I had one of the most frightening conversations during a ride to the airport this morning with a Cabbie that lived under a horrible tyrant. He gave me his predictions for the United States.
I recognized him from a picture years and years ago because - unbelievably- when I was in parochial school, I had written him a letter when he was in prison in Romania.
Yes, I had seen him on an Amnesty International poster. Before I go on, the conversation we had was about everything that concerns Kossacks. Bush. The war. Our fragile Democracy. Our very freedom.
Florin was born and raised in Communist Romania and fought his corrupt government tooth and nail just to be free. They imprisoned him, took him outside the purview of any lawyers, any embassies, any churches or otherwise any place he could find representation.
Then they tortured him.
Some nun brought his case to some university students in Hungary and next thing you know, he became a minor cause celebre for Amnesty International.
Letters like mine freed him.
"Where did you live after you left Bucharest?" I asked him.
"Paris. London. Switzerland."
"What brought you to America?"
"I hated the Communists and the mess they made of everything. I wanted to live in a country that was free."
A long pause followed.
Then I told him, "I have soured on America frankly."
Another long pause, then he sighed and said "Yes, me too. Me too."
"Well you've lived in tyranny sir, what do you think of Bush?"
He spoke in a very thick Romanian accent, "He is as bad as any Communist leader I ever fought against. He is a bad bad man and he has bad plans for this country."
"Now how do you know all that?" I asked him.
"I have seen all this before."
"OK, give me your prediction."
Another long silence.
"I think the same thing will happen as in Romania when I grew up there. It starts with fixed elections. First the 2000 election was fixed and then the 2004 election was fixed. It happened in Communist elections just like it happened here. The people who count the votes are all in the government that's in power. And even when it seems like people have had enough, the tyrant will always somehow come out winning just enough to make your conspiracy theories seem ridiculous. Just like in Romania and Bulgaria of the sixties and seventies, the press may even report problems with elections, but Bush knows that Americans are lazy. I am sorry my friend. Maybe not you. But Americans are lazy and they will not seek their freedoms. Because it is always frightening to fight the government. But you are mistaken if you think you will avoid trouble by going along with the government. One day you will write a letter to the editor and sign your name, and then the next time you are at a train station, they will tell you `you cannot ride'. Or at the airport they will say you cannot get on a plane. Or they will stop you are the border, and just like Romania and the other Communist countries, America will become your prison. When the 2000 elections happened, my 89 year grandmother-in-law asked if we could go back to Bucharest. You see, this smells just like the communists in Europe to her. Corrupt. Incompetent. Totally controlling the media, the elections. Once they have that, and a lazy press, that's it. I mean that's it. They will continue to install an overbearing government where idiots who wear white gloves and badges, low-level-small-paycheck bureaucrats get to stop you at airports and demand to know where you are from and where you are going and what your business is. They will ask if you support the Party, or "who did you vote for?' It will come down to the day when you will see the police jump on someone for no reason and you will turn your heads and act like you have seen nothing. Your neighbor's wife will knock on your door desperately at 3 in the morning and tell you her husband was arrested out of his sleep last night. And she will cry and ask where he is. And you will make her coffee and call the local police and they local gendarme or sheriff or whatever will come by and pat her on the shoulder and will say he was taken by the Feds and they have no idea where he is going."
"You will notice more and more changes. The leash will get shorter, little at a time. And so slowly even you will not protest because you will hardly notice. You will lose your freedoms little at a time. One day you will speak out against the president in hushed tones even at a party. Then you will drive home from the party and steam at yourself for being so much like a little pussy cat. Then you will wonder who heard you."
I asked him about Iran.
We stopped at a light and he turned to me and said "Iran is a sovereign nation. Their elections were democratic. They may not be totally free but they are no less free than America is. What right does this country or any country have to tell another country what weapons they can have or not? I mean when I was a child in Romania they scared us with the United States. They said you dropped atomic bombs on people. It turns out to be true. And guess what, America has more atom bombs than anyone. If America has atom bombs, what right do we have to tell others they cannot?"
"OK," I said. "Give me your prediction. Please."
"Look," he said, "I went home to Bucharest about a year ago and saw some family. Right now they have more freedoms in Bucharest than you have here. That's the irony. I have children and grandchildren here in America and I see little future for them here. America manufactures nothing. So there will be no real economy in the future. The only thing made in America are deals."
It stunned me to hear this. Then again, he had lived there and I did not. I asked him what freedoms they have that we don't have.
He answered "In Romania we can burn flags, threaten to kill the president. The government is not allowed to give shared fund- or taxes of any kind to churches. In Romania, if the government took someone with out charges, they would be freed within a day or two. Not in this country. In Romania you are not raped in jail cells. In America you are not only raped in jail, they use the fear of rape and beatings to control you. In Romania, no one tells you you can't have an abortion. In many areas it is illegal. In others it is fine. All over the country you can get an abortion if you need one."
"You still haven't made your prediction," I reminded him.
