The Snow of My Childhood

Ploiesti buried under snow in 2017
Photo: Florentina A. 

The first snow of 2017 finally arrived; a couple of inches covered the ground early before sunrise, turning our world into a powdery-white winter wonderland. The woods were unusually quiet and the animals disappeared with the exception of the resident fox. She ran from the back bushes and left a trail of swirling dry snow disturbed by her bushy tail. My two squirrels were nowhere to be seen.

I was planning to go to an Epiphany celebration that morning and was not sure if I could drive on unplowed roads in our neighborhood. The main highways were clear; this time nothing was left to chance, plows and salt trucks were in position the night before. They were not going to repeat last year’s fiasco when a few inches of snow on untreated roads caused gridlock on all major highways and interstates for hours in northern Virginia. I was stuck on a hill top with many others for six hours before we were rescued.

I made it to my friend’s beautiful mansion, perched on the top of a hill and I parked on an incline without fear. The snow had stopped, how hard would it be to maneuver the car going home?

An hour and a half later, I did not like what I saw. The snow was coming down hard again, covering everything with a fresh, thick blanket.  As I looked out the window in the back yard at Denise’s two pink flamingos covered in inches of snow, my mind wondered to my childhood’s snow, a world away on the other side of the globe, in another time, another life, not so abundant as today.

Our winters were always very heavy, icy, and bitter cold. When it snowed, we stayed snowed in for months in the country unless God was merciful and temperatures rose for a few days. Then it snowed again on top of ice.  The city plowed the main roads for buses and trams, but side streets were always buried deeply. The main streets had snow piled up so high on the sides; we could not see the heads of the people walking between the mountains of snow. Boulevards and avenues were covered in dirty slush, splashed with vengeance onto everything.

I am not sure how much the many falls on sheer ice have affected the intense pain I have today, I just remember the constant bruises on my legs and butt. I was fortunate to have never broken a bone, but many of my friends were not so lucky.

To us kids, winter was a time of fun, sledding, building snow men, snow ball fights, and ice skating, but for adults it was a time of misery - walking, commuting, and working in bitter cold. For the elites, who had chauffeurs and their own cars, it was a time of skiing and partying in the beautiful mountainous lodges and expensive hotels of beautiful Sinaia resort.

Growing up with my grandparents in the country, snow was something entirely different than in the city. It created a lot of extra chores in order to survive. Nobody came to plow the roads and the bus arrived often only once a day if it did not get stuck on the way. Once in the village, even though it was only six miles away from the city, you were stuck for the winter.

We had to care for animals every day, feed them, water them, and make sure they did not freeze to death. My grandparents’ four bedroom house did not have heat, nor a bathroom, so they built a tiny adobe, mud and straw brick, three-room structure nearby and that is where we survived in winter.

The first room was where we cooked the meals on the cast iron stove which was fed with chopped wood and sent heat to the adjoining room where Grandma Elena and I slept. Grandpa Cristache’s bed was not far from the stove and as such, he got up every morning and restarted the fire which had died during the night. We did not freeze because we had really thick and heavy wool quilted comforters stuffed with cotton which kept us toasty warm. As soon as we stepped out of bed, it was very cold.

A third room had a separate entrance and was used as a summer kitchen and that is where we ate our meals as well. It was warmed by a butane gas stove on which grandma cooked our meals and the slop for the pig.

The wooden outhouse was located in the garden, as far away from the house as possible, and we had to trek through mud and snow to use it. It was just a wood shack over a hole in the ground. The toilet paper was pages from the main communist newspaper, Scinteia (the spark), with Ceausescu’s brain-numbing lying speeches. It gave adults a sort of perverse and guilty pleasure to use his printed face on our behinds.

Grandma felt sorry for me, a “city girl,” where we had indoor plumbing and a bathroom. But I spent more time with them growing up and on school vacations than in the city. Besides, the commies did not give us hot water often in winter and in summer they even cut off cold water in order to clean and maintain their holding containers of rust and minerals or to conserve resources. So Grandma brought in a bucket at night so I did not have to go to the outhouse to pee; she did not want me to trip in the dark and fall on ice or snow.

