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The Swamp
Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015 |
The first
Americans I’ve met, Pam and her husband James from Chicago worked with my dad
at the refinery. He was an engineer from
a small family and she followed him to this God-forsaken country where everyone
seemed to be a prisoner. They appeared friendly in a plastic way, smiling all
the time for no apparent reason, totally unconcerned about the misery of the oppressed
Romanians around them, barely surviving under communism.
The couple relished
in their monthly shopping trips – it was their escape from the depressing life
around them. They would fly to places in the West that were forbidden to us,
Hungary, Austria, and Germany. She would come back each time with expensive
gifts for herself and her family. She could not wait to return to the land of
plenty, far from “this dirty, drab and awful country where nobody smiled.”
Insulated
from reality, shopping at their special stores, treated by American doctors, Pam
never really understood the pain and suffering white-washed by clean streets, summer
flowers in well-manicured parks, and beautiful monuments erected to the dear leader. The long lines for food, she said, must have
been because the cashiers were really slow and ineffective. Americans did not
stand in line for anything except tickets for games and rock concerts.
John came
for the opportunity to share his
skills in a communist country and to meet new people. In our conversations in
English (they never tried to learn Romanian), the word opportunity seemed to crop up all the time. I did not understand
what opportunity meant because such a
word did not translate exactly into our vocabulary and into our lives,
literally and figuratively. You were born in the proletariat class and that is
where you remained for the rest of your life, no chance at anything else. The
communist elites had any opportunity
they chose to take for themselves by force.
America is
the land of opportunity where
immigrants dream to find success through hard work and a lifestyle with a picket
fence, a nice home, plenty of food, and a traditional family comprised of
mother, father, and children. Nineteen-seventy America was still the land of opportunity
where, if one worked hard, one could reach whatever he/she was willing to
sacrifice in order to achieve their goals. But Christianity, God, faith, and
family were at the center of a successful life.
There were
no pedestrians in the southern town where I lived. Americans were trapped
inside large metal gas guzzlers that drank gasoline like water. Nobody strolled
outdoors except in the square downtown. If anyone saw you walk on the side of
the road, since sidewalks did not exist except in large cities, they would stop
and offer you a ride. It was done from a sense of pity as well as concern for
your safety, walking in 90-degree oven-like heat coupled with unbearable humidity
that kept everyone’s face looking young and shiny.
Many
foreigners who dared or were allowed to travel to America came by boat as it
was still much cheaper than flying. Once here, some took the Greyhound bus
across the U.S. and others, like me, flew everywhere or crisscrossed the
country by car or truck, seldom taking the train.
In a very
small southern town of 3,000, church was the center of life for young and old. I
counted over 100 churches stretching as far away as a ten mile radius in the
county. Many youth trips, activities, and summer camps were sanctioned or
sponsored by the church.
There was a
drive-in theater, and one grocery store, locally owned and operated. The
closest chain grocery store was over 60 miles away. A tiny mall with boutiques
and a Sears store is where people bought their washers and dryers, TVs, lawn
mowers, bikes, toys, Christmas gifts, and clothing. Fancier TVs could be
purchased in a Curtis Mathis store. There was no Super Walmart, Target, or such
retailers.
Some
cross-roads had a small convenience store that the local farmers frequented for
their daily necessities, milk, bananas, ice cream, and candy bars. Americans of
all ages consumed, I thought, way too much sugar then. The owners knew
everybody and, if they just came from the field and did not have their wallets,
the items purchased were put on an account which the farmer could pay later.
There was a
level of trust that I have never seen anywhere else – nobody needed a credit
card. People did not dare write bad checks and credit cards were hard to obtain
and seldom accepted. My Egyptian friend Lula remarked that we bought everything
with checks, not cash. She did not understand the western concept of banking.
People
dressed simply, the local seamstress made a good living with Simplicity
patterns and fabrics purchased by the yard at Hancock’s Fabrics. She charged
$20 to make a dress at a time when minimum wage was $3.10.
The local
beauty shop was a wooden building on the side of an empty highway, no sign,
every lady in the county knew where it was, just big enough for a couple of
chairs, a sink, and the window air conditioner. A southern belle dressed in
jeans and a country shirt did her hair on Friday for $10 and then went to the
grocery store and bought the week’s $20 supply of food for the family. Americans
could buy a lot of food for $20 in the seventies and still only spent about 15
percent of their income to fill their refrigerators.
I was
mesmerized how homes in the middle of a pasture had running water and a septic
tank. In my Romania at the time, country folks still had smelly and unsanitary
out-houses.
