"Struggles Come in All Shapes, Sizes, and Colors" Facebook Post Opinion written by Mimi Johnson

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2019

As the world continues to crumble in a downward spiral of fire, hatred, division, and utter insanity, I decided to get off of the newsfeed and pay attention to other aspects on my FB profile. To start, I have 700 friends, the vast majority of which I know personally, have shared meals, stories, hardships, happiness, sadness, and many other emotions, and a small percentage I’ve never met, but in an ideal world, would love to meet.
As I started down my list, each name brought back memories of sometime from the distant or not so distant past, reflecting on the fun times and sharing similar battle scars of life. I vividly remember specific conversations that changed my life or impacted me in a positive way, and also impacting lives for the better. Most who meet me know that I try to be a kind, loving person to everyone until you give me reason not to be.
When I was growing up in Mississippi, I had a hard time finding where I belonged. Despite being white, my sister and I had major identity problems because we were raised by two Romanian women, my mother and grandmother, whose values and culture did not align with Mississippi’s cultural expectations. My mom was always so proud to be an American citizen, and wanted to adapt, having left such a horrible and miserable life in Romania, and as the years went by, she became more and more Americanized, shedding some old world habits, but never forgetting her beginnings.
It was almost like living a double life; at home everything was Romanian, and at school or work I was just an American. I have always been extremely proud to be half Romanian, a badge I wear proudly, but the southern culture didn’t see it the same way. I think my sister understood this and decided that she wanted to be just a MS southerner with no ties to any other place, and I desperately wanted people to see that I was a proud half Romanian young woman.
Struggles come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. The cruelty and “isms” of the world are endless. The world handed me a dose of reality at a very young age and I didn’t like how it tasted. The name calling, the shaming, the ostracizing, etc. Watching my mother, despite being Caucasian, being treated with utter irreverence at her job, not invited to events because she’s an “immigrant,” not allowed into social organizations for the same reason, the stares in public when we would start speaking in our language because my grandmother couldn’t speak English, the way people would look at us as if we were aliens, the way we dressed, the food we ate, the list could go on. In the midst of all of these things, I never wavered in wanting to be different. I always marched to the beat of my own drum and eventually, after many years, grew a thick skin. These horrible experiences molded me into who I became as a young adult.
I made it my life’s mission to defend the bullied, to treat everyone I met with kindness, to stand beside friends who are being mistreated, to be the example and hope that others would follow suit. To this day, when I see bullies, I see red and immediately launch into “mama bear” mode. To look at people and situations objectively, never making a quick assumption without all the facts.
Why am I sharing this with you today? I do so to show my solidarity with you. Yes, you that haven’t taken the time to read this, the mistreated, the sad, the angry; I understand what it’s like, I don’t agree with it, but I won’t jump on political bandwagons. Changing my profile picture doesn’t do a thing to change people’s hearts, but leading by example my entire life is the way I have emboldened change. It’s the way that I can truly make a difference in everyone’s lives. I live this solidarity every day, not just for a fleeting moment on FB. My silence doesn’t speak volumes, my actions do. Trust actions and not momentary grand gestures of the disingenuous. Take a look at your friends list and walk down memory lane. It may change your heart and mind today, you may gain a different perspective on things, or it may renew a neglected friendship.

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The Zinns of Revised History

Arlington National Cemetery established on land confiscated

Photo: Ileana Johnson

Elementary school students learn their first version of history from their College of Education licensed teachers. Some deliberately change historical facts to match their social engineering agenda or are too ignorant and lazy to research on their own and thus do not care what damage they inflict on their charges as long as nobody gets physically hurt while in their care and everybody has breakfast, preferably at the taxpayer expense. Once their minds are made up, nothing can change their reality - it becomes the solid rock chiseled by water over millennia.

Parents may be either too busy to check the validity and veracity of what their children learn in school, may agree with the teacher’s activism, or may themselves be ignorant and unmotivated to do anything about it, not caring that their kids’ minds will be forever imprinted with misinformation and social justice drivel. Very young students look at their teachers in awe as the ultimate arbiters of truth.