At night, she gave me a clean and warm flannel pajama, painfully washed by her ageing hands and dried on the line, clean but smelling like wet dog. We slept cozy warm until the fire in the stove died out and the crackling of burning wood stopped. As soon as we hit the sack, flees woke up and started biting but we were too tired and cold to care. Grandma always fed many flee-infested cats that slept in the attic, in hope that they would control the mouse population. We could hear the mice at night running through the tunnels they dug inside the adobe walls, probably going up to where hay and grain was stored. When we got up in the morning, bleary eyed and shivering, we waited for Grandpa to stoke the fire again before we crawled out of bed. Our pajamas and nightgowns bore bloody witnesses to the many flea bites we got during the night. Grandma tried to treat the cats with a flea powder, probably DDT, but fleas became hardy, they always came back.

Every morning we had to boil water to start the frozen pump outside which gave us water. It would freeze so hard, we had to boil a couple of pots before we could break the ice and start pumping water again for our own use and for the animals.

I remember thinking that I never wanted to be a farm girl, to live in the country, because life was too harsh, frigid, and miserable. And there were so many chores that a child like me could not understand.  Life was hard, no radio, no TV, and no electricity, we used a kerosene lamp with a wick and a fluted clear glass globe.

I can never understand to this day how my Grandfather bicycled to work nine kilometers each way in heavy snow for four decades. He was in good health but, when he developed a hernia and needed an operation, they nicked his colon during surgery. Ceausescu’s communist surgeons were ill prepared to care for the proletariat and nobody was concerned when most of them either died on the operating table or later from infection from a botched procedure. When I was seventeen, my beloved Grandpa, who taught me so much history, told me so many stories, and guided my first seven formative years of my life, died a horrible death from gangrene.

Village kids seldom had time to have fun in the snow – there were too many chores. But once in a while, around the holidays, they went from door to door, pulling a sleigh in the snow, decorated with a pine tree with colorful crepe paper garlands, singing about Father Frost and wishing the residents health and happiness in the New Year.

The snow turned red at Christmas with the blood of slaughtered pigs, a generational tradition passed for centuries. We were not allowed to eat meat unless we watched the animal being killed. I always hated that because domesticated animals were my pets. As I watered and fed them, I talked to them as if they were human and petted them. They responded in kind with affection, following me around the yard.

And here I am today, in this beautiful home, surrounded by freshly fallen powdery snow, so far away from where I came, wishing once more that I could travel back in time to my childhood snow, my grandparents, and my roots.

Florentina's Yard 2017


 

I regretfully left, struggling to control the car in the driving snow, and, when I got home, my cousin had sent some photos of the snow they got in my hometown of Ploiesti. It was just as I had remembered it. I gazed through teary eyes at the image of roads and fenced yards totally submerged by un-shoveled tall and pristine snow and I wished that I was an oblivious and blissful child again.
Note: A video of the 1966 winter in Bucharest.
 https://www.facebook.com/BucurestiulSecret/videos/935231383279607/

That's Right, You Stink, Go Home, Take Bath!

Years ago, in the mid-80s, as a foreign instructor at a southern college, I was assigned two summer classes nobody else wanted to teach because of the un-PC nature of the course. Even though I was an American citizen, I was still considered a foreigner in the southern culture, and as such, who else better suited to teach a bunch of foreign graduate teaching assistants who had already been hired and given assignments to teach introductory classes in the fall semester in various departments, business, economics, engineering, physics, chemistry, biology, generally science classes.

My job was to vet them and to make sure that they spoke English intelligibly and clearly enough to be understood by incoming freshmen. I was to teach them how to make a proper lesson plan, how to develop tests in their subject-area, and how to grade papers in our generous and highly inflated American grading system.

Somehow, I was to make it clear to them that the administration did not like to have parents call the Dean and complain that their progeny had been unfairly tested and graded by the very hard teacher who made Johnny cry when he got an F after a night of partying at the sorority house.

The teaching assistants were to prepare a lesson plan and teach a 15-minute lesson as part of their final exam during which time a panel of three veteran teachers was to grade them on content, delivery, and mastery.

Last, but not least, I was to tell them very diplomatically, without starting a riot in the classroom or on campus, how to bathe regularly and wash their clothes. The president of the college must have had a lot of faith in me, especially since we used to jog at the track together almost every day and talked some during my two miles.

