Apparently the thread got closed, but I wanted to post a quick reply to Troy2000 about economic survival, where I discussed growing a garden and learning how to clean chickens being useful today. Luckily I copied/pasted the response because when I hit SAVE it said the thread was closed... and I'd spent some time typing the message. Here it is:
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You could just as reasonably have judged Socialism's results on a society by traveling through Western Europe and Scandinavia.
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I did, Troy... on the same trip. NY to London, Ireland, Scotland, Helsinki Finland, hop across to Leningrad, then Moscow, to East Berlin, across Checkpoint Charlie, W Berlin to Frankfurt, to Antwerp, then to Paris.
The only place people asked to buy the clothes off my back was in Russia. I lost track how many times in Leningrad and Moscow people came up and offered nearly anything they owned for my Levis jeans (they weren't available there, then). The interpreter in Moscow told us while we toured the city that the GUM store (sits just off to the opposite side of Red Square from the Kremlin and Lenin's Tomb) was the "greatest department store in the world that offered
everything." But what I actually saw when going through it were empty shelves, people standing in long lines for basics such as bread and spices. One morning standing outside St. Basil's Cathedral (looks like a cookie castle on Red Square), there was a circle of people around me asking if I'd sell them my jeans.
I was running an old 8mm movie camera and approached the fence just outside the (tiny, machine-gun guarded) airport terminal in East Berlin when the two soldiers took it upon themselves to swing their guns directly at me. I still have the video, and we've laughed about it many times... because you can see I quickly turn back the other direction and go back, IN A HURRY.
East Berlin looked as if WW II had ended just the previous week. This was 1970. There were bombed out buildings all over the place, rubble had just been stacked up to allow traffic through. When we passed through Checkpoint Charlie into West Berlin, it was as if I'd entered an entirely different world. A brand new city... new buildings, clean streets, nice people. The contrast between the expressions on the faces of people on the East side compared to what I saw on the West was so stark I can't sufficiently find words to explain it.
SO, in response to your comment quoted above, please let me just say this: Nowhere else in Europe did people try to beg my pants off. Nowhere else in Europe did I see empty shelves in stores, incredibly long lines for bread and milk. Nowhere else in Europe did I see peoples' expressions who looked, as a whole, as if someone had just shot their dog. They looked beaten, miserable, as if they hated their lives. And nowhere else did I see a people kept behind the line by machine guns, killer attack dogs, concrete walls and barbed wire.
You can call me judgemental because you're right to a certain extent... I
didn't see the entire country. But we become the sum of our life's experiences, and that trip is burned into my brain. Maybe there were happy people wearing Levis somewhere else in Russia... but I didn't see'em.
After I finish the New Madrid trilogy, I'm going to write a short piece of non-fiction (for a change) about that trip.... there's some smiles to it, believe it or not -- such as the night I got loaded on screwdrivers in the bar of Hotel Moscow, got my room key back from the machine gun armed guard on the floor, returned to my room, threw open the shutters on to Red Square and shouted COMMUNISM SUCKS! at the top of my lungs. The knock that came on the door less than 10 minutes later, by a man that had an imposing classic look of a KGB agent -- complete with trench coat and secret-agent hat (no kidding), nearly caused me to pee myself in terror. It's smiles and laughs retelling the story these days... but back then it wasn't so funny.
Anyway, enough ramblings. Just wanted to explain where I'm coming from in my post that recommended growing a garden and learning how to clean a chicken.
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