Letter from Macy's CEO, Jeff Gennette, and my Response

I received today an insulting political message from Macy's CEO. Below is my answer to his form letter of June 7, 2020.

Dear valued customers,

Macy’s is proudly “America’s department store.” Beyond the products we offer, the parade and the fireworks celebration, our company will ultimately be known for the values we exhibit. That starts with fostering an inclusive, welcoming community – one that believes, and acts on a principle that everyone is created equal and deserves our respect.

The death of George Floyd is sadly just one more incident of racial injustice, including those against Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, along with countless others. The grief, frustration and anger that we have seen is understandable. And as a company, we are committed to do our part to end systemic racism.

This week we hosted a virtual Town Hall attended by over 5,000 of our colleagues across the country. Several opened up with remarkable vulnerability and honesty about their experience of being Black in this country, in our company, and in the streets. About the difficulty of living a life on guard all the time, of teaching a young child to do the same. Of constantly explaining why Black lives matter.

As our customer you are part of the Macy’s family, so we are sharing some of our learnings from this Town Hall with you here.

Thanks for listening. We will continue to keep listening, too – every day.

Sincerely,

Jeff Gennette

Chairman and CEO of Macy’s, Inc.

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Jeff Gennette,

As a Macy's shopper, I am shocked by your overt political message. This letter is highly offensive to me. For you to call me indirectly a racist, is beyond the pale. You are in business to sell clothes not to engage in politics and to try to be my conscience. I have a mother and a conscience already, thank you. You are pandering to a demographic that has looted and destroyed your stores and you should be ashamed of doing so.

It is sad that George, a black man. was killed by police but this issue is not about racism, it is about police brutality. Black and white men have been killed by police brutality but it does not make us or our country racist just because you say so. For you to present it any other way, it is absolutely disingenuous. I do not need your town hall to teach me how to be a good human being, a good American.

"Systemic racism," a new liberal construct invented by the leftist academia to excuse the riots and looting, only exists in the warped minds of those with an agenda to fundamentally transform America into the socialist paradise of globalism. I happen to know first-hand that America is the most tolerant and least racist country in the world.

Since you are now a political organization, I will start buying my linen, clothes, jewelry, and everything else you sell,  from a small business that deserves my dollars more than you do.

Sincerely,

Ileana Johnson

Mr. President, Please Open the U.S. Economy!

Mr. President,

Please open up the U.S. economy as soon as possible!

It is very sad that so many people around the world fell ill, suffered, and thousands have lost their lives to this horrible virus. But the rest of the globe must go on living in a terrible economic situation which is about to get much worse than most people realize. Is it a moral crime to care about the sick but to advocate for the living too?

What about the people who are sick with other ailments and cannot see their doctors because the offices are closed? Are they not entitled to be seen by a doctor? Some may die by neglect.

Can you not see that you are playing in the hands of China, Russia, and the global communists who want nothing more but to destroy the U.S. economy in order to make a smoother transition to take over its people for the one global super-state ruled by communists? They want us dependent on China and the communists for all of our needs - economically, medically, financially, educationally, and every other way possible. And you are one courageous American who has derailed their agenda for now.

China already owns so much of this country! Bring back our industries from China, communists are NOT our friends and allies. China owns so much land and businesses in this country already – Hollywood, the media, banks, manufacturing, etc.

Look what they have done to businesses in northern Italy. Here is the real reason Italy had so much Coronavirus – they have hundreds of thousands of legal immigrant Chinese working in the artisanal high end trade of leather and silk and hundreds of thousands of illegal Chinese immigrants as well.

I don’t know where this virus came from but I do understand economics. China is trying to bankrupt our economy in order to come in and buy more businesses in trouble at bottom prices.

Mr. President, you won’t have money to build up our military to defend us against a Chinese military invasion, and they are building up their military like crazy. You will be too busy finding food and medicine for destitute Americans who are already out of jobs. Twenty-five percent of the labor force is out of work.

How are you going to build tanks with steel from China? What if they change their minds and refuse to ship it after they’ve taken our money?

I am not so sure the economy is going to bounce right back up as some ecstatic economists have stated – “as soon as the lockdown is over, people will go back to work and everything will be fine.”  Small businesses, single family owned, do not have the ability to bounce back like a corporation which can raise money by issuing more stock or get huge government bailouts. Small business owners rely on revenue, their savings, and loans; they can’t raise capital any other way. After weeks of lockdown, how many small business owners, the back bone of America, will be able to survive and rehire their former employees?

Mr. President, can you not see that the Democrats are 100 percent socialists/communists now and don’t give a flip about our country? They investigate you non-stop in order to deflect what they are doing to this country, the fundamental transformation to socialism, on its way to communism.

And half of America is so brain-washed by the public school education that they think communism is great. You have to fight them at the ballot box as well because they cheat and lie.

Build that wall already! If the countless new illegals that crossed our borders so far would not have come here to sanctuary cities, we might not have had this Coronavirus invasion. And their illegal votes might not have flipped Virginia socialist last November.

We need our second amendment, we need our guns to fight a potential communist invasion and to protect ourselves from government intrusion. We might even need our guns to protect our food supply from looters.

Stop giving money to churches and church-sponsored NGOs to bring illegals into this country. Churches have been infiltrated by communists as well and they are no longer preaching the gospel to their parishioners. They are preaching globalism, a mega state ruled by communists.