How do I tell an assorted hodge-podge of Europeans, Africans, Middle Easterners, and Asians, most of whom came from backgrounds where soap and water were scarce and very expensive, that they must bathe regularly because body odor is offensive to other people around them, especially to Americans who have plenty of water, cheap soap, shampoo, washing machines, and access to laundromats? One of the first questions on this very delicate topic came from the front row, what is a laundromat?

The math and computer science departments already had a few malodorous foreigners with whom everybody refused to share an office or an elevator; they preferred to climb stairs or held office at the library in the reading rooms or in the stacks to avoid the unbearable gagging stench.

So I came up with the genial idea to say that offensive body odor is part of non-verbal communication and Americans respect each other's space by bathing, washing their hands, and laundering their clothes regularly. Problem solved! I was quite proud of myself and was looking forward to deliver my speech to the first class.

Here I was standing in front of the classroom, saying in the most crystalline voice I could muster, my prepared sentence. As soon as the last word resonated against the windows, silence. Everyone was squirming uncomfortably in their seats; few were looking up at me, increasing my discomfort by the second. Finally, a Palestinian on the back row, who was going to teach something in engineering, shot up, looked at me for the first time in almost thirty days, and said, "Are you saying that I need to go home and take a bath?"

A pregnant pause followed as I was weighing in my head a response and debating how I should say things to keep this from escalating. A jocular Chinese man, always wearing safari shorts with the hairiest legs I had ever seen, said with a large smile and booming voice, in his broken English, "That’s right, you stink, go home, take bath." The entire class erupted in laughter and the explosive moment was diffused.

I never agreed to teach this class again the following summer even though I could have used the remuneration.

Today such a class would be considered racist, bigoted, and xenophobic on any American campus which is kind of sad because some people do need proper hygiene lessons to prevent the spread of disease and to spare the noses of those around them.

I am glad that I am retired because today I would not last one day in the classroom. Everybody is offended by something daily and reality has been replaced by moral relativism.

"Useful Infidels" Vetting Refugees

“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”  - George Orwell

When America was great
Photo: Wikipedia

When truth has been replaced with moral relativism and progressivism teaches our American children through high school programs such as the International Baccalaureate and Common Core standards that they are global citizens, love of one’s country is bad, proselytizing for Islam in school curricula at the expense of Christianity is good, and socialism and the Islamisation of Western civilization have become the norm, it is time to worry.  America is “harboring in New York its own worst enemy,” and financing it with taxpayer dollars. It is time to stand up to the U.N. and its forced globalization programs, including the “refugee” relocation.

“Progressivism is anarchy and spiritual disorder.  It is an ideology of the global left which is based on envy. If you have something and I don’t, you can’t have it, neither can I, and I will destroy it.” Brainwashing our children in schools in this vein is a form of psychological warfare, teaching them about non-existent white privilege in order to anger non-Caucasians and instigate hate and division.

Closer to home, the Virginia Refugee Resettlement Program “Provides services to all refugees without regard to race, religion, nationality, sex, or political opinion.” It is humane and Christian to help someone in temporary need but we have enough needy people in our own country, do we need to import the citizens and problems of other nations, and shouldn’t countries of the same religion that are much closer to the conflict zone offer refuge first?  Must they migrate across the globe? http://www.dss.virginia.gov/files/division/cvs/rr/state_plan/entire_plan/Virginia_2016_RR_State_Plan_submission_.pdf

And if we do offer services regardless of political opinion, would it not be important to our citizens’ safety to know which one of those admitted come here to destroy us because they despise our way of life and their holy book commands it?

Don’t we owe our own citizens a modicum of safety? Do we want to turn our country into a failed Europe, into Merkel’s Germany, an invaded country that has been deliberately flooded by its own liberal leaders in the name of pacifism and political correctness while Germans quietly accept their fate?

Should we not vet these people properly instead of saying that we do when in reality everybody knows that there is no known data base in their countries of origin that would flag problem refugees? And why are there most of them males with no skills or education who become wards of the state immediately, on the dole provided by hard-working Americans who are struggling to feed and support their own families?

If you were a newly arrived “refugee” who came from a poor part of the world, given to tribal strife and wars for two thousand years, would you not be elated to be cared for by American taxpayers’ generosity administered through the Refugee Assistance Program? In Virginia alone, newcomers become beneficiaries of the Refugee Cash Assistance Program (RCA) which is consistent with its Temporary Assistance to Needy Family Program (TANF).