Middle school students may or may not escape the deliberate indoctrination, depending on how involved some parents are in their children’s homework and school and on how much information students bring home at the end of the day or discuss with their parents.

Middle school students may ask their teachers more difficult questions, depending on their personality and the teacher’s eagerness to answer inconvenient queries from Johnny who happens to be disruptive to her pre-prepared lesson plans pulled from the state-approved curriculum and textbooks.

By high school students have been exposed to a barrage of misinformation from various teachers who may or may not have had a personal socialist agenda, but they were using Common Core textbooks which emphasized collectivism and Islam to the detriment of Christianity and American history facts.

The textbooks used today around the country are almost exclusively Howard Zinn’s version of history published in 1980, A People’s History of the United States. Howard Zinn, a native of Brooklyn, New York, considered himself a radical. The 729-page book is overloaded with manufactured history told from the revised perspective of the downtrodden and the exploited. I am familiar with this heavy-handed indoctrination as our textbooks when I was growing up presented history from the Communist Party’s collectivist perspective.

According to Zinn’s book and other Common Core approved textbooks, America is a land of brutal racism and oppression of the downtrodden but economically is a great place because wealth was stolen from the slaves who made this abundance possible. It is our duty to pay reparations to black people whose ancestors were forced into slavery when they were sold to white men by their tribal brethren in Africa.

Most high schools and colleges in the United States are teaching their students that America was and is bad, yet the downtrodden of the world risk life and limb to cross our borders illegally. If it is so bad, and their third world cesspools so wonderful, why are they coming? Is it because the welfare is great, and money grows on trees?

George Orwell wrote that “The most effective way to destroy a people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” If people cannot understand where they came from, who were those who have fought for their country and why, they become people without a compass who judge what happened in the past through the lenses of modern societal social trends. And our youth today is offended and triggered by anything that does not fit into their philosophical view of the global U.N. compact. 

When we sat in history class, the teacher gave us dates and her opinion of the events which may or may not have transpired as described, or the textbook writers’ opinion, or the government in power’s opinion of history. We understood who we were as a people based on this information or misinformation.

People with dementia forget their own family’s history, who they are, their families, and no longer connect to their tribe and its history. They are lost and confused. All their memories and experiences which had defined them, have been lost forever, in a jumbled mass of neurons. “Wipe out their memory and you erase their identity.” Wipe out their history and they become global citizens.

When you deliberately repeat in class ad nauseam America’s mistakes, while ignoring or omitting America’s successes, you prepare students who have no respect for their own culture, who are embarrassed by their own history.

Since Jimmy Carter’s department of education was established in 1979, progressives have been overtly promoting their dangerous socialist narrative meant to divide the nation and its accomplishments by constantly separating people by race, class, gender, and deviant sexuality and sowing the seeds of hatred, self-loathing, and revolution.

One of my Economics students decried the statistics in the textbook written by Democrat academics, saying that everything is divided by race, age, and gender.  In his opinion, the book, which had numerous editions, was biased and racist.

Academia, Hollywood, corrupt politicians, and the main stream media have invited real and imagined victims of “evil capitalism” which they elevated to a minority entitled to exercise the tyranny of the oppressed while the rest of us must pay reparations to those who have been mistreated by history. 

All traditions that have defined our culture, Thanksgiving, Presidents Day, raising the flag, singing the National Anthem, celebrating discoverers like Christopher Columbus, special holidays like Christmas, Easter, and other traditions have been replaced by ethnic holidays or cancelled altogether.

James Robbins described in a recent PraegerU video that we are now involved in a “non-violent civil war.” I am not sure if it is a civil war but the non-violent aspect of attacks is debatable if we consider the ANTIFA violence on campuses around the nation and in the streets. ANTIFA is a radical organization that fashions itself as anti-fascist but is fascist in the behavior of its masked members.

