In elementary school in my country, children were required to sing our national anthem, followed by El himno a la Verdad, a hymn to the Truth, that I love to this day. It went like this:
“No digamos jamas la mentira; no enganemos a nuestros Papas, que no hay cosa mas bella que un Nino cuando saber decir la verdad. Respetemos a nuestro mayores; ocultar una falta es error. La Verdad es la cosa mas bella; donde esta la Verdad, esta Dios”.
Our hymn to the Truth, to this date near my sixties, brings pride and joy to my heart. I spent only one year in Catholic school, but that indoctrinating truth hymn followed me for the remainder of my life. It became important to me because, without fully realizing it, I kept searching, as I got older, for the truth. As a Descartes’s disciple, I questioned all I had been taught or learned in my journey through my youth and rid myself of preconceived notions and prejudices. It took me years to find the truth. Finally, I found it. It’s not an absolute truth, but my truth. The one that set me free.
This is how it happened.
I attended our largest university, la UASD -Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo-. La UASD was a public university, at the time, with a very marked communist bent. It was a breeding nest of communists, socialists, and other creatures of the political left. At the time, in the early eighties, we were still amid the Latin American struggle for self-determination. Our campus bloomed with lefty propaganda. My favorite activities were the music, the poetry, and the intellectual political discourse. I learned of Victor Jara, Mercedes Sosa, Silvio Rodriguez, and other singers of the Nueva Trova. It was all about social justice and liberation from the boots of the Yankee’s imperialism. We questioned everything, bordering on the anarchical. Given my suspicious streak, I soon started having doubts about all our “communist” leaders.
I suspected that something was not right because some of these “leaders” were able to come and go to Russia freely and were alive, never imprisoned. It turned out the Yankees wanted to present the Dominican Republic as an open and free society. Later, I also found out that the main figure, the top dog of the Partido Comunista Dominicano, was born into a family of the upper echelon of our society and still enjoyed the benefits of his lineage. He was a Bourgeois, and Communism was only an intellectual exercise for him. Every so rarely, he would be arrested and would not stay locked up a day.
Anyway, all these pseudo-revolutionaries ended up known as “cocktail party communists.” The real guys, one of which I became friendly with, “Yury,” were tortured in prison. And most disappeared after being imprisoned in la 40 y la Victoria -our two infamous prisons-.
Let’s press on with my story.
I learned that in the wave of historical revisionism, Marxist intellectuals, after the Manifesto, concluded that Religion and other societal institutions’ only Raison d’etre, Razon de ser, was to perpetuate the bourgeoisie’s power. Wow! Fair enough. How? I had to press harder in my search for the truth.
All those who have known leftist intellectuals know that, for all their faults, they love books, and they mean well.
One night, my friend Luciano, who was also my neighbor, invited me to his friend Lula’s house. Lula was a medical student. She was spirited and diligent. She was passionate, intense, and militant. With her white skin and blue eyes, she almost looked like a petite gringa. It was a rather unusual look in my part of town—kind of like a moonflower, a Lily, blooming in our dark Caribbean mood garden.
On a second visit to Lula’s home, we met another guy. He was the real deal, Yury. He was not an intellectual; he had done prison time and was lucky to be alive. He considered himself pragmatic. Yury was a big boy, burly, with a calm temperament. He had a paternal thing to himself. As we sat on Lula’s porch, he looked more like an old grandpa than a militant communist. We debated which form of communism would be better for our country. Whether Cuban, Chinese, or Russian. I was, of course, running my mouth assertively, a bad habit I picked up from my stepfather-always preaching-. I was turning into an argumentative ass. After patiently listening to my well-thought-out intellectual arguments, he calmly, in a fatherly way, proposed the Albanian model, espoused by Hoxha, as the purest form of communism. -I wonder if Lula and Yury were trying to create their communist cell and the whole point of the gathering was to indoctrinate us-.