"It may take about ten years. But it will be very much like the old Soviet Union. Incompetent government. Walls will appear around you. On the borders. Your internet sites will be scrubbed or monitored or may suddenly disappear. A government will control everything from one branch, businesses too will be in bed with the government. One day you will see your boss have the power to go through your bags. One day your corporation will have more rights than you have. Just like in Romania, we had conspiracy theories. One nuttier than the next. It turned out to be mostly true these things. This thing that has happened to America was planned for a long time. And like Romania, people will forget and lose all the principles that your country was founded on. We had a Constitution in Romania. Under the communists?....just words."
He pulled up to the curb at the airport, I paid him and he gave me a receipt.
"Do you have kids?" he asked me.
"No, I don't"
"Are you married?"
"Yes."
"Leave. That's my advice to you. Leave and don't look back."
My plane is boarding. So I will finish this when I land.
UPDATE
Ok, by now we were at the airport. It was very very early and it was raining. It had been raining all night and there were so many taxis coming in and out and it was so wet that everything had a halo around it. We sat and talked for about ten minutes before I finally paid him and grabbed a receipt and walked in.
So this is as best as I can remember what else he said
He said "Think about how hard they have come down. Howard Stern is off the air. CBS paid hundreds of millions for a second of boob. Fox is all lies. ABC played that lying 9/11 thing. Disney particpate. They tell big big lies and the media hardly replays the corrections that come later. People still think the war was a good idea and they believe all this terror apocalypse. This just an old Soviet governing idea: control by fear. They told us the gigantic powerful technologically Americans would incinerate us. The big Americans are now saying a band of thugs would incinerate...uh...you... America. Same Circus, Different Clowns."
I LAUGHED OUT LOUD.
He talked about a foundation he has in Romania that won a quarter million grant and he had to turn it down, he said.............. "because the Bush Administration was going to make us all sign a promise only to use the funds for abstinence only programs. I could have used that money. I am so upset. The media is in bed with the government. Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, two very bad people given so many interviews. Big media channels. They are treated very well. You see? If you changed the countries names in this, you would say this is a dictatorship. It is tyranny already here. Not terrible, but it will probably get worse. Look at all lies they tell. Children are learning that winning, not character, counts. Ceaucescu trained us to be subservient. In Romania, its stand in long lines quietly. Or pay high prices and see nothing on the shelves even when we knew the warehouses were full. You walk in there ( the airport-ed ) and if the tell you stand on your head you will do it. They are training you. All of you."
.......MY HEAD WAS SPINNING.........
"They will tell you what to do and you will let them. I have seen it."
So this is all written fairly soon after we spoke, I had to get through the terminal and all, but I managed to get most of it down.
And now in a first, I am pulling a comment out of the thread and planting it at the end of my tale, because her story is very interesting.
in Communist Romania touring with my college choir in 1976. What we saw there (and it wasn't too hard to see through the facade they put on for us) was a country cowed into submission. No one knew who might be watching them. Citizens were afraid to talk to us about anything other than pleasantries because they knew that one verbal misstep would get them arrested.
Some of our number thought we were making this stuff up - they were the ones who didn't care about anything except having a great time - but our suspicions were confirmed when we heard that the brass professor who toured with us got a post card the next summer from Julian, one of our two tour guides, with a one-sentence announcement: "I have escaped from Romania."
Turns out that he had earned the trust of the tour company where he worked to be sent as a guide on one of its rare tours out of the country. Once he was safely beyond the borders of his native country and the tour had ended, he simply failed to show up for the plane. He had left in the night with just the clothes on his back and some money he had managed to squirrel away in his clothes.
Here's what he told us: Our bus driver had been the one who was really in charge of the tour. He was a Party member, and his job was to keep his eye on everyone, including us, and to make sure all our conversations with the locals were supervised.
All the hotel rooms we stayed in were bugged. Every one. We had joked about the possibility (including going so far as to deliberately talk into light fixtures); in fact, it was true.
While riding near the Romanian-USSR border, our itinerary was abruptly changed without explanation. We were told that the road was out. In fact, the Soviets and the Romanian forces were massed on either side of their common border, and there was some serious saber rattling going on.
Our other tour guide, a gorgeous woman whose name escapes me at the moment, had been killed in the Bucharest earthquake that had leveled most of the city two months after we had left. When some of us had written the tour agency and had asked after her safety, the response had been that she and Julian were both safe. Why had they lied to us? "Because under Ceaucescu, nothing bad ever happened in Romania. That was the party line. Not even during a natural disaster."
We also heard about how women were forced to bear children for the state. Abortions were outlawed. Women would abandon the children they bore because their leader bankrupted the economy by building monuments to himself and his wife. Many of these orphans later received AIDS from tainted needles and died by the hundreds of thousands.
When I reflect on this, and what I saw and the other stories I heard, and learn that this taxi driver is convinced that we're headed down the same road, I get cold chills and a sense of dread, an echo of what I felt during my visit, which I'm sure is just an echo of what that country's citizens felt every day, and I find I am afraid.
"We lucky few! We band of bloggers!"--Malacandra
by Sharoney on Wed Sep 20, 2006 at 09:35:38 PM PDT
Thanks for the rescue McJoan.