Eating out
was unheard of unless you counted going to the Rexall Drug counter for a soda
float or getting a Mickey Mouse ice cream bar at Vaughn’s country store. The
small town had a Sonic drive-in but no McDonalds and no pizza parlor.
Locals
bought their blue jeans at Varney’s Department Store on the square and Elegant Ladies,
each the size of a master bedroom today, or at the Co-op store where you could
pretty much purchase anything you needed to run a farm, including the tough
Wrangler jeans for $10.
If you were
willing to drive over 60 miles to buy food in a chain grocery store, you could
also shop in a real Sears or J.C. Penney store, today’s dinosaurs. Catalogs
came in every year but ordering by phone and receiving packages in the mail
took time and effort and the shipping and returns were costly. The post office
was not conveniently located either. Walking in the heat and the unforgiving
sun to retrieve packages or mail from the mailbox on the side of the country road,
far away from any farm house, was a sweat-drenching proposition.
Homes were
sprawling and comfortable, simply decorated, with A/C units in the windows or
the occasional central air heating and cooling. Poorer folks lived in trailers
who rocked, rattled, and shook during the frequent Tornado Alley storms that
seemed to crack the sky in two with thunder and lightning. Powerful winds whipped and ripped old and
venerable trees from the roots and occasional tornadoes demolished and
flattened the forest, ripping anything else apart that stood in its path, and
sending cows and humans flying through the air.
People dressed
in their best for Wednesday and Sunday church services, followed by picnics and
potluck suppers when everyone brought their best dishes to share with the
congregation. And during football and baseball season, people attended the high
school games and prayed before each game, cheering for the home team.
A stream of
friends and acquaintances visited my in-laws to meet the Romanian girl who was
lucky enough to escape Ceausescu’s communism while the Romanian was bewildered
by all these well-meaning strangers who had no idea what kind of world she had
left behind.
Without a
myriad of TV channels of today, the drive-in was the only cinema that offered
the latest movies. If your car broke down in the middle of the road, kind
strangers stopped to help, change a tire, give you a lift home or to the
nearest garage.
Cell phones
did not exist in our bucolic lives and land lines were expensive. Many country
folks had rotary dials with four parties on one phone line. You had to wait
your turn to make a call or, in an emergency, ask the other parties to get off
so that you can make the call. Everybody knew anybody else’s latest news and
gossip as it was easy to listen in on conversations, intentionally or not.
Foreigners
like me, an oddity from the communist world Americans despised, were a rarity in
the South and Americans opened their homes to them but did not really accept
them as part of their social milieu, they kept them at arm’s length and on the
fringes because communists were not to be trusted. Yet foreigners like me learned
the language and integrated into society, and became naturalized Americans who were
contributing to its well-being and paid taxes.
Today’s
Americans embrace communism and desire to change their society to that utopian
failed state. They take in with open arms the real flotsam and jetsam of the
third world who are often anti-Christian and unwilling to ever integrate into
society, learn English, and assimilate. They are only interested in the
generous welfare.
In the 70s,
it was a shame to accept welfare. You had to be really down on your luck and
prayed to improve quickly so you could get off welfare. There was shame and
dishonor associated with accepting handouts. Today that shame is gone and it
has morphed into an entitlement to everything other people own and had worked
hard for.
The local
high schools would invite foreign speakers who survived and escaped oppressive
regimes to educate young Americans about the evils of totalitarianism/communism
and how dear leaders like Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, and Ceausescu have tortured
and killed 100 million of their own people, citizens kept prisoners in their
own countries and often starved to death.
After
decades of telling teachers and students that one cannot mix Christian religion
and state, the k-12 Common Core curriculum adopted is indoctrinating students
into Islam and into sexual deviance. It is sad to watch today’s public schools,
some private schools, and many colleges in the U.S. preach communism, intolerance
of everyone who loves America, the pillars of Islam, and anti-Christianity even
though many well-informed parents object.
And those
who object to this indoctrination are labeled immediately – intolerant,
xenophobic, sexist, homophobic, racist, bigoted, anti-Semitic, islamophobic, misogynist,
or whatever “hate” label the Left has chosen for the rest of us who fell in
love with 1970s America.
With a few areas
here and there, small towns that did not have enough money or resources to
accommodate the welfare-seeking invasion of illegal immigrants and government-allotted
mostly male refugees, 1970s America is unrecognizable today. The rule of law and
borders long forgotten, is the country still yours?
Say good-bye
to what you grew up with and hello to 2018 America altered not by the normal
change that the passage of time creates but a socially-engineered globalist
entity spawned by the communist Left over the last five decades.