Even though America abolished slavery and many Americans, black and white, have lost their lives in the fight to end such an inhuman practice, the radical left continues to poison the minds of useful idiots with slavery while ignoring the actual slavery taking place in the Islamic world of Africa and the Muslim genocide against Christians.

Our country is portrayed as unjust even though we are the most tolerant nation on the planet today when it comes to accepting people from all over the world as long as they come here to make America greater than when they found it and are not here to fleece the generous welfare system.

All nations on the globe have been established and reshaped from land purchased, taken, given, won, occupied, or gained following wars and other means of partition. It has always been a struggle.

Our students should be taught that America, although not perfect, is still a land of opportunity if those seeking it assimilate and understand its history and culture from factual data, not collectivized and manufactured history to fit the radical agenda of Democrat Socialism.

America Fundamentally Transformed

Photo: Ileana Johnson

In the spring of 2007 I was teaching a small class of non-traditional students, some as young as eighteen and some older than I was. It was an interesting mixture of blacks, whites, Hispanics, civilians and military who had jobs during the day and took classes at night to finish their college degrees. They were not the pampered and entitled snowflakes of today; they were hard-working Americans from all walks of life, some receiving Pell grants and some on military scholarships.

We always had interesting discussions as most brought their experience to class to contribute to our economic lessons. A few detracted from it with their unruly and disrespectful behavior. It was a bit too late to teach social manners to the two young black women who always arrived late, answered their phones in the classroom, and left often for bathroom breaks but returned with sodas, hamburgers, and fries from the nearby bowling alley.

Everyone was hungry, most students did not get a chance to get supper but some were patient enough to wait for the large break between the three-hour long classes before they bought food.

The two women, who wanted an A just by showing up for class, asked provocative questions such as, why does our textbook separate everybody by groups, age, disability, education, race, when giving economic statistics? Can we all not be just Americans, men and women? The fact that most textbooks are written by liberal college professors and are chosen as part of the curriculum by more liberal college professors and administrators did not dawn on them.

The “maverick” candidate Obama with his “beautiful family” and what he could do for our country and the black community economically was often the talk during breaks. One young man was especially excited as he was campaigning for him around the state.

My traditional college students during the day would often miss classes or arrive late with starry eyes from campaign rallies in support of this “transformational” candidate who would revolutionize America and give everyone free housing, health, food, and college. The excitement was so palpable, you could package it in gold tin foil with a blue ribbon. A few students even endangered their lives by standing in the middle of busy intersections holding signs in support of the unknown Chicagoan’s candidacy.

Schools staffed with Democrats to the rafters organized trips two hours away to hear candidate Obama who, as president of the largest economy on earth at the time, would “fundamentally transform” America into the socialist paradise of his anti-American and racist ideology. He was going to be a uniter and make everything that ailed this country better. At least that’s what everyone thought.

A local radio shock jock was asking listeners who they will vote for President in November. One caller said he would choose the unknown half-black candidate Obama because, “he would screw up things so badly, nobody would ever elect another socialist to office.” He was wrong on the election part. Obama was elected twice and more socialists and communists are elected to office today.

Eleven years later, we are divided more than ever along ideological and racial lines. The economy is improving thanks to the leadership of President Trump who is presiding over a 4.2% GDP growth unlike his predecessor who was busy telling us that a weak economy, less than 2% growth, was the new norm. President Trump is making good on the many promises candidate Trump has made to make America great again, his campaign slogan.

The Democrat side is busy telling us that America was never great. I wonder why everybody is risking life and limb to come to America if it is such a bad, racist, and intolerant place to be.

The entire country is in a social and political ailment. Communists, socialists, and anarchists are slowly taking over the country. Washington is a political Swamp nobody can possibly ever drain. People not qualified to answer a simple history or geopolitical question are elected to Democrat office by Democrat voters equally ignorant, lacking basic information, civics, and history knowledge, and who often do not speak English and vote legally and illegally.

The education of our children that used to be the envy of the world has taken an intolerant Marxist tone. Violent fascist and racist organizations like ANTIFA and BLM have found nests on campuses around the country, formed as their perceived need to enforce social justice. Their anger that the Democrat candidate Hillary lost the election is endless and incurable.