“The Office of Newcomer Services collaborates with the Department of Social Services Division of Benefit Programs on the inclusion of cash, medical, employment, and support services for refugees in its Medicaid, SNAP, and TANF program guidance documents.” (p. 7) http://www.dss.virginia.gov/files/division/cvs/rr/state_plan/entire_plan/Virginia_2016_RR_State_Plan_submission_.pdf

The lofty goals stated are “durable economic self-sufficiency and social integration in Virginia’s communities.” Most of the areas where refugees have been inserted are conservative, small, and are unable to cope financially with a group in disarray, as the newcomers have no intention of integrating into orderly society or learn the language, they expect everything to be translated and conducted into the language of their countries, following their customs and Sharia Law which is antithetical to our Constitution and rejects American democracy.

Brian Sussman stated recently in a radio broadcast that we are vetting Syrian refugees incorrectly. We should not be vetting them for terrorism; we should vet them for “their acceptance of Sharia Law which will ultimately lead to terrorism.” Many who are settled into our small communities overnight, without local knowledge, are not even Syrian, they are Somalis or some other African Muslims.

Do we not care who comes into our country? Do we not care about the safety of our children and our families, of our fellow Americans? Do we not care if these migrants are not contributing to the betterment of America?

How are they going to improve our lives? Are they going to assimilate into our culture? Are they going to go back once this particular Shia/Sunni conflict ends in the Middle East and, will this tribal and religion-based millennial conflict ever end, especially when the flames are fanned by superpowers with industrial military complex interests?

We were told that we were involved in order to improve their lives over there, getting rid of their dictators, so they can live in peace and harmony, the Shia and the Sunni together, and now we are bringing them over here. It’s not enough that they have colonized Europe; they are now going to colonize us.

We spent money, treasure, trillions of dollars fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to make a better country for them, a democracy like ours, our American men have died there or have lost their limbs and now they are all coming over here to take over our country under the guise of refugees. Why not bring in an equal number of Christian refugees? Thousands and thousands have been raped, tortured, and slaughtered by ISIS, and their Coptic Christian churches burned.

These “refugees” are never going to assimilate, it is neither their intent nor interest, they just want to occupy the country and transform it, they want to install Sharia Law; they don’t want to speak our language, nor respect our laws, they are violent and anti-American. They wait patiently for such a time when they can take over our country through demographics.  Each man can have four wives and thus fertility rate is high, while our western fertility rates are declining below replacement value. They are conquering us through the womb.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), a U.N. program, helps people displaced by conflict. UNHCR “mandated to protect and support refugees at the request of a government or the UN itself, assisting in “their voluntary repatriation, local integration or resettlement to a third country. Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, this member organization of the United Nations Development Group was established at the end of WWII in order to address the millions of people displaced across Europe as a result of WW II. The Milanese Filippo Grandi is the 11^th United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees who runs the agency. http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/the-high-commissioner.html

Bruce Bawer wrote in his 2006 book, “While Europe Slept,” about the wave of immigrants spanning many decades as “refugees” and “asylum seekers,” migrating as “a consciously planned act of subversion,” no longer as guest workers.  He mentioned the “traditional Islamic division of the world into Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam) and Dar al-Harb (the non-Muslim House of War, so called because Muslims living in it are commanded to bring it under Islamic rule through jihad).” (pp. 28-29)

Since the recent conflicts in Libya, Egypt, and Syria, we can add other nationalities to the “refugees” migrating for the economic heaven of EU countries with generous welfare systems.
Bawer described in vivid detail the murder of the Dutch filmmaker, Theo Van Gogh, at the hands of Mohammed Bouyeri, the son of Moroccan parents and a member of a radical Muslim network. He pinned to Van Gogh’s chest with a knife a five-page letter addressed to Parliament member Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

“I know definitely that you, O America, will go down. I know definitely that you, O Europe, will go down. I know definitely that you, O Hirsi Ali, will go down.”  (Bruce Bawer, “While Europe Slept,” Broadway Books, New York, 2006)

Bruce Bawer wrote, quoting from the Jyllands-Posten, “There is only one answer to violence, threats, revenge killings, taking the law into one’s hands, blackmail, private justice, blood feuds, camel  economics and imams who have not understood what society and what century they live in: NO!” (p. 212)

Should we sleep like Europe and allow radical Islam to destroy the West from within? Should we not pay attention to the multicultural elite, the “useful infidels,” who promote the admission of even more improperly vetted “refugees” into our country? And for the Islamophiles who consider the rest of us racists and xenophobes because we question the sanity of this planned invasion, Islam is not a race.

