedes Volk ist Volk; es hat seine National Bildung wie seine Sprache" (Because every people is a People, it has its own national culture expressed through its language). We do not have our own official language – the government and necessity have forced the use of two languages.

Immigrants, who have entered other cultures through time, have formed their own sub-cultures within the primary culture:

-         Core culture (Leitkultur or “lead culture” as the Germans termed it) - minorities had an identity of their own, but they supported the core concepts of the culture on which society was based

-         Melting pot – immigrant cultures mixed willingly without state intervention; such was the case of the United States until liberals intervened and changed it into “tossed salad bowl”

-         Monoculturalism – was adopted initially by some European states as a government policy to assimilate immigrants; it was deemed racist and nationalistic by ruling elites

-         Multiculturalism – immigrants preserved their cultures while interacting “peacefully” within one nation; France, Germany, and U.K. admitted recently that multiculturalism failed miserably in their countries; other European nations are struggling to survive as they are losing their identity, culture, and their countries to the “peaceful” immigrants

United Kingdom’s sociologists developed cultural studies influenced by Marxism. These studies, models, and lessons were incorporated and adopted by universities around the world and preached in thousands of classes every year. The core message was the same – socialism and Marxism are the wave of the future if society is to attain utopia and happiness. The entrepreneurial work ethic of capitalism was disdained and maligned.

We are in a globally-accelerated culture change period driven by these educational models, international trade, the socialist mass media, and the population explosion. Many inside and outside forces encourage and promote change through thinly veiled environmentalist and globalist propaganda indoctrination, economic, and political measures. Other forces resist change coming from cultural ideas and practices favoring socialism and Marxism, but they are outnumbered. New technologies and social conflicts also produce change by promoting new and peculiar cultural models that alter social dynamics in the utopian vein.

The feminist movement deeply affected gender relations and economic structures in the American culture, often in negative ways. Environmental conditions and groups caused cultural change through global warming brainwashing. War and competition over resources such as oil greatly impacted social dynamics and culture.

Cultural ideas were transmitted through diffusion (fast food across the globe, innovations, direct borrowing) and acculturation (acquiring traits). Individual like me who learned the language, history, customs, and traditions became assimilated into the new culture. Likewise, over many generations of students, trained College of Education teachers indoctrinated their pupils into the socialist mindset without much interference from the clueless parents who were often themselves products of the public school cultural modification curricula.

People who were born, raised, and grew old under oppressive communism, did not culturally understand any other way of living. They felt alienated when capitalism replaced communism. They did not know how to make a living, how to survive on their own and provide for themselves, they were still waiting for the communist regime to hand them their meager rations – it was not much, but it did not require having to think, having to provide for themselves a daily subsistence, or having to work. These elders wanted communist enslavement back because it was a certainty they recognized.

People who fled communism were not shocked that the Russians celebrated by the thousands Stalin’s birthday recently, in worship to his dubious and murderous achievements, having starved and killed 20 million innocents during his reign of terror in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). We know that a dependent and hopeless culture breeds helplessness.

The French are so unwilling to give up their culture of “welfareship” as Sylvain Charat calls it, that they have fallen hard into the “poverty trap.” France is going to allow doctors to “accelerate the coming of death” of French patients in the socialized medical care system, in order to fund their cradle to grave lavish welfare. What caused such a harsh change in the values of their culture?

Why are Americans allowing the dreaded 15-member “death panel” of Obamacare instead of trimming the government’s lavish spending and offering healthcare insurance to the uninsured in some other form? If some Americans want universal healthcare and gun control, why don’t they move to Cuba?

Why would a culture run household budgets in such a way that citizens are willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of their children in the future and the grandparents through euthanasia driven by medical care rationing in order that the parents live better in the present?

It should come as no surprise that the majority of Americans prefer a lazy lifestyle, dependent on government welfare for their every need as the only viable solution to daily living; they want a secular society devoid of faith, a society that does not think twice about killing the unborn as a form of contraception but builds crossing bridges for turtles, a society that does not seek justice for the murder of innocents but demonstrates to release infamous terrorists and criminals.

Americans who no longer share the values of the culture that was established long time ago, adhere to the culture of socialism/Marxism. The low-information Americans, who chanted for the promised hope and change, aspire for a culture of government dependency and entitlements in perpetuity.

Entrepreneurship is slowly replaced in the American psyche by “assistance-ship” through a barrage of constant cultural indoctrination by the academia, the media, and the government.