The media is bashing President Trump non-stop, vilifying him, his family, and everything he does. A man who has given up so much to do what is right for our country has become public enemy number one for all Democrat voters who seem to have lost their minds, mired in pure hate and insanity.

Hollywood college dropouts and ball players have joined in the fray of anti-Americanism. They use their microphones afforded by successful roles in movies which have suddenly made them experts, telling us how to live and how to become globalists by giving up our language, borders, and culture to invading hordes of economic refugees from third world countries.

The then transformational candidate Barack Hussein Obama, who promised to heal all the wounds and right all the wrongs, give his supporters free food, education, health, housing, cars, has turned our country into such an anti-American and welfare-centered direction that it is uncertain right now that we would ever be able to recover.

What is good has become bad, evil has become good, and moral values have been replaced by moral relativism, decadence, and filth. America continues to be fundamentally transformed from the shadows.

 

 

Political and Societal Conundrums, Normalizing the Abnormal

As I attempted to discuss politics in my former country, one young cousin commented wryly that individuals are not preoccupied with politics like Americans are; people are too worried about daily economic survival and loss of “entitlements.”

After decades of communism, the culture of dependency is strongly ingrained and is not likely to go away. Voters are too uninformed, he added. They say, ‘who cares who is elected, they are all corrupt,” but then eagerly accept the meager bribes of $15-$20 in exchange for their vote, whether it’s a vote for mayoral elections or for higher office, and then line up for the promised “social benefits.” Once they obtain said benefits, they complain that nothing ever changes in society because it is all rigged against the poor. Sounds familiar?

I’ve never seen so many young people idle, out of work, smoking and drinking in cafes, discussing philosophy and the virtues of socialism, unashamed to extend their hands to receive undeserved and unearned government support, as I have seen in Europe. A few countries are tightening their welfare belts but the citizens protest vehemently.

Our young Americans, the products of decades of public school indoctrination into socialism and Marxism, are equally perplexing in their outrageous and confusing demands.  

They want equality but fail to understand that “free people are not equal.” They refuse to understand because their revisionist history teachers have taught them that communist utopia makes everyone “equal.” They don’t know that communist elites were rich beyond anybody’s dreams and wanted to maintain the status quo while everyone else was equally poor and equally miserable.

Another conundrum is expressed in the chants rioters use during organized mayhem, like “America is capitalist and greedy.” Yet almost half of the population is on some type of welfare and citizens on the dole see themselves as the “victims” of white men, the “white devils,” who succeeded in life because they had bogus “white privilege.”

In a country where every child receives an award and a trophy for participation in a competition and an undeserved, often shocking praise for fiascos, it is no surprise that failures want to be recognized for sloth and lack of work ethic.

When blatant lies and deception are endlessly justified, while corruption and treasonous behavior are no longer punished, right is wrong, wrong is right, is it any wonder that our youth have a distorted view of reality?

These imagined “black victims” predominantly run the government in most bankrupt U.S. cities and enable their constituents to remain on generational dole, asking constantly for more. As they claim to be poorer and poorer, in spite of trillions of dollars spent on the War on Poverty, they have personal property that people in other countries wish they had and fantasized about.

These same “poor,” “enslaved” people, who never mention the real slave states in 21^st century Africa and Asia, are demanding reparations for their ancestors’ slavery, egged on by progressive academia; they drive the manufactured narrative of racism, of bigotry, of hate speech, in the most tolerant country on the planet, in an attempt to silence and shame all whites into blind submission to the bipartisan rulers of the country.

We are not supposed to judge an entire religion for the actions of one Muslim terrorist because he is a “lone wolf” but because one lunatic, drugged-up individual chose to murder in cold blood nine innocent people, we must immediately blame everything liberals ever wanted to change on various symbols this deranged young man displayed or used, and reorient our entire society to fit the one world government agenda. “Never let a crisis go to waste,” even a crisis as senseless and hateful as this one.