 

 

 

 

Joe Keller's Story

If you wish to comment, please do so on his Facebook page.
Ileana Johnson

https://www.facebook.com/notes/joe-keller/the-sew-girls-daughter/1407168982628709

Do You Take Your Grocery Store for Granted?

Bread line during the 1980s
Photo credit: adevarul.com

The Ceausescu clan and their communist useful idiots were quick to remind us of what an enchanted life we lived under his leadership and how terrible life was under evil capitalism and how their people suffered under the boot of the bourgeoisie.  We were so protected and full of hope under “mother” Elena and “father” Nicolae’s leadership, we were told ad nauseam, while the opposite reality hit us in the face every day.

Commies lied to us in order to cover up their mismanagement of the economy, the disastrous five-year plans, the gross misuse of the land, squandered resources, sold produce and grain to the west for hard currency while people were on rationing cards and hungry, and funds stolen from the treasury or from citizens accused under dubious circumstances of treasonous activities such as enemy of the proletariat.

The five-year plans had impossible to achieve goals set by those apparatchiks with high ranking in the Communist Party.  People would go to jail for not meeting these goals in the time frame dictated by the Stalinist bureaucrats, illiterate community organizers, who understood nothing about the economy, about industrial or agricultural planning.  When things went missing in factories, and they did often, accountants and managers would go to jail as theft occurred under their blind watch.

More tight lines for food
Photo credit: adevarul.com

At some point, they ran out of cattle feed and Ceausescu had to distress-slaughter cows. I remember mom saying that beef was tough to chew and purple-looking. To this day, we don’t eat beef. The meat was rationed to 2.5 kg per family per month.  Butchers would chop up bones in the meat which turned it into a purplish grey mass thrown on the counter with contempt. We had to bring our own wrapping newspapers and expandable jute shopping bags to carry food home. In addition to this shopping jute bag, people carried extra cash in case a line developed somewhere which meant that they could not pass up the opportunity to buy whatever was on sale.

This type of pathological lying to the people is not unlike the Democrats covering up their failed economic policies by telling Americans for eight years now how the economic status quo is our new normal, we should get used to the global economy, to the manufacturing sector moving entirely outside of the U.S., and how our jobs are never coming back.

Living under the boot of communism, we could not compare our meager existence with how other people lived because we were forbidden to travel, television programming was tightly controlled, and so were radio broadcasting and the press. 

Once in a while those in power slipped and broadcast successful mini-series like “Dallas” which gave us a glimpse of the opulent and dreamy life of the Ewings in Texas, the faraway Shangri La where money grew on trees and oil bubbled out of the ground.  American movies were smuggled into Romania, translated by a very courageous lady, and sold on the black market when VCRs became available.

Romania was not the only Iron Curtain communist regime to treat their people this way, but it was one of the worst.  Joe Keller described in a recent post, “When Victor Belenko defected and flew his Mig-25 Foxbat into Japan, he was taken to a safe house in Warrenton, Virginia, for debriefing and subsequent resettlement. Warrenton was not much of a town at the time. We had Peebles, shoe stores, grocery stores, an IHop and a couple of other restaurants and a bunch of gas stations. Belenko thought the Agency had staged the entire town for his benefit and did not believe stores had clothes, and restaurants had food in America. It ran against everything he had been told.”

The dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, a man with no formal education, ordered in 1982 the passage of the “Program of Scientific Nutrition for the Population,” a law that established the rationing of food, how many calories a person could eat, and how much one could weigh.  Two years later, the nutritional standards were reduced even more.

Portions and consumption were controlled through the issuance of cards which could only be used at the local neighborhood grocery store where residents had to register each family member, present proof of identity and residence, and the number of people living in the house, including renters or temporary visitors.  Food could only be bought based on the number of people registered.