“P.R. Thompson, the real one is Enver Hoxha,” he said. Who? It was the first time I had heard of the guy, so I had to ask. I knew of Fidel Castro, whom my stepfather despised, and Chairman Mao, whom my biological father idealized. The Albanian, I never heard of that one. Frankly, I could not quite locate the country on a map.
Then, we talked about the next round of strikes and fights with the police, debating what was going to happen and who would participate. Lula was in all the way. I was surprised that my friend Luciano and two other close friends had also partaken in it. Coming to think of it, it was like a rite of passage. Most of the guys I knew fought the police, broke cars’ windshields, and even set buses on fire.
I came up with all kinds of excuses for why I was not fighting the police. I came up with, “I can’t see without my glasses.” I rationalized that in the fight with the cops, I would lose my prescription eyeglasses and be at a clear disadvantage. I guess I sounded convincing enough to Luciano and Yury, or they respected my intellectual presentations, or they were embarrassed for me. At any rate, Lula was not having it. “You’re a coward!” she told me right there and then. Ouch!
I did not argue; she was right; I was a coward, indeed. What I was not was stupid. I saw no point in fighting bullets with rocks and getting my skull crushed with a baton, landing in prison to be someone else’s bitch. I knew better than her what was going on in our prisons. Most of the kids I grew up with had done prison time. No rosy-colored story ever came out of the Penitentiary.
Later, Luciano told me that she had a crush on me. Whatever. I was more interested in my intellectual pursuit. I did not harbor ill feelings toward her. Later, when I became a bigger dog, I asked Luciano about her. He told me that her family sent her to the United States. -Good decision!- I kicked my ass for letting pass that free chance of getting laid. “Oh well. I guess I’ll catch the next train”. I continued my passionate pursuit of the truth. And girls.
As we continued our discussions, on campus, one name appeared.
Louis Pierre Althusser. Who? I had to know.
I decided that I had to read his work. My decision was born now not out of genuine intellectual pursuit of the truth but snobbery. I thought that his name sounded super fancy. And French. Later, I learned the following about my fancy idol of the moment:
“Althusser’s life was marked by periods of intense mental illness. In 1980, he killed his wife, the sociologist Hélène Rytmann, by strangling her. He was declared unfit to stand trial due to insanity and committed to a psychiatric hospital for three years. He did little further academic work, dying in 1990”.
In the same way, I could not figure out his reasons for his passionate treatment of his wife; most of his Marxist-Structuralist concepts, a la Francaise, went over my head. I was studying Medicine anyway. But a couple of ideas stuck with me:
-The concept of Infrastructure of the state.
-The concept of Superstructure of the state.
Infrastructure needs no definition because everyone knows it. But the one that blew my top was “Superstructure”. This latter one, the real Marxists-Engelian intellectuals, debated to this date.
It was whether the economic base built social institutions, law, politics, religion, or the other way around. But there was another, simpler definition that encapsulated the concept.
“The set of beliefs, politics, law, morality, religions, art, that constitute the Ideology, in a determined society, aiming at justifying and perpetuating the power of the bourgeoisie.” Wow!
I stumbled upon Structuralism without knowing or realizing it. I became so obsessed with social science and intellectual grandstanding that it got out of hand. One day, between classes in medical school, as I was happily humiliating another medical student with my “knowledge” of Historical Materialism, Marx and Engel’s theory, another student, irritated, intervened, ” You should not be in medical school.” Ouch!
At the time, I had a reputation for being an intellectual, and some of the guys hated me for it. I enjoyed dialectic political discourse and praxis philosophy; I loved associating with intellectual circles, writers, and poets more than my medical studies and the medical students. Above all, I loved arguing and debating aggressively. I was both stubborn and curious and disregarded the angry fellow’s advice. I remained in medical school and continued my search for the Truth.
