My latest article at American Thinker: Kids, don't play with communism

This morning the website American Thinker has published my latest essay.  "Young People, Listen to Your Gen-X Elders: Communism Sucks!" is something that's been percolating for awhile and  I suppose recent events in the American political realm made it time to deploy.  This article is a few things: history lesson (has it really been thirty-five years since I was a high school senior watching the attempted coup against Gorbechev?), recap of the rise of extreme socialism in this country, and finishing off with a stark warning to the young people of this land.  Take it from someone who was there during the height of the Cold War: communism is NOT something we should want to entertain notions of accommodating, much less adopting (or having it forced upon us).

From the article...

The ad begins with a poor Russian peon, bundled up for the harsh winter, cautiously asking a stern sentry about what he is guarding.

“Is toilet paper.”

“Is good?”

“Is cheap,” replies the soldier.

The word spreads down the ranks of the people standing in line at the store. “Cheap toilet paper!” they say in astonished turn. One gets his hands on some: it bends and folds, as if it’s not toilet “paper” at all but lengths of semi-raw wood pulp.

For some reason that television commercial from the mid-’80s has come to mind quite a lot lately. It was played for laughs. But it was based in a very tragic reality, one that most people in the free world readily grasped. The Soviet citizenry, for all of the power that their government boasted of having, were utterly miserable. Toilet paper and nearly every comfort enjoyed by their Western counterparts were in dire shortage. Including food in its usually sumptuous variety.

How we laughed at the sight of all those people, in lines stretching out the building and down the block, waiting to get inside GUM—Moscow’s biggest department store—because rumor had hit the street that a shipment of canned potatoes or new stockings had come in. 

For all of the fear of World War III that many of us in America harbored, we also understood fully well that “they” were in fact quite a pathetic lot. The Soviet people wanted for canned goods and toilet paper, but it was an open secret that their leadership abounded in such luxuries and more. They were a people who nobody in their right mind would ever dare dream of emulating. How did the Russians get into such dire straits to begin with, anyway?

Mash down here for the rest of the essay.  And welcome to everyone who's visiting this blog from the link on the essay's page!

Categories: american thinker, commentary, communism, history, russia, socialism, united states