Lying was impossible as the police informers, the beat cops, and the housing registration office knew exactly where each person lived or if they moved and where. Cards were color-coded by cities and towns. Urban residents could buy more food while farmers were given less rations on the assumption that they grew some themselves. Those who tried to purchase in excess of their rations, when found out, were sent to jail. It was considered speculation punishable by law if a person tried to barter goods or sell food on the black market.  Many enterprising Romanians were clever enough and were never caught. http://adevarul.ro/locale/alexandria/ce-mancau-romanii-vremea-ceausescu-jumatate-paine-zi-litru-ulei-kilogram-zahar-luna-pui-marimea-porumbeilor-1_555f0c0acfbe376e3578994d/index.html

Imagine how mesmerized I was when I first entered the one and only grocery store in a small town in the south, population 3,000, Horn’s Big Star. It was filled with food to the rafters.  I was in awe and I kept filling the cart to the brim. My husband was laughing, putting things back and telling me that they will be there tomorrow. I did not believe him at first, I expected empty store shelves on my second trip.

I was so incredulous! I went to the grocery store every day to buy nectarines and Red Delicious apples. I was so shocked that I could buy fresh fruit in early January. I just knew that it was all staged for my benefit. Albert, the owner, who was a friend of the family, always greeted me with a big smile which I thought odd. Why is this man always smiling?  I was used to sour employees, shouting and treating us like animals, while we pushed and shoved each other in endless lines, often getting to the front of the line and finding out that they ran out of whatever we were waiting to buy.

We have an abundance of food and people get irritated in the U.S. when they can’t find their particular brand. Few have any idea that our grocery stores only stock a three-day supply of food. When major storms strike or even the potential of inclement weather in the U.S., shelves of milk, water, and bread disappear really fast at Walmart. 

Until you have to stand in endless lines to buy food and basics for survival, such as bread, milk, sugar, oil, flour, butter, or toilet paper and vitamins, until you have to live in the dark and cold when lights, heat, and electricity go out daily, when you have no running water at all or hot water is a rare occurrence, you cannot claim that you are poor, living in an “unjust country.” What you really need is a lesson in history, a trip to Cuba, to some other third world country, and an attitude adjustment to reality.

Eating Some of the Crust of a Loaf of Bread

Photo: 1 decembrie.com

I can sleep better at night now that the specter of global communism has temporarily dissipated from our America with the election and confirmation by the Electoral College of our 45^th president, Donald Trump.

One cannot imagine my temporary relief and inner peace, not having to hear Hillary’s hectoring voice, giving us lectures on social justice, equality, racism, bigotry, and white privilege, while banking billions of other people’s money. 

Her voice reminded me of Elena Ceausescu, the “mother,” co-creator and conspirator of our communist misery and exploitation we had to endure for decades. She and her husband brought an entire nation to its knees with a Stalinist police state that was state of the art at the time.

On a really cold day like today, 22 degrees Fahrenheit, I remember my gloveless fingers turning red in the frigid air but holding on tight to my precious loaf of bread called "franzela." I had waited in line for a long time to buy it and nobody let me ahead of the line because I was a child, it was a fight for survival.

No crayons, coloring books, or puppies to comfort and shield me from the harsh reality. I was fighting, in a small way, for our daily existence. There was no safe space for me to crawl into except my mother’s arms. And she was too busy to give hugs to her scared and cold little girl who did not understand that other people, in faraway lands, lived much better lives even in their darkest days. There was no time or place for pampering, we had to become hardened and learn fast how to survive.

We did not need a “safe space” from reality, reality was surrounding and suffocating us, there was no other place to go. If we had the easy and coddled life of precious American snowflakes, full of awards, rewards, and undeserved and unearned praises, we would have never wanted to escape to an imagined “safe space.”

As a six-year old, if I did not lose the money along the way, and if I found bread at the communist corner store, I ate a good portion of the crust on the way home, knowing that mom would be mad and there would be consequences. But I was so hungry and the loaf was still warm from the oven. That loaf of bread had to last a few days with mom’s soup made from bones bought at the communist butcher shop and stripped bare of any meat. We were only entitled to 2.5 kg of meat per month, with rationing cards.