Of course, I was not a Communist. Not even remotely, but I had a very deep, personal sensitivity to the plight of the oppressed masses. After all, ninety-ninety-point-nine percent of my relatives were and still are poor. Thus. I was a communist at heart, not by conviction or practice.
But friends are cruel, and they keep you real. One of them started chipping at my intellectual castle.
I later became friends with a poet, Geraldo. He introduced me to writers and poets, including the insufferable, pompous Leon David. Geraldo was the one who first blew my communist bubble.
We were heading to his home, a humble one, and, as was my norm, I was ranting about the class struggle and the oppression and exploitation of the Proletariat by the Bourgeoisie. I meant it with all my heart. I had seen all the degrees of poverty around us and felt deep outrage for the inequities in our society. He did not see me that way and stopped me in my tracks. He said with a smirk on his face, “P.R. Thompson, you’re not one of them. Look at yourself”. I was kind of offended. How dare you? At the time, I did not get what he meant by it, but on another visit to his home, it all became clear.
A few weeks later, we headed to a dissertation to deconstruct the film “Apocalypse Now.” While I waited for him, his mother approached with an unhappy look and scolded me, “What’s wrong with you? Why are you dressed so nicely; you’re gonna make my son look bad.” I was again offended. How dare she? I was a proletarian. But it was the truth at some level. I had a sense of style and decent clothing. I guess, in the end, I was not as proletarian as I thought I was. Despite the blow from Geraldo’s mother, I kept on visiting them. I loved Geraldo- more than he loved me-his siblings, and his parents. They were all nice people.
Life continued, and my communist fervor, despite Geraldo and his evil mother, became more ardent. The medical students were known to be a very conservative bunch; the widespread opinion among our intellectual circle was that they were indifferent. They did not participate in the class struggle. They did not fight the police. Not me. I was in a struggle. I joined despite my stepdad’s admonition to my mom, “They’re brainwashing your son.” He had a deep hatred for Fidel Castro and his revolution and thought that the UASD, my university, was infested by the criminal political elements: “They’re just looking to cause a death, to blame the government.” I did not believe his bullshit. How dare he?
My metamorphosis was almost complete. I went from being conservative right out of high school, brainwashed by my stepfather, to being infested by literary Communism in the UASD. Lula would have been proud of my conversion. Now, as I approach my sixties, I have forsaken some ideologies and made peace with a healthy dose of Cynicism, as I’ll explain later.
Another strike was coming, and we needed to shut all the classrooms. We all marched classroom after classroom, especially by the medical school building, loudly chanting “La indiferencia, es una verguenza,” and compelled students to get out of the building and join the march. No one joined us. They did not care. I knew they would not. Most of them were sons of physicians or foreign students. We were real proletarians, not them.
We headed then to the building housing the schools of Accounting and Economics, where we knew we would be more successful and find receptive audiences. My heart was in. Finally, I was fully immersed in the struggle, and I even knew our “leaders.” The point of mobilizing la masa estudiantil was to confront the police. Only violent confrontations with the agents of the state would animate the masses and ignite the revolution. And so on…
As I marched animatedly next to the Accounting and Economics building, I curiously looked up toward the Engineering and Architecture building to see how integrated they were into the struggle.
The engineering students were a tough bunch. All of them had a reputation for being macho guys and hardcore, except for the Architects. The school of Architecture had a lot of gays and girls. No apt for the struggle. Then, in one of the windows, up on the third or fourth floor of the building, I recognized our supreme student leader. He was there, out of danger, leaning on the window, positioning himself with a clear view from a distance to be a passive spectator of the soon-to-happen police slaughter. In my naiveté, I expected our leader to be some kind of General Patton leading his troops. My stepfather was right, after all! The students were nothing but cannon fodder.
Fuck that! I thought. I went as far as to the Accounting and Economics building in support of my comrades but headed straight home from there. I was grateful to our leader for opening my eyes to their manipulation. Strike one.