Americans are too ignorant and naive to realize that the communist ideology has been the most destructive force in history, killing at least 100 million innocents.

Stop giving money to the U.N. and all the tin pot dictatorships around the world. The WHO is a bureaucratic organization run by third world despots. They hate America and would love to see its downfall.

Stop depending so much on computer modeling. The results are as faulty as the incorrect data which had been input by “experts” with nefarious agendas but pretending to care for the people. Just like the global warming modeling scam, the data spewed out garbage because faulty input readings and variables were used.

Mr. President, can you not see who is pulling  the Coronavirus policy strings in your White House? A real practicing physician would not be discounting a potential life-saving drug like hydroxychloroquine for his patients, but your Coronavirus tsars do because they are political hacks supporting their boss Bill Gates, who has invested a lot of money in a vaccine with which he wants population control of the globe. Can you not see they are financially-vested in a vaccine, not a cure? But people around the globe need a cure right now, not 18 months in the future after the vaccine had been developed and tested on humans.

Letter from Tasmania

On January 7, 2018, I got a most interesting letter from my friend Rostislav in Tasmania:

"Many thanks for your 'Exodus from Tyranny', dear Ileana, - historically it’s a very fruitful theme, indeed! But, truth to tell, it’s rather sad to read again and again about all sorts of 'Smart and cautious refugees, who are FLEEING.' I’d prefer finally to read one beautiful day some great article about the unusual 'Resolved and brave citizens, who are FIGHTING their inhuman regimes'.     However I understand perfectly well (thanks not to some faraway Venezuela’s example, but, alas, thanks to my own Russia’s one) that my hope is hardly anything but a rosy dream: you see, leaving for Australia in my 75 only, I gave nearly all my life to the exposing – often with quite a cruel price for it – the Soviet crimes in my articles, in my books, in my later work as the Siberian Parliament’s representative. The same task was even better performed by a lot of my much more brilliant contemporaries, from Solzhenitsyn to Bukovski. So what? So nothing: 18 years ago my countrymen have freely elected (without any machine-guns or gulags behind) for their president the KGB boss. They were most obediently voting for the same Putin ever since.
    Well, probably it’s nothing to be too much astonished about the Putin’s electorate after our witnessing the 2008-2012 victories of the pro-Communist, pro-Islamic and pro-Terrorism 'community organizer' with falsified identity papers – where did it happen? Not in any Russia, Uzbekistan or Indonesia, but in the Land of the Free…
     Your 'Exodus from Tyranny' has made me to re-read most pleasantly – thank you! - one of my most cherished English-language worn books brought from Russia (it was strict forbidden there, naturally): 'Sailing to Freedom' by Voldemar Veedam and Carl Wall about the incredibly hard transatlantic escape in the late 1945 (137 days to the North Caroline’s Cape Henry) of several Estonian families (with their children!) in an old 36-feet fishing boat. Do you know the story? If not, the volume surely does deserve your attention!
With every good wish from your thankful Tasmanian reader Rostislav"

J.S. Letter to Me

From my friend J.S. who wishes to remain anonymous:

"On the way to Maryland last week I found myself in a conversation with a woman at breakfast. She told me she was a poet and her female friend was a novelist.

She wanted to ask me if I knew about the woman's march and if I was going there. I played dumb, but I really didn't know much about it. I asked "what women's march?" She said tens of thousands of women were marching in DC on Sat. I asked, "whatever for?" She said, "to protest Trump's inauguration." I said, "that sounds silly." She said, "he is a misogynist and racist." I asked what "misogynist" means, which I really did not exactly know. She spouted out some definition that he hates women. I told her I have not seen that. She said it was because of what he said during the campaign against women. I asked if they were protesting Bill Clinton, too. She said, "no."

She said something about women having the right to have a voice. I asked her if babies in the womb have a voice when they are being dismembered and taken apart piece by piece during abortions, and  during partial birth abortions if babies have a voice when a scissor is stabbed into the head and the brains are sucked out to collapse the babies head. She seemed to start shaking and she and her friend did not immediately answer, but then went back to the same baloney.

I told her that when a mother is influenced to kill her own children in the womb where they are supposed to be protected and safe that it creates a culture of hostility. They argued that what I said about abortion was just my opinion and that they did not agree with me that it creates hostility in culture, though agreed that hostility is increasing.

I said it was best to stop the conversation as they went on and on with incomprehensible verbiage; that I needed to eat and leave. When I was leaving the poet lady came up to me and said she was sorry because "there is so much divisiveness" and she does not want to be part of that. I told her there was no need to apologize, that she had a right to speak her opinion and I had the right to tell her facts.

I asked her to consider that Jesus Christ, King and Creator of the Universe, came from His throne in heaven to earth as a baby and when grown He, God, is the one who elevated a woman's status in society; if one considers the command for a husband to love his wife as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her, that Christ in that sense elevated women to be more important than men, while honoring both men and women equally.

I then asked her to consider next time she writes poetry to write from the mind of the baby in the womb as it is being attacked to be killed. She said, "maybe I will."

That was the end of that conversation. Strange women. I prefer to be called a "lady". I am not part of this illogical 'sisterhood.'

Note: I concur with J.S. I am a lady and I am in no way part of this strange and embarrassing "sisterhood."