They don't appear as often and as vivid as they did when I first landed on the new planet called Utah. Ok it is not a planet but it felt like it to me. People are different in Utah, the strength of the LDS church, its visibility physically and spiritually is somewhat similar to the perception of Poles who are deeply Catholic and very patriotic. Americans are patriots too, but our heroism is of a different nature. Ours, I said the word and instantly I wondered if ours was American or was it still polish.
Yes I have been an American citizen promoted to become one by the unfortunate election of the divider in chief Obama. I didn't call him president, because he doesn't represent me, I didn't vote for him and he is destroying everything I believe in, literally everything.
I can see the beginning of the end, and I have seen the end before.
As many of my friends know I grew up in Poland. Oh, how beautiful Poland is, so green and classy and you trip over history everywhere you go, a millennia long history. Our people are strong, hard working, smart, but they have been tried and on a brink of destruction so many times. Pick up the book by Norman Davis" Gods Playground" very well written history of Poland. Watch a production done by Newt Gingrich about the Pope, my pope John Paul II and his divinely inspired course of action that lead his country, my country to freedom.
I was born in Communism, we liked to call it socialism back than, but it was worse, it was the full blown communism imposed on us by the Soviets, but my new country-America had a hand it our unfortunate situation too. After the WWII the allies divided Europe, Poland wasn't important to the West. Just as they let us down and didn't adhere to the agreements we had before the war and never came to help us after Nazi's invasion, again the western countries of England and France and yes America let us be taken without asking for our permission. In Yalta at the post war conference we were given to the soviets as part of the Eastern European block. We were the Warsaw Pact, the opponent of NATO.
The people were not, but the government was. The birth of communism was swift and painful. Those opposing, disagreeing either fled to other countries, if they could or were imprisoned and in most cases never heard from again. Nobody celebrated those political prisoners the way the west celebrated the terrorist Nelson Mandela. Our prisoners were tortured, killed, or left to die in circumstances they could not combat.
My family remembered free Poland, they secretly talked about it, it was always very dangerous to talk about the benefits of the free market.
The country went back to work, we had inflated 100% employment, and nobody was making any livable wage. The huge monstrous housing blocks were build with people having as little as 20square meters to live in. The government wasn't only the ruling power it was the God. Everything suddenly was to be fair, but how and who defines fair? The government did. Fair was that everyone has education , everyone has job, everyone agrees with the proletariat representing government and everyone is equal. Only in the eyes of God everyone is equal. Government is not God. Black market sprang to business, if you worked for high ranking government office you had a good life, if you agreed with them politically you had a chance to get a good government job, otherwise you were masses. The land, the homes, the properties of everyone, including my family were confiscated and divided. In our Jordan residence a school was established, the property now belonged to the collective. Belonging to the collective meant nobody cared, but most importantly the rich or noble were stripped of their families heritage, belongings. People who lived in the city as my grandmother did with my dad who was in his college years had strangers put in their homes by the government. If I think about it, it reminds me of the English being put in the American homes during the war. The government decided how much square meters each person was entitled to and if you had more, they would make you share it with the needy or whoever came across their desk.
One of the way to keep people busy and on edge was the lack of food. Believe me it wasn't because we didn't produce, or our farm lands couldn't produce. It was artificial and made to keep people live day to day, week to week, month to month. If people had a hard life, spending time on waiting in lines for bread, meat, soap, shoes, clothes, anything, that they didn't have time to rebel.
I remember waiting in lines on Christmas Eve to make sure we had bread and meat for Christmas. You could never buy too much, there were restrictions, and I as a 10-11 years old child stood in line at midnight waiting for the store to open at 7AM so I would be close enough in line to actually be able to get the meat or sausage. There was never enough supply. Again it wasn't because we couldn't have it, it was always send off to The Soviet Union leaving us with mere left overs. We lived like the people in "Hunger Games" the book brought it so close to home.
Our fields would be left unattended, because they belonged to the government and nobody cared for property that wasn't theirs.
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