Look around you, at the abundant grocery stores, your warm homes, with water, electricity, natural gas, stove, microwave, dishwasher, refrigerator, and plenty of food. You have indoor plumbing, bathrooms, a washing machine, the latest devices money can buy, TV, a myriad of channels for entertainment, warm clothes, multiple pairs of shoes, a warm bed, and lots of books and toys.

What are you really missing in your lives, in your standard of living? Who is exploiting you and controlling your minds? Your college professors and community organizers are filling your minds with imagined racism, bigotry, and intolerance you harp about non-stop, while looting and destroying other people’s property in the process of demonstrating your lunacy. Count your blessings before you wish for socialism and communism!

When I first started teaching full time in the 80s at a preparatory school for college in the south, I used to tell my classes stories of what life was like under socialism/communism; it was not the failed multicultural socialism you admire in western Europe. It was the socialism in Eastern Europe, behind the Iron Curtain.

When students asked questions, I told them frankly how it felt to be exploited by communism, to have your spirit destroyed, to be kept hungry, cold, and without hope for any future; what it was like to be stripped of all personal possessions, land, home, and individuality, to be stuck in tiny cinder block apartments, to be jailed because you had something extra in your home that was not reported to the all-mighty Communist Party that had every right to confiscate what you owned and distribute it amongst themselves as a reward for their “purity of Marxist thought.” And there was no law or justice to protect and defend us. And we had no guns because they had been confiscated as well.

When students joked, “yeah, you had to walk uphill barefoot in the snow to get to school,” I realized quickly that students had been so thoroughly brainwashed that they laughed and giggled at my stories, so I stopped telling them anything. The reality of the cruel communist life was just a joke to them.

It was impossible to educate people who had been so methodically programmed by their activist socialist teachers before me. Logic would have dictated that they would have asked themselves, if socialism was so great, why were all these people leaving their countries and their loved ones behind, everything they’ve ever known and loved, often at great risk if they defected, to come to the United States, to the west? And why are not Americans flocking to move to the then USSR, Cuba, China, or North Korea, their utopian paradise?

Why are all these “refugees” from the Middle East coming to the United States, into small and conservative communities around the country, if we are such a racist, intolerant, and bigoted country? Do they enjoy our generous welfare system offered to them on a silver platter, a ridiculous system that does not require anything of them in return, not even assimilation?

If you don’t fight to preserve your country, if you don’t stop listening to the brainwashing from schools and the MSM, how long is it going to be, young know-it-alls, before these “refugees” colonize you and your “social justice” narrative? They are already on their way colonizing and Islamizing Europe.

 

Visiting a Nursing Home, a Sobering Reality

 

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2016

Entering the nursing home, I never know what human drama peppered with dark comedy emerges. It is a life that most Americans turn their eyes and minds away from. The residents are the forgotten sick, disabled, recuperating, and old Americans about whom few dare to whisper. “This is where people go to die,” I was told by a very good friend. “I would never put my mom in such a place.” But this is where people live now and they want dignity and proper medical care delivered with humanity and patience.

It is bad enough that they cease to have an identity, they are reduced to a wing or room number. It is bad enough that they feel trapped and isolated as they no longer have the freedom to do things they’ve always enjoyed. It is bad enough that they spend most of the time alone because the families have long abandoned and forgotten them. It is bad enough that they realize their own mortality and understand that, when they leave, it will be because they’ve passed on. It is bad enough that no one takes them seriously anymore. They’ve lost their dignity as they are no longer able to feed, bathe, and wipe themselves. They depend on the kindness or meanness of someone else who is paid to care for them but often abuse or neglect them.

On the positive side, the residents get medical care, however slowly or quickly, three meals a day that they may not have gotten before; they befriend others in the same position in life, and are forced to participate in activities to stimulate their minds and social skills.

The smell of bodily fluids is overwhelming on most days, even for those used to it. Patients are showered twice a week, some screaming for help because they’ve been bathed last month and they don’t need it again. Some don’t speak English but scream and protest a shower anyway. In their third world countries, it is hard to find water and soap or indoor plumbing, so showers are rare.

