...this never fails to make my head spin. In just 25 days, the Cold War will have been over for three decades and people are still insisting that the Russians should have won.
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Tim Willard said;
I get asked why I loathe Communism so fervently. It's damn near a religion with me.
How about a little background. I'm from the wrong side of the tracks. My siblings would have stolen railroad tracks and sold them for scrap. When we left the farm, we went to the trailer park.
The trailer park was, naturally, on the wrong side of the tracks. I wore hand-me-downs and Goodwill clothing. I was a high school dropout who moved out at 15.
So I'd seen the bad side of living in the US.
I remember my dad sending me in to buy 10 cent candy with a $1 foodstamp so I could give him the change. We did that till he had enough gas in the car to take me to school and he could get to whatever job he had at the time.
Or to buy booze.
Whatever.
So, I'd seen the bad part. It wasn't fun.
I enlisted, and the Army was great. When you lived in a trailer with a leaky roof and shoddy electrical and drove a car that you epoxied the passenger door shut, and went to bed hungry on the four days before payday, well, the Army is the fucking life.
I went to Europe. Assigned to West Germany.
I liked it.
Then the Wall fell. Now, West Germany was a modern nation. Luxuries everywhere. Plenty of food. In accordance to the independent streak I still had, I had moved out onto the economy as soon as S2 gave me permission. I wasn't a barracks rat. There were places to see and people to fist fight. When I went into East Germany, I saw East Germany through my own biases and colored by my personal experiences.
And I was suddenly glad that I was born on the wrong side of the tracks in America.
That girl I mentioned? I knew she was only fucking me to get access to the PX and maybe hoping I'd take her back to the US with me. (Hah, those titties may have been like POW! and that ass may have been like BLAM! but I ain't taking you home) I didn't care.
Don't look down on her. Don't you fucking dare.
She was East German. Her father had been taken away when she was a kid and she never saw him again. She had grown up, many times, without heat, without food, without decent fucking clothing.
She sat on my couch in my little apartment looking at my photo album and asked me what my parents did that we were so rich.
My family. She knew what it was like to not have heat in the winter, or have the roof leak, or be evicted from her home. Only it was different. We were evicted because booze was more important than rent.
Her family was evicted for 'reasons' she didn't know. Just it was after her brother got arrested and vanished.
Like father, like son.
Touring East Germany was like touring one big trailer park.
The factory parking lots full of rusting junk? Yeah, seen that. I asked what was being made. She just shrugged. They weren't allowed to know. She worked there. I met her neighbors. I listened to them. They told me things about living in Communist East Germany.
Learned to hate the Stasi just like they did even though they had vanished into the dustbin of history. Well, were being swept away.
I knew about police brutality and excess from being poor white trash. Nobody will kick your ass in the interrogation room like a cop who knows your family can't afford a lawyer.
But they aren't allowed to kill you. Not so with the Stasi and the rest.
The apartments made me sad. Her apartment made me sad.
I had more room and better living conditions in a Cold War Era barracks on top of a frozen fucking mountain than she had grown up in.
If I didn't pay my power bill, they turned off the power.
Her power was turned off, apparently for shits and giggles. Just random fucking times. She told me, and her mother told me, that it was better now than it was before the Wall fell. The power was on more often than it wasn't.
The architecture was brutal, simplistic, dehumanizing, and above all, trailer trash cheap. The concrete was crumbly, the windows had gaps, all of it was shit condition.
The trailer I'd moved in to for $50/mo when I'd first left home was better than that block style apartment building.
My high school dropout in and out of juvie white trash ass had it better than everyone in her building.
Bags of potatoes at the Commisary were $2.50 a 50 lb bag. We're talking half of what I spent on a quad-151 and coke with 2 cherries for a 50 lb bag of fucking potatoes. Well, for her birthday I bought some groceries at the Commissary.
Nothing major. I wanted to make corn beef and cabbage stew for her. I spent like $30 at the Commissary. Nothing major. I mean, that's like 1 night of drinking cheap well whiskey. (Yes, I used to measure my expenditures by how much booze I could swill down for the same price. Like father like son)
The next internet commie who tells you that food was plentiful in the 1980's in Communist East Germany, feel free to beat with a sack of cheap potatoes.
Maybe in the city, but I liked my girls from the country. And it was a small town built to support a factory that everyone was forcibly relocated there in the 1960's. Ever been embarrassed by someone's reaction to something you take for granted.
See, in the US, corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, all of that is 'poor people food'. Shit you learn to make on the wrong side of the tracks because it makes a lot, cheaply, and keeps for a few days. Their reactions still embarrass me to think about. I was a farm boy originally before we ended up in the trailer park.
"It's just basic food..." went through my head at one point. I'm Irish descent. Potato, butter, and beer, and I'm good.
Her grandmother accused me of trying to buy her. Yelled at me till I left. I sat on the curb, trying to figure out just what the fuck happened, when her mother came out, called me a good boy, and had me come back inside.
Grandma apparently had a flashback to when political officers would bribe families with food like that and then take the daughters.
And that was when things had gotten better and the Fabulous Stalin Rape Fest of 1945-1952 was over.
But sitting there, looking around, smoking a cigarette, I saw that while it was just as bad as the trailer park, I mean, it WAS a factory town, the people did their best to make it into home. They hadn't given up. There was faded colors here and there on that shitty cement. The curtains were bright and decorative. Little flower gardens here and there. There were some kids kicking a ball.
But it "felt" different. If you're from the bad side of the tracks, you'll understand this...
Sitting there, in the sunlight, smoking a cigarette, the Wall is down, the USSR is losing its grip, there had been a riot that took out the Stasi headquarters in Dresden, but there's a certain feeling. It felt like it did in the trailer park when a half dozen cop cars pull in, blocking off the way in & the way out. That few seconds before the cops get out of the cars looking for a "person of interest".
There was nothing to really cause it, not that day, but it was still there. And there was this "gray" feeling to things I guess, that went along with that subtle feeling of dread.
I got it, sitting there. Knowing that you're powerless against the State. That the powerful can do whatever the fuck they want to you and nobody will care. Hell, they'll be glad it isn't them if they don't snitch to avoid being looked at too close.
It was Communism that had pushed them this far. That had taken the German people, who only had 43 years of difference between their Western counterparts, and done that to them.
No beer fests. No fests no pay phone on the corner, no corner butcher, no store full of food, none of that.
It had all been robbed from them in the name of collectivism. All funneled toward Moscow and the powerful.
No checks and balances. No "equal before the law" that the US at least gave lip service to when someone might be looking.
The whole fucking country was the wrong side of the tracks.
That's Communism. Dividing a country in half, turning half of it into a goddamn trailer park.
Worse than a trailer park.
Compared to them, I was lucky.
And that makes me mad.