On another occasion, after that episode, we headed to class, and I noticed a small tumult on the Quad. It was early in the morning, not even 8 am, which made it more unusual. “Get what, P. R…. Guess who’s here?” said cheerfully one of my comrades. “Who?”. “Issa Conde,” he whispered as if it was a secret. He was talking about Narcisso Issa Conde, the supreme leader of the Partido Comunista Dominicano. Now, he got my attention. I needed to see this. I knew the guy from the TV and newspapers because he was always there preaching the revolution. But seeing him live was a different story. I would not miss seeing him live for nothing in the world, not even class.
Like a shadow, “always there, but never noticed,” I got close to him. I was stunned. He was pasty white as if the sunlight had never touched his skin for a second. Evidently, he was a creature of his desk and his chauffeured car. I continued with my sartorial inspection and noticed that he wore a beautiful, salmon-colored linen shirt and nicely pressed linen trousers. Beautiful tropical colors. He was elegantly dressed. More CEO-looking than proletarian. I could not believe my eyes. I was furious. “He’s wearing linen,” I told my friends, incensed.
Understand, please!
In our country, in those days, possibly today, only exceedingly rich people wore Linen. It’s a beautiful fabric and a godsend for our climate. But very expensive. One shirt costs the equivalent of two- or three-monthly salaries of a laborer. That’s it! I needed no more proof. I was now convinced that Narcisso Issa Conde was full of shit. I already suspected it because his brother was the head of the Dominican Industrialist Society. The guy was loaded. And, above all, Issa Conde never did time. I needed no more convincing.
Yury, the Albanian communist who had been tortured and who knows what else in the Dominican penitentiary, had warned me about the fake local communists. Strike two.
Speaking of Lula’s boy, Yury, I further investigated Hoxha, the father of the Albania miracle. I had to know. He did not trigger my imagination. He seemed to me very parochial, a country-bunking. At any rate, I had already fallen in love with the European Social Democrats. I was also praying at the altar of the Existentialists Sartre, Camus, and Spinoza. My communism was softening, giving room for alternative versions of the truth. These French guys were the real thing!
There was one more disappointment waiting for me: my third strike. This one ripped my intellectual hymen off for good, opened my insides to the reality of human and mass psychology, and gave birth to my truth.
Around the mid-eighties, Latinos and communists were incensed, burning with Caribbean heat. The United States, as usual, was sabotaging yet another Latin American government, thwarting the legitimate aspirations, hopes, and dreams of the masses. They were financing “The Contras” in Nicaragua to subvert the revolution. It was such an issue for us Dominicans and all Latinos that one of the guys in Block G, where I resided, for example, got so obsessed with the Nicaraguan revolution that he started collecting newspaper clips of the conflict. Every day, as we kibbitz on our street, he would come down from his apartment, indignant, showing us his newspaper clips of the details of the war. He was our war correspondent. We nicknamed him “Somoza,” which used to piss the hell out of him. Guys are really assholes.
The conflict was over. Nicaraguan won, the Contras perished, and kicked the imperialist’s ass. As a bonus, Reagan developed dementia. Our war correspondent, “Somoza,” had to find other things to obsess over.
The victory tour around Latin America followed. Rumor had it that El Comandante Danilo Ortega, the undisputed leader of the Sandinista revolution, was going to visit us. Now, that was something. The closest guy in stature alive to Fidel Castro was going to visit the Dominican Republic. Better yet, he was going to visit our university exclusively.
Our university had a very large, sort-of convention hall, El Aula Magna, where the Claustro Universitario, elections, graduation ceremonies, and concerts were celebrated. It was a big place by our standards, easily accommodating a few thousand people. The place seemed logical to receive such a distinguished visitor.
I recall, when I graduated, to my chagrin, all the schools in the university graduated at the same location at the same time. As part of the ceremonial prescription, we formed a very long line to get into the building, as thousands of students were simultaneously graduating, and all the students then received a communal speech by the Rector. And that was it! I guess it was a Communist university, indeed. Very uniform, non-ornate, and egalitarian.