The country is described as “racist,” everyone cowers in shame, and immediately agree with the “transformational liberal agenda” that we must purge any symbol of our history, of our past, any word or phrase in our language that may be deemed offensive to someone of a “darker-pigmented skin.”

The American flag, the Confederate flag, and any statues, monuments, and graves must be removed because it offends those who don’t know nor care to know their history; if you are not removing them fast enough, let’s deface them with graffiti such as “black lives matter.” Farrakhan wants to remove all American flags!

If you cannot purchase a Confederate flag in the Gettysburg museum shop, where can you? And why are large retailers banning the sale of the Confederate flag but still selling the Nazi swastika flag and Che Guevara t-shirts, the butcher who “murdered thousands, forced thousands more into slavery, and drove more than a million to exile,” and an inveterate racist? http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/michael-j-totten/truth-about-che-guevara

Young Americans, who live in a distorted world manufactured by the progressive academia and the deceitful main stream media, have no idea what they are asking for or what they are admiring.

As Michael J. Totten said, “…anti-establishment young people all over the world have Che’s face on their walls and their T-shirts. Most of them don’t know anything real about the man they admire. They have no idea he was one of the most violently illiberal establishment figures in the Western Hemisphere’s history. They admire the image, which is and always has been a fraud.”

But we must destroy our own history and all the symbolism attached to it and remake our American past in the fake vision of liberalism that wants to shape the youth of the world into global citizens. The only country that stands in the way is the United States. But this former bastion is crumbling day by day into the dustbin of the former empires. It is falling from within through the work of its elected self-serving representatives and the ignorant and dishonest voters.

Illegal aliens and amnesty must be our number one priority, we are told ad nauseam, they represent a significant and very important voting block for all politicians; money is no object in pleasing them, while benefits to veterans and to the military are being cut.

America is so “unjust” that we must change it and make it like those perfect socialist and bankrupt European countries liberals envy and admire where everyone is “equal” on paper and “social justice” reigns supreme in theory, basking in the glory of failed multiculturalism.

America must change because it has had a good run as an “evil empire,” we are told by progressive admirers of Marx, Engels, Stalin, Lenin, and Mao.

Any perversion that violates religious beliefs and family values must be taught to our children starting in kindergarten, without parental approval. “Free-range parenting,” another liberal category constructed to demean our worth and bring us down to animal level, is verboten. Parents who engage in such practices that allow kids to be kids, play outdoors, or home-school them away from the destructive Common Core, must be arrested and stripped of their rights.

Liberals invent new language, force strange labels on us, trans-gender, trans-racial, trans-normal, trans-sexual, trans-human, just add the prefix “trans.” Liberals are normalizing the abnormal, marginalizing the majority of us as irrelevant. Only then will we achieve the sought-after “equality” and “justice” under the sun.

Will we then be a perfect society built in the progressive image of utopian Marxism with citizen slaves to the Orwellian government where some animals are more “equal” than others?

Or is this just a distraction to do the bidding of large corporations and pass the basement-guarded Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), a disguised giveaway of our sovereignty (under the excuse of globalist trade) to a foreign entity composed of a “committee” nobody knows, elects, can talk about, reign in, nullify, or supersede?

 

 

 

 

 

Infecting a Nation for Politics and Money

“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing.”
– Christopher Manes, Earth First!

“I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.”  – John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

Ebola Source: The Web

Should flights coming from West African nations be cancelled and our borders closed? According to Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the answer is “No, absolutely not.”  “When you start closing countries like that, there is a real danger of making things worse,… governments could fall if you isolate them.”

What kind of logic is that? How is it possible that blocking visas and the travel of people sick with Ebola and quarantining them in the Hot Zone is making things worse? Would that not be easier for the virus outbreak to be contained and allow the virus to burn itself out before it mutates?

Apparently the neighboring countries to Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria have good judgment and have made the decision to close their borders to and cancel incoming flights from the affected countries.

