My Musings Today

I was extremely lucky to emigrate legally in 1978 to the land of opportunity and freedom, the United States of America, and I thank William for that. I left behind everything I knew, held dear, and loved. I left my parents behind, hoping that I would be able to bring them with me later.  I did not want to spend the rest of my life under the oppressive boot of the Romanian Communist Party.

I was sick and tired of the daily indoctrination in school, on television, on radio, in the state-controlled media, tired of marches to praise the communist dictator and his wife, tired of being hungry, cold, of living in the darkness, of being cut-off from the rest of the world, tired of being spied upon by our neighbors, relatives, who received extra rations of food, tired of being snitched on by the state-paid informants, having our mail opened, our phones tapped, and deprived of any human rights. My husband helped give me freedom and, I would have kissed the ground at JFK airport upon my arrival, but the ground was frozen.

I wanted to be free of fear, free to travel, free to move about more than a radius of 30 miles. I wanted to have enough food, good shelter, heat, electricity, good medical care, to become a young doctor without having to sell my soul and allegiance to the Communist Party, to not be afraid and suspicious of everybody, to have children who were not told in schools that the dictator and his wife were their parents. Hillary’s “village” did not own our children, the Communist Party did.

The communist agitator at my Dad’s factory lived in our apartment complex. His family was well-fed, had medicines, good medical care, clothes, and other amenities that we could only dream of - all because he spied on his co-workers and filled their heads with lies about the virtues of communism, while they starved or stole things from work and traded with others in a theft-based bartering system. Nobody thought they were stealing because the proletariat was supposed to own everything. In reality, they owned nothing and were pretty unhappy about it.

I was lucky to escape legally and so was my mom, who defected two years later. My dad, unfortunately, was not so lucky. Even though we tried to bring him, he was constantly denied a passport, a visa, and was put under arrest at work every time the president happened to be in town. My Dad died eventually in a hospital at the hands of the communists, where he received no medical care, food, or IV fluids for three weeks. His sister kept him alive one spoon full of water at a time. He died on May 12, 1989, down to half of his original weight.

I never would have believed you if you had told me in 1978 that America would turn communist in my lifetime. I would have laughed. But here we are – every day I have communism PTSD, something is happening that the rest of you are ignoring, lulled into a false sense of freedom and security. You do not realize that the communists within are destroying our country. I shall list a couple of the latest examples.

1.    New York City will begin tracking the carbon footprint of household food consumption and putting caps on how much red meat can be served in public institutions in order to achieve a 33% reduction in carbon emissions from food by 2030.

I beg you to wake up! This is what communism dictated to us - how much food we could consume per day, how many calories a day one could ingest according to how strenuous individual jobs were. We seldom found meat, medicine, and necessities for sale - the shelves and stores were empty! We survived with so little, and everybody was gaunt. There were no obese people around. We were all thin on Ceausescu’s diet, but we were malnourished.

Everywhere I turn today, there are more news of technocratic fascism, government globalism, and neo communism. Academia never let communism die – commies hid underground and emerged slowly first from universities, accelerating their coup since Obama’s regime. Academics reject capitalism and conservatism but promote communism.

2.    Universities pay radicals to speak to student bodies while rejecting conservative Americans altogether. Angela Davis, a racial activist and VP nominee for the Communist Party USA in 1980, who was previously on the FBI’s Most Wanted List, was the keynote speaker at the University of Texas, Austin, on April 4, 2023. She was paid $25,000 to bash capitalism as exploitative. Oh, the irony!

Let me tell you what exploitative was under communism: working for low salaries regardless of education, skill, and training, living in terrible conditions, without water, without hot water, without heat, in 450 square feet apartments without electricity most of the time, being forced to do free labor in the fields to plant and harvest crops, being equally poor, equally paid, and equally miserable, dying in dirty hospitals because the medical care was subpar and low-skilled doctors were experimenting on their patients, nobody was held accountable, there was no justice, and nobody to sue or complain about. The state was the ruler, the judge, and executioner. People had no rights at all. If we asked questions, we were told, democracy had gone to your heads and we were disappeared, never to be seen again. That is exploitation!

Do you want communism? It is already here in daily smaller installments. Wait until they come to confiscate your guns, your homes, and your bank accounts. When they are done with each of you, as Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, said, “You will own nothing and be happy about it.”