The Rector’s speech went like this:
“Today, you have accomplished the dreams of your parents. The Dominican people are proud of you! Their sacrifice was not in vain. It was with great sacrifice that this poor nation carved a future for its best and brighter. This pueblo has brought you to this point. You’re graduating by the sacrifice of the Dominican people. No matter how far and high you go in life, you should always be grateful to your parents and El Pueblo Dominicano”.
The place almost exploded in applause; Tears rolled down like a stream.
This freaking demagogue made it difficult for me. I still hear that speech at home. Whenever I tried to get big in my head, my mom never let me forget it. She sarcastically would say, “Remember what the Rector said…you graduated because of me”. It was my mom’s coronation. She felt that she had graduated with me. It was okay. She indeed graduated; I climbed on her shoulders, big time.
Surprisingly enough, my stepfather, who seemed not to care about my affairs and hated my university, was also there and walked alongside me to the Aula Magna to my graduation. I was escorted on one side by my mom and on the other by my stepfather. His were the second set of shoulders I climbed on.
Of course, true to form, my stepfather wanted me to cut the line and get in front of others.
My beef with the communal graduation was that I imagined that each one of us, as I have seen on TV, was going to receive their piece of paper and get two minutes of glory. Nope. You got your speech, took a couple of photos outside, and shared some more tears. Your diploma will be signed later—Hasta la vista.
Eventually, after one last hassle, including dealing with one ‘admin officer’ trying to hustle me for 10,000 pesos to expedite the signing of my diploma, the Rector signed my Diploma. I was finally able to get the fuck out of my communist university and my hope-busting country. The hustler? I gave him shit.
In hindsight, I should not have cared that it was a communal graduation because I was not an honor student. My highest grades, top of the class, were in Anthropology, Sociology, and Languages, which were prerequisites not for Medicine but for a Law degree. Whatever.
I digressed big time. Where was I? OK, the visit of El Comandante to our Aula Magna.
Since El Comandante Danilo Ortega triumphantly kicked the Yankees’ ass and was coming to town, to our university, there was only one place large enough to receive him. Our Aula Magna. The place was bursting.
The Master of Ceremony started:
“Como uds saben, despues de expulsar las botas invasoras del imperialism, el Comandate Danilo Ortega, esta ocupado asegurando el progreso de la nacion y no puede viajar al extranjero”.
Basically, the guy said that El Comandante Danilo Ortega was busy getting his country ready after the insurgency and could not travel. A wave of disappointment invaded the place. The truth is that he was following the advice of our next-door dictator, Fidel Castro, not to travel abroad, especially to the Dominican Republic, because that would have been the last trip of his life. The CIA would be waiting to assassinate him. Not showing was his best decision.
The Master of Ceremony paused and let the big wave of disappointment set in. The students started bitching; they were already in mourning. The MoC then continued, “But the international solidarity that the Dominican people and all Latin nations gave to our comrades in Nicaragua cannot go unpaid.” Suddenly, everyone sparked up with pointed ears, like German shepherds. The crowd sensed that they were not going home empty-handed and started their crazed chant, Nicaragua sin Somoza again. Viva la revolucion!
When we were all well-seasoned and ripe for exploitation, he then introduced the keynote speaker, the glorious Sub-comandante of the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional, now Vice president of Nicaragua. His Excellency, the Sub-comandante, blah, blah, blah. I don’t recall his name. I must confess I was disappointed, though. I was looking forward to seeing how Danilo Ortega was dressed.
Anyway, the second in command did not, and I mean it; he did not disappoint. This guy was absolutely a better speaker than the overrated Fidel Castro. – Che Guevara was 100 times better than Fidel-. El Sub-Comandante, I said, did not disappoint; he was sharp and gesticulated with the intensity of the German guy but with finesse, class, and deliberation. He masterfully commanded the stage and projected an air of commitment and sincerity. He had the rhetorical skills that I had only heard in our conservative leader, Joaquin Balaguer. His salutatory speech gave proper recognition to our revolutionary efforts. We have stopped numerous classes, shut classrooms, broken numerous windshields, and burnt a few school buses on Nicaragua’s behalf. Viva la Revolucion! – At least, my friends did-.