Should Americans care if governments might fall in West Africa where Ebola is raging out of control, when the safety of our own citizens is at stake? We used to be insulated somewhat by our geographical location but thanks to our government’s insane politics we now have Ebola cases and the enterovirus D68 infections among American children in almost all states of our union.

American children were made sick by the illegal alien children who were bureaucratically dispersed and placed in classrooms around the country.  These children did not speak English, were illiterate in their own native dialects, and lacked any knowledge of basic hygiene. In addition of lice, scabies, TB, and chicken pox, the list of infectious diseases they brought into our country is quite long.

The surge of illegal alien children has dropped, according to the Washington Times, from 10,000 per month in May and June to 3,100 in August, but the damage has already been done. (Stephen Dinan, Disease plagues illegal immigrants; lack of medications, basic hygiene blamed, The Washington Times, October 6, 2014)

At least five children have died in the U.S. with respiratory illnesses caused by the enterovirus D68 (EV-D68). The latest casualty is Eli Waller from New Jersey who died of the “polio-like illness.” Health officials “have no idea how he contracted the virus.” Michael Savage pointed out on his website that the County of Union New Jersey Department of Human Services in Elizabeth, New Jersey, accepted $1,100,766 in grants from HHS to receive shipments of unaccompanied illegal alien children.

Eli has died “to support Obama illegal-alien goals,” said Michael Savage on his website. He discussed on his show church charities and child services agencies that have received millions of dollars in grants to accept and care for unaccompanied illegal alien children infected with communicable diseases.

Dr. Savage blamed the spread of the “mysterious” virus which is no mystery to him at all, on this administration’s leftist policies of open borders. He reminded listeners that these progressives have blood on their hands. “They will infect a nation to buy another car, to buy another house, “and to push their progressive agenda.

Prof. Paul Ehrlich spelled the progressive depopulation agenda quite succinctly in The Population Bomb. “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people…. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.”

Markus Bergstrom, chief information officer of Startup Cities Institute in Guatemala, wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post, "Losing the Birth Lottery."  http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/losing-the-birth-lottery/2014/10/03/d1806338-4a69-11e4-a046-120a8a855cca_story.html

According to him, it is “borderism” and “racism” that are preventing the Mexicans south of the border to come and go as they please, borders are a nuisance . I wonder if Bergstrom heard of Sgt. Tahmooressi who is languishing in a Mexican jail for having accidentally crossed the border into Mexico.

A Mexican citizens and an American citizen from New Mexico are only separated by a birth certificate, having been born on the wrong side of the fence, he said. I don’t know what fence he is talking about because our southern border is wide open into the U.S., we even provide charter flights and buses to come here illegally, grants to care for them, medical care, welfare, Social Security cards, and many benefits paid for by the American taxpayers who had paid into the Social Security “trust fund” for decades. We also have the 14^th Amendment  with birthright citizenship that provides pregnant illegals with convenient “anchor babies.”

In Bergstrom’s opinion, we must address this geographical injustice and transform the United State into a European Union with open borders because the mass migration from poor countries to developed countries in Western Europe worked so well, Europe is not a basket case of financial bankruptcy and multicultural strife, violence, beheadings, and overall failure.

Bergstrom says, “… borderism and racism are ultimately questions of ethics. Inheriting the wrong genes is no longer punishable by law, but inheriting the wrong citizenship is. Borderism is thus a sibling of racism as it subjects our rights to the lottery of life. While many opportunities in life are unequally distributed, our legal rights must always be universal.”

There you have it, progressivism on parade. We are all global citizens now and borders and sovereignty are a thing of the past.

©Ileana Johnson 2014

 

 

 

 

Are You Thin Enough or Fashionable Enough for a Boutique?

 

The Jennifer purse by Tom Ford at Neiman Marcus, the $38,100 Swiss is croc leather.

I don’t know exactly what happened to Oprah Winfrey in the Swiss high-end boutique that allegedly refused to let her look at a $38,100 purse because it was expensive and she could not afford it. The saga turned into an accusation of racism from Oprah’s perspective, and a “she said, we said” from the shop owner’s side.

