Currently, I’m reading Monica Crowley’s new book “What the BLEEP Just Happened?” It’s a great read. She’s got a chapter in it titled “The Skinny Socialist is a Big Fat Liar.” Gotta love Monica for a chapter title like that. Her last chapter “America Unleashed” pretty much tells the reader: while things may look bleak now—it’s not over. I still haven’t been able to bring myself to believe America is over. This country has weathered many storms throughout history. In the long run, I believe that America will be able to shake what craven liberals like Obama have done to this country in the last four years.
Know this: it took many, many years for things to get like this. It’s going to take many years to correct the damage that has been done. We’ll be lucky if we can simply even the score.
Below is a transcription of the beginning of Crowley’s last chapter. She tells the story of her conversation with a New York cab driver who hailed from the former Communist Republic of Bulgaria. It’s amazing what you we can learn from our friends from the East. I have had similar encounters with such people. My last interaction was with a sixty something year old from the former Soviet Union. We were both working the phone bank on an early Saturday morning for the McCain/Palin campaign just a week before the general election.
He was an endearing man. Very passionate against Communism. Like Monica’s cabbie, he’d seen full blown communism and oppression up close. He fled it to America in 1982, married and began his new life here. With his thick Russian accent 26 years later, here he was two cubicles away from me trying to warn voters of what was about to happen if they elected a communist into the highest office in the land.
Needless to say, America didn’t listen.
I’m proud to say that I have a story to tell that’s similar to the one below. I was lucky to encounter such wisdom by a person from another world. I, like many conservatives in 2008, understood his warning.
“You are American, yes?” The burly NYC cabbie looked at me through the rearview mirror as he asked the question, his voice saturated in a heavy Eastern European accent.
“Yes I am,” I replied.
“Tell me: what are you doing?”
About a year into Barack Obama’s presidency, I climbed into this man’s cab for a short trip across Manhattan. Engaging city taxi drivers can go one of two ways: it can be enjoyable, interesting experience or it can in end in a torrent of profanity in multiple languages. This particular cabdriver was friendly and gregarious, particularly when I asked him about the source of his accent.
“The Bronx,” he replied. “Oh, you mean where am I from?” He paused for a moment and then said, “I was born in Bulgaria. But I am an American.” And then this big, strapping man grew emotional as he told me his story: “I am American by choice. And you’ll forgive me, but I think those of us who are Americans by choice rather than by birth have a different view. Many Americans, you do not appreciate your freedom. You have always had it. You don’t know anything else. I have lived under communism. I have been beaten and put in jail. I have heard the knock of the secret police in the middle of the night. I have seen neighbors disappear. I have had the government open my mail and listen in to my phone. I have gone days eating potatoes because the store shelves were bare. There was no medicine, no good doctors.”
His voice squeaked with despair and frustration as he railed against what he called “enslaving debt,” “communist medicine,” and a jack booted government.” As he stopped to my destination, this refugee from a communist hell turned to me and said, “Please do not let this happen to America. It’s creeping in here. It’s creeping in fast. We came to America to get away from socialism. If it comes here, where will we go? Where will any of us go? There’s no hope anywhere else. You’re letting your freedoms be taken from you, and you don’t even see it. Or, you see it and you don’t care. And that’s the worst kind of treason.”
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