My Latest Story

Read my latest story at The Epoch Times:

https://www.theepochtimes.com/a-warm-day-brings-back-memories-of-summers-under-communism_2582514.html

Hysteria, Hate, and Histrionics Defines the Left

Narrenschiff - Woodcut

Lacking any substance and sinking deeper into the abyss of irrelevance, the Democrat Party’s platform seems to be defined by the cause of defending illegal aliens over Americans, invaders who have broken our laws by crossing the border illegally. Mexican officials and liberals claim that immigration of any kind is a human right.

Going a step further, Democrats are defending MS-13 gang members who have terrorized Salvadorans, robbing and stealing from ordinary citizens who are so scared for their lives, they give them everything they want – clothes, money, chicken, food, and anything else they demand.

Now these animals who maim and kill for ritualistic sport are coming to our shores among unaccompanied minors housed on our military bases and in church-run shelters. The President was right about them.

The Democrats defend the children who are separated from their parents, sometimes desperate parents who send them alone on foot and on a train called the Beast, sometimes opportunistic and irresponsible parents who send their young with a coyote to the border.

In the case of the woman who crossed the border twice with her child, she left her husband and other children behind. Her asylum petition does not seem like such a sure case if the other children left behind and her spouse are safe. It did not stop Time magazine from running a cover with her crying child and a towering Trump, implying that Trump had separated the poor toddler from her mom - they were together.

But the Border Patrol told Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA in an interview that unaccompanied children are not like ordinary American children of that age, they are “hard core.” They have organized hierarchies even as young as five, ready to “take your lunch money.” They take cookies from the weaker ones. The older kids, ten to thirteen, engage in sexual activities through the chicken wire fence that separates girls from boys. When the agents put up plywood on the fence, they drilled holes in the plywood in order to continue their sexual activities. https://www.facebook.com/turningpointusa/videos/1718816781500364/UzpfSTEwMDAwMDAxOTUyNjA0ODoyMDIyODY4MDUxMDU3MTU5/

Why do Democrats and their socialist ilk hate patriotic Americans who love their country and want the best for its citizens, including border protection and sovereignty? Because Democrats have been successfully brainwashed and indoctrinated in public schools and have become strident and militant proponents of the new world order, of global communism, and of open borders. Anybody else who believes differently is a threat which must be marginalized and eliminated. And the money coffers are full; there is enough to go around for many years of social unrest and societal disruption in the style of their socialist guru, Saul Alinsky, the author of Rules for Radicals.

Every day another famous or infamous Democrat celebrity is taking the stage to vilify, misrepresent, and threaten the opposition with disrupting their lives, their peaceful access to grocery stores, gas stations, movies, restaurants, or just walking down the street.

Public officials of the Trump administration are being stopped and harassed in public places by unhinged liberals triggered by speeches of Representative Maxine Waters who claims that she has a right to peaceful activism. Calling for violence publicly is not peaceful. When you restrict someone’s civil liberties in this manner, it is not peaceful activism.

It is a mass hysteria, hate, and histrionics stoked by the MSM, reading their marching notes from the Democrat Party. The western world is shaking its collective head as to what is happening to our country.

The more successful the Trump economy becomes, the more strident the Left becomes. And the “Right Wingers,” patient and tolerant group that they are, keep their silence hoping that the insanity of the left will die down and everyone will go back to the hole they crawled out of. But, since they have nothing else to offer their voters and supporters, they offer childish tantrums unbecoming of adults.

You would think that all political groups would get behind a good economy even though they may hate our President, because a good economy benefits all Americans. But that is not what the left is about. They show their hateful colors every day by projecting it onto conservatives.

Four years ago, Nancy Pelosi riled Berkley graduates in her commencement speech by urging them to be disruptors. As some on the left followed her advice, now Pelosi has changed her tune and warned people to be civil. Civility is a rational direction but the radical left is still sore and bruised from their election loss two years ago and they are not going to accept Trump ever as their president. They are certainly entitled to free speech as long as it does not incite mass hysteria and violence. http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/206417-pelosi-tells-grads-be-disruptors

Speaking to a criminal justice organization in Los Angeles, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said about the critics of the administration’s immigration policies, “The rhetoric we hear from the other side on the issue, as on many others, has become radicalized. We hear views on television today that are on the lunatic fringe, frankly.” http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-sessions-downtown-20180626-story.html

As one reader, Mike F., put it, “Liberals have never been on the right side of anything. What they touched ended up corrupted, tainted, deluded, diluted, compromised, unworkable, overly expensive, and unwieldly. They started the KKK, the Jim Crows laws, used fake news, and photo shopped pictures to incite hysteria in their base.”

