Perhaps the most chillingly accurate post I have ever read

(thanks to maccabee on daily kos...)

a week from this coming sunday afternoon, i will be landing in sofia, bulgaria, right next door to romania, and i will be thinking of this post... a lot...

"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."

so, in romania, are things any better...?

"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."

and what does he see down the road...?

"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 closed with this...

"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."

i've said many times that i have a keen ability to discern patterns, taking myriad small pieces and putting them together to make a bigger picture... what this romanian immigrant to the u.s. describes is precisely what i have been feeling in my bones for years now... this, my friends, is precisely where the united states is headed unless something or someone somehow brings it to a halt...

p.s. fyi, i'm writing this from argentina... while far from being a utopia, i feel a noticeable absence of the poisonous atmosphere that i never seem to be able to shake when i'm in the u.s...

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