There are never enough caretakers to handle the entire floor of patients and some are left to wallow in their feces and urine. It is difficult and time consuming to change diapers on someone who cannot move and many are left for 5-12 hours in beds entirely wet. Even babies scream bloody murder if they are not changed every two hours and are left with a wet diaper too long. Patients develop constant urinary tract infections from such neglect. One caretaker to five patients is not enough help. I don’t know what the margin of profit is for nursing homes but the large fees charged per patient should at least include keeping them clean and dry. It is not easy convincing a 160 pound person to cooperate – much harder than dealing with a 10 pound baby.

A few crafty patients escape through the elevators even though they are coded. One man was chased half way down the road on the side of a very busy highway. A woman was sitting on a bench outside, all dressed up, ready to go for an imaginary job interview. Another patient, who can still dial the phone, calls 911 regularly screaming for help; the police comes and stays outside for a while. It is hard to ignore calls of desperation even from a dementia patient. You never know when the call might be real.

Patients are transported to doctors and left there for hours. Nobody comes back on time to pick them up and some are forgotten. When they are discovered missing, a search ensues. A doctor’s office eventually calls a cab, the patient is delivered back to the nursing home and the nursing home refuses to pay the fare. Mary* suffered such an indignity recently when the cabby threw her wheelchair in disgust on the curb, potentially injuring the patient who was semi-mobile. She did not have the $11 to pay the fare.

There is an ombudsman listed on the wall if a patient needs help or is being abused but who is going to call them? Many patients have been abandoned there by their relatives who only show up once a year, usually around the holidays, to make sure their relatives don’t leave them out of the will.

Many patients are so alone, I’ve never seen anybody visit them in the two years I’ve gone by regularly. I advocate for better care for my mom, but most have nobody to make sure their relatives are properly treated and handled with care and respect.

But some staff members really do care, and it is heartbreaking for them to see their patients die - they are sad and shed tears. Encountering mortality and imagining the end of life for every human being is a very sobering experience. Nobody wants to ever live in such a place, they would rather die suddenly.

Jeremy* is the oldest resident, he has few family members left, his parents, who were his caretakers, have passed on long time ago. He still remembers his previous life and talks in halted speech about his mom’s pancakes.

Barbie* kept packing her bags to go home every day for a year and a half. She was sweet, wondering around other patients’ rooms, asking them if they knew when her daughter was coming to pick her up. She died one day when she stopped eating and drinking. She finally went home to heaven without her packed bags. Yesterday I saw her frilly favorite blanket and other personal possessions in a clear plastic bag in the hallway, waiting to be donated.

A Russian man talks constantly about his homeland, his garden, and his wife, especially how beautiful his town was. Nobody knows what he is saying except me. I hear his voice and my eyes tear up wondering how this man wound up in this particular nursing home, so far away from Russia.

The staff is far away from home too, they are mostly African and Asian transplants. Some speak English well, some don’t. Some are dedicated to their jobs, others could not care less. Those are the ones to watch because they are abusive physically, verbally, and neglectful.

They have coloring activities for people with severe dementia; those patients are kept behind locked doors in a wing sadly named Arcadia. The rest get to play bingo, have coffee socials, outings to Walmart, or a Christmas party and a collective monthly birthday party. Musicians are brought in once in a while to entertain those who still have their faculties but are suffering of other illnesses. A beautiful brown lab wonders the halls and enters certain rooms to let residents pet her. She is old herself, with a bad hip, slowly waddling in pain across the hard linoleum.

There is a beautiful Christmas tree in the lobby but most patients never get to see it as they are never ambulatory. Transport vans come and go, delivering the really sick patients on sudden visits to the ER. Some come back, some don’t.

When a new neighbor passes suddenly, the reality of a corpse behind a closed door across the hallway is a very sobering experience. There was once life there, screaming in pain, now it is silence. I am not sure if the soul has gone to heaven or it’s still hovering over the deceased’s bedridden body.

People screaming in pain become a daily reality. There is no medicine that could take their entire pain away. Such a cocktail of drugs would rob them entirely of their humanity and they would become comatose. Staff nurses can only do so much to alleviate their patients’ pain.

A nursing home visit should be a required part of American high school and college education. No matter how ugly, sad, or cheery, it is a reminder of where we all might wind up someday if we live long enough. It’s a vivid lesson about the frailty of human nature, a lesson that nobody should take their good health for granted, and we should behave decently and morally towards our fellow humans.

 

*Not their real names