We learn Civility as toddlers and in kindergarten. Civility has a different definition for liberals. Civility for them is harassing our Press Secretary so much that she now requires Secret Service protection 24 hours a day. Civility for Democrats is bringing mobs at prominent Republicans’ homes and disturbing their peace with offensive chants and drums. Civility is throwing the carcass of a charred animal on the front porch of a Republican with small children. Civility is harassing administration employees in restaurants, cinemas, and at gas stations.

 

The 1970s America Is Gone Not by the Tides of Change

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.

 

 

 

 

God Sent Angels in Our Path Today

Today God gave me a profound lesson in faith, humanity, and prayer.

After I drove for one hour with two very sore knees and the artificial one still healing from surgery six weeks ago, I made it to mom’s nursing home room.

She was already dressed, happy, and ready to go. Her childish giddiness that she was getting a hair cut today was almost infectious.

The nurse put her in her wheelchair and the CNA pushed her outside so we could wait for the handicapped taxi I had called. It arrived promptly and, 3 miles and $10 later we were dropped off at the mall. The driver assured us he would come back to pick us up in two hours. I paid him for both trips.

At 3 p.m. sharp the taxi was nowhere in sight. I called the Red Cab Co. and was told that there were no handicapped taxis within 20 miles of us.

We waited 45 minutes, I was in more pain, and about to cry not knowing how to get mom back.

While in the dark garage, I said a silent prayer and, out of the corner of my eye I saw four young policemen on bikes cycling in our direction, all smiles. I have parked in this garage for ten years and I’ve never seen before cops on bikes.

I asked them if they could lift mom and put her in the front seat and her wheelchair in the trunk. Not only did they do that, they even buckled her seatbelt. They waited until we drove off to make sure we were all right.

I returned mom to the nursing home, the CNA took the wheelchair out and put mom in. Out the door came her nurse Linda who carried her to the ice cream social in progress. I kissed mom good bye and walked out the door.

I finally broke down and cried in the car - I did not want to upset mom. She was so happy with her new haircut! God sent a few angels in our path to help us today and I am grateful.

Musings on Electric Cars and Clean Energy

So, with most electric cars, you have to stop every 200 miles or less to recharge for 1.5 hours. If you are going 400 miles, you need 6 extra hours to get there and back just to recharge. The electricity for your car is generally produced by fossil fuels.

Wind turbines and solar panels require backup generators. Just because wind turbines are moving, it does not mean that they are producing electricity. In some places in Europe, they are not even attached to a storage facility, they are just spinning. EU gave them money to install them and they did it hastily for show or did not have the infrastructure nor the money to store the electricity generated.

The electricity produced by both wind turbines and by solar panels is more expensive and not sufficient and dependable to satisfy the demands of our huge economy.

Wind turbines and solar panels require large fields to display, fields either taken from agriculture or in a deserted area with lots of sun and wind.

Turbines chop up wildlife in flight and cause a constant thump, thump sound which affects the health of animals and humans. Whales are confused by the low frequency waves and beach themselves accidentally. Animals living around wind turbines attack each other and give birth to deformed babies. Humans suffer insomnia, tachycardia, headaches and other hormonal disturbances.

Solar panels create a heat flux that fries birds in flight. The shiny mirrors further kill birds who fly into them by confusing them with water pools.

But, let's not allow facts get in the way of the progressive agenda, they've already made up their minds. The young environmentalists on Capitol Hill drive alone to work on the Beltway in their expensive Mercedes and BMWs while they lecture us to ride bikes, the metro, the bus, and light rail.

 ~ Ileana Johnson

Progressivism Makes America Worse

Photo: Ileana Johnson

Americans are bored with their abundant lifestyle.  Western civilization is bored with its wealth, bucolic life, and success.  Academics and Hollywood elites have taken it upon themselves to bring all this success and wealth down a few notches if not to the first rung of the prosperity ladder. They’ve had their fun time in the sun, it is now time for the third world to take over and to teach them how to live, work, and worship the right way.

Having just one protected class in America was not enough; we brought in Islam with its clean living and fertility to replace the declining birth rate in the west. Western young women and men are not interested in marriage and reproduction, they want to have fun, and, if it means having it in the street or on reality TV, the more the better for the narcissistic society that we have become.

Right now the welfare spigot is open and it is flowing generously to the rest of the world. Although America is despised by all, they crowd the irrelevant border to cross illegally so they have an opportunity to our generous welfare system, our injudicious immigration laws, and to take over our wealth and our way of life.

Americans used to enjoy working long hours, overtime, bought every amenity imagined on credit and became slaves to banks, credit cards, the downtrodden, the aging population, and the ersatz disabled. Now they are still slaves to a bloated financial system  but have added their liberal children in the basement and the protected illegal immigrant underclass and pretty much any third world tin pot dictatorship that can force its way into the United Nations human rights council and muscle and squeeze more billions out of Satan’s country, the very generous U.S.A where money grows on trees just waiting to be plucked by intrepid illegals with no intention to ever assimilate or to contribute their share to the society they are plundering.