 

Ileana’s Musings During Corona Times

The forest is coming back to life

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2020

I’m going to start dating everything with B.C. (before Corona) and A.C. (after Corona) or, if I am in a day of reckoning economic mood, B.C. (before collapse), A.C. (after collapse). I know I’ve become a full-fledged American because I have gained humor during dire times when I should be crying. Why take everything so seriously, we must be self-deprecating once in a while.
My wardrobe has taken a turn for the worse but I seem to be blissfully happy about it. I didn’t just fall off the fashion train, I mix and match loud pajamas in mismatched colors, and warm and comfy sweaters with pants Mims bought me long ago in my favorite colors, loud pink and sea foam blue. They hang loosely so I can be comfortable. I am not trying to impress anybody except my waist.
I keep in my car two coats, a Nanook-of-the-north model with a hoodie against the wind called “the hawk” in black and one in red so all the critters can really see me wandering and run away, a wool blanket, three different umbrellas, plenty of empty coolers for food preservation, a walking stick, gloves, hat, forest map in case I get lost, which is often, pepper spray, my camera, Purell, water, face mask, sun glasses, readers, hand lotion, makeup bag I never use (the bears, deer, and foxes don’t care), and other survival items.
My car looks worse inside than a college kid’s vehicle, going home to do laundry. I would buy a new car but why ruin its beauty with all my junk?
I’ve become that person I used to make fun of in my twenties, with graceless stretch pants and seemingly color blind.
How many times have you opened the door to your house and looked outside at the empty street and neighborhood? Close the door, it's cold and drafty and the flies and mosquitoes are coming in!
Tomorrow we will spend the day in the basement. That way it will feel like we are visiting and dirtying up someone else's house. For ambiance, we will turn on the lamp that's never plugged in because nobody reads there – it’s too cold. We could open the door but the critters may crawl in and it's still pretty darn cold outside too. But the grass looks pretty and the snakes are alive too. Chip and Dale are busy digging up my flower beds, looking for acorns they’ve buried for the winter.
The house is clean like it’s never been before, and I even vacuumed the tiny space between the drier and washer with all the lint accumulated over the years. I could have made a really big dust bunny out of it but I'm not artistically inclined and not yet bored out of my mind.
We keep asking Alexa what the temperature is outside. “It does not matter, suckers, you are still stuck inside on China Corona virus lockdown.”
Gas is so much cheaper but there is no place to go because everything is closed and under police surveillance. The tiny river beach at the nearby vast park is surrounded by yellow tape like a crime scene. I am thinking about taking up yoga in the sand because the governor said that exercise places should remain open. Maybe I can also take up day fishing, it is still allowed but night fishing and boating are “verboten.” I don’t own a boat nor fish so I don’t know that the virus is catchier after sundown; you probably drink too much beer and get too close for pandemic safe “social distancing.” Our Democrat governor Northam did extend our lockdown until June 10 which seemed like an arbitrary date until I learned that June 9 is the Republican primary so we won’t be allowed to vote in person.
Let me open the door for the umpteenth time to see if the deer family or the fox have come by looking for food.

My Musings from a Year Ago

Millennials have been indoctrinated to admire primitive cultures and to despise their own civilization. Why in the world would any civilized American want to revert to primitive societies or to the way of life a century or so ago?

Diana Gabaldon described the hard life of the 18th and 19th centuries best, "People ate, slept, and frequently copulated, crammed into tiny, stifling cottages, lit and warmed by smoky peat fires. The only thing they did not do together was bathe - largely because they didn't bathe."

Like I used to say in jest to southerners asking me in 1978 if we bathed in Romania, "we bathed once a month whether we needed it or not."

Of course, in reality, our bathing was predicated on whether we got hot water or any water at all. The communists had their own secret schedule to keep us starved and in need of water. Heat (via steam) was optional in winter.

On the Teacher Appreciation Week

My musings on this Teacher Appreciation Week:

Photo credit: Vasile Tomi

To my high school English teacher who said that I would never amount to anything because my parents were blue collar, I’m glad you were so wrong.

To my grammar and Romanian language and literature teacher, thank you for being so tough, I really learned a lot from you.

To my history teacher, Mrs. Avram, who challenged my thinking by playing the devil’s advocate, thank you. She was eventually allowed to immigrate to Israel under a strange deal Ceausescu made with Israel to allow Jews to repatriate in exchange for monetary payment in hard currency.

To our world literature teacher who brought his violin to class and played classical pieces that he thought matched the mood and the era of a novel we were reading and discussing, thank you. You taught me the love of music and the appreciation for fine writing.

To the math teacher who terrorized us with complex calculus that she could not solve herself, you taught me to be a better teacher than you were, to admit that I did not know something and that I should study it further instead of giving students a bogus answer.

To the gym teacher who tried to keep us physically fit and healthy even though we had so little food.

To the disciplinarian principal who did not mind doling our physical punishment as well as detention for the worst among us.

To the home room and physics teachers who tried very hard to indoctrinate us into the communist party, you failed miserably with me.

To the petite chemistry teacher who tried to teach us a lot of theory without the benefit of a lab and experiments - I learned the table of elements and enjoyed organic chemistry more.

To the home economics teacher who wore immaculately pressed clothes every day, thank you for teaching me how to sow, how to make clothes and a pattern, how to knit, cross stitch, and embroider. Unfortunately I failed at cooking because it bored me terribly. Who wants to be all day in the kitchen? Certainly not me. I like to cook simple food that does not require toiling in the kitchen for hours.