The Sub-Comandante brought the house down.
We, guys and girls, were on fire. Nicaragua sin Somoza, Nicaragua sin Somoza!. Que viva Nicaragua… que viva! I cannot put into words how good this guy was. The thought of him brings fire to my chest. We Latinos love spirited, arousing speakers who would violently stir our passion. We love drama. There was something else about the Sub-Comandante.
Because of my habit of being early in places, I got in the front row and saw the Sub-Comandante at close range by the time he arrived. The Vice president, Sub-Comandante of the Revolution dynamically, filled with revolutionary enthusiasm, sprung his way onto the stage, but not quickly enough to avoid my sartorial inspection. He had a full-grown white beard and wore a light blue, short-sleeved Chacabana shirt with stylish but simple white patterns and two front pockets, complemented by slightly darker than military khaki pants. It was an unassuming-looking, proletarian attire. Finally!. This guy was one of us. I repeat. He brought the house down.
I even started chanting with the crowd for a few seconds, moved by the wave of enthusiasm, solidarity, and communist love: Que viva la revolucion, que viva! But an evil thought crossed my mind as I saw the guy next to me chant. He was another medical student that I knew in passing. He was chanting in a trance. He was in, heart and soul. Mesmerized by El Sub-commandate. I swear, up to that moment, I did not know that evil lived in me. Something inside me said, “I’m gonna mess with this guy.” The voice inside my head said, “Do it”.
In such a solemn moment, amid the celebration of the spoils of the Nicaraguan revolution, I committed the ultimate sacrilege act.
As they were all in, chanting “Viva la revolucion, Viva Nicaragua!”. For pure entertainment, my evil self decided to start yelling a different slogan. I just wanted to fuck with the guy’s head and see if he would do it.“Yankee go home, Yankee go home, Yankee go home!” I chanted loudly. Long and behold, to my great surprise, I started hearing some of the other guys in the crowd, near me, hard-core committed communists, chanting my made-off chant for a minute, “Yankee go home. Yankee go home, Yankee go home!”. Then they stopped when they realized that it was not the chant for the moment. They were like automatons following the ideology streaming from the mountaintop. They rectified their heresy and resumed their “Viva la revolucion, viva Nicaragua!” chant.
My guy, the first one I converted to my fake chant, was next to me and gave me the dirtiest look that I had deservingly received in my entire life. For those milliseconds, he hated my guts. I ruined it for him. He wanted to kill me. Luckily, they were too hypnotized by the Sub-comandante to handle my offense. He gave me a “fucking idiot, mother fucker” look and resumed his chanting. I got lucky, though; I could have been accused of being an infiltrated CIA agent and lynched right on the spot, having not been for the fact of my skin color and my attire. I also could not afford Linen. Strike three.
In that instant, with my evil experiment, I realized that ideological “isms” in religions, politics, science, or society in general were all branches of the same psychological tree. They obeyed the same man’s messianic needs for absolution, redemption, and salvation or mere desire to belong to “something bigger than ourselves.” These ideological traps respond to man’s desperate quest for explanation, meaning, and belonging.
The oppressed, or the ones perceived as oppressed: the poor, women, blacks, religious, and others, will blindly follow these messiahs, false prophets, or a doctrine, and like my fellow chanting medical student, will chant with the docility and acquiescence of an opium addict. I learned in that instant that all the dictum of the “authority” figures, whether in churches or proclaimed in universities, with their unintelligible jargon and arousing speeches, aimed to liberate them or to give them meaning, only to end up putting them in a worse prison. People surrender their freedom to