I do know, based on my frequent travels that most Europeans do not engage in acts of racism; they are elitist socialists embracing multiculturalism to the point of self-destruction.

EU has opened its borders to people from 27 different countries and to a massive exodus from North Africa and the Middle East. They have opened the floodgates of socialist welfare and nationalized medicine to anybody who set foot in Europe, no questions asked, allowing them to set up ghettoes of the countries they’ve fled.

Elitist Europeans do consider themselves superior educationally to Americans and see us as tennis shoe wearing loud idiots who do not understand the fashionable refinement of squeezing our feet in shoes that were only meant for torture and of starving ourselves because food is too expensive to consume. Europeans consider fatness a sign of stupidity and laziness.

The French, dressed in their Sunday best, sip wine and smoke at street side cafes, watching sneaker wearing American tourists with contempt, jealous that they cannot afford to be tourists in America as frequently as Americans are tourists in France.

Most boutiques, including high-end ones, allow customers in by appointment only or are buzzed in if they are thin enough and fashionably dressed enough. Anybody size 8 or larger cannot find clothes in their shops anyway and are considered fat.

I saw a shop in northern Italy dedicated to large women called “La Grassa” (The Fat). It was remarkably crass since most northern Italian women were petite, size 0-4, and looked like they’ve been poured into their black pants, walking fast in stilettoes among cobbled stones.

There is a certain look that a customer in an expensive shop must have, gaunt, skeletal, pale, and dressed in the most expensive clothes money can buy or deliberate rags if he/she is a celebrity. Shopkeepers are paid in commission and they know how to profile and pamper a prospective buyer.

Boutiques often do not allow shoppers to try on clothes since they are afraid the items might be soiled by a person’s body odor. Likewise, touching a very expensive purse would be out of the question for most customers, to protect it from damage.  Race does not play a role. Owners know how to appease and please even the most spoiled and demanding among the very rich.

Europeans are very protective of their personal possessions. For example, Germans would be offended and shocked if a person would ask to borrow their clothes or jewelry to wear for a special occasion. That is a cultural faux pas.

Shop owners and their employees are generally not very patient, courteous, and polite as many sales associates are in the U.S. They do not allow customers ample time to choose items for a purchase. They will often walk away if an American takes more than a few minutes to decide if they will buy something or not.

Furthermore, sales people assume Americans do not speak the language of that country, and make unkind judgmental comments about customers, brazenly in front of them, to nearby colleagues. They do it because they think Americans ignorant and monolingual. I have questioned crude remarks before, if I happened to speak that language, to let them know that it was inappropriate to take advantage of someone who may or may not understand.

European mass consumerism has never risen to the level that it has in the U.S. Sales happen only two times a year in a country like Germany and are highly regulated by the government. They do not want shops offering a sale to have an unfair competition over other shops that do not.

I cannot remember how many times my mother and I were profiled in shops in this country in the 80s when there were few foreigners in the town where we lived. We were followed closely as if we were criminals ready to pounce on their merchandise, while natives were actually stealing from them. One small shop owner actually told us to leave because he did not want our business. It was his business, it was his choice, and I never thought him to be racist or discriminatory in any way. There were plenty other places where we could spend our money.

Abercrombie and Fitch profiles, they want their clothes on “skinny people who are sexy.” They don’t make larger sizes because they don’t want their clothes on fat people. It is their choice. http://fox4kc.com/2013/05/10/abercrombie-fitch-fat-ugly-people-shouldnt-buy-our-clothes/

Clubs of all sorts profile. They have the right to choose who they admit to their membership roster. HOAs profile and choose and pick who they allow to purchase an apartment in their co-ops, even among the very rich. There is a certain pedigree required.

To see profiling in action, walk into a high-end department store in this country, and you will experience the same treatment. And it has nothing to do with race. The women are paid salaries and commissions and have learned to profile your body size, the clothes you wear, the purse you carry, the shoes, the hair cut, the makeup, the jewelry, and, based on such profiling, you may find yourself totally ignored, looked at with contempt, or you may be lavished with fawning attention.