Gadgets that open the window to the world have cast a 24-hour glow on the faces of all generations, beholden to social media. They are stars, they are somebody, they are Internet and Instagram trolls, they can reach the stars with their hidden identities. They are finally somebody, no longer the ignored taxpayer or the bullied public school specimen brainwashed into liberalism and global citizenship utopia.

The vice of working endless hours every day is slowly dying down, replaced by apathy and a sense of entitlement to the government’s trough in the European socialist style. Nobody is asking the obvious question, the elephant in the room, which group of people is going to replenish the abundance trough if everybody adopts a lifestyle of government dependency from cradle to grave?

Materialism has triumphed for decades and opportunity has turned to success, and the rat race has ensued which turned the vast country into a fine-tuned watch; but its components are beginning to age and rust, and materialism has given way to indifference and apathy to anything that could remotely resemble what once used to be “borders, language, and culture.”

Americans have been brainwashed for many decades of academic excellence and liberal experimentation that they don’t have a culture and their history is bad, their men of fame, their inventors and entrepreneurs were bad people.  Inventions that made life easier and saved billions around the globe have suddenly become a danger to the planet and to Mother Nature itself.

The United Nations and the global elites have taken it upon themselves to socially engineer the masses into compliance with their wishes because, as rich as they are, they know for sure what is best for everyone, freedom be damned. They are gods of technology, of banking, of genetically modified agriculture, of pharma, of law, of politics, and are far superior to the dumbed down masses who must obey or be nudged through the power of the law, the courts, and of imprisonment.

“Thoughts are free” says an old WWII protest song, Die Gedanken sind frei, but corporate and political elites know that you have an “unconscious bias” and these thoughts you didn’t know existed in your brain must be rooted out with indoctrination classes in the workplace. If they could have, they would have physically extracted your evil and unapproved thoughts with pliers as if they were rotted teeth.  If you want to keep your job, you must think the way elites tell you to think and you must harbor thoughts only approved by progressive guidelines of the new world order.

Half of Americans who vote are ashamed of their country, of who they are, of their history, and of their culture. Teachers are more than happy to indoctrinate your children into their twisted political views.

Unconcerned Americans are at cross-roads of self-destruction, following in the footsteps of the intrepid Europeans who are busy committing demographic suicide and societal hara-kiri by bringing in non-assimilating masses of economic refugees from Africa and the Middle East at such alarming rates that many beautiful European cities have already been turned into cesspools of violence and destruction.

The triumph of materialism has finally hit a reinforced concrete wall built by progressive agendas and elite billionaires who can afford tall fences, expensive security systems, and armed body guards, in a gated and protected luxurious life that the rest of us cannot afford. We don’t want their wealth, we just want a safe country with well-defined and protected borders.

The West’s ladder of success is sporting dangerously loose rungs and the last few are even missing.  Can it be repaired and salvaged? How many Donald Trumps would be needed to fix it? Are we passed the civilization point of no return, headed for a down-sloping road into a furiously bubbling cauldron?

To put it bluntly, no matter how hard President Trump tries to make America economically better for everyone, those afflicted by a serious mental disorder, best described as liberal race-baiting and the progressive worship of the dictatorship of the oppressed, are making America worse.

A Repost from Memorial Day 2017

David Salutes a fallen soldier

It was a completely soaked Rolling Thunder day. We got drenched twice at Arlington National Cemetery but we did not stop. We decorated 2 rows of graves with red and pink fragrant roses.
Dave saluted every time as he placed a rose and thanked the person marked on the gravestone for his/her service. I did the same but I did not salute since I am not military. We were not allowed to place flowers on the graves marked with a star of David.

It was raining so hard, the deluge was washing away my tears. I was so moved by the thousands of rows of white marble headstones of the selfless Americans who served our country in so many God forsaken places and died so that we may live so well and free.

It was beautiful and I am so glad I went even though I was in so much searing leg and knee pain, My misery seemed like such a small sacrifice for these heroes who served their entire lives; so many died for our freedom in far away wars, liberating people who never thanked them nor appreciated their sacrifice. I was there to thank them for giving me freedom from oppressive communism and the opportunity to become the best that God intended us to be.

There was a feeling of camaraderie all around us, entire families, children, grandchildren, grandparents, or lone individuals were carrying around buckets of roses and placing them lovingly one foot in front of each grave marker, thanking that person outloud for their service and sacrifice.
People were in a happy mood waiting at the metro station even though everyone was soaked and shivering.

Memory Eternal for those selfless men and women, our true heroes, who gave their lives for our freedom and comfort.

May 28, 2017