Stopping at Target and seeing the empty shelves due to the COVID-related supply chain disruptions, I joked to my girlfriend that we lived in the Eastern Bloc now, causing her to respond in a non-joking manner that good thing we had, in her words, “turned into Blocheads,” because, first, the American desire for cheap, bountiful consumer products had driven down wages and destroyed the environment; and, second, those Communist countries at least had generous social programs and no, again in her words, “religious crap,” though of course other crap had existed. Every ideology has its crap, she added matter-of-factly. (She’d taken Cold War History in college, taught by a professor so radical, he wore ragged jeans to class.)
Copyright © 2022 by David V. Matthews
January 17, 2022
DAVID V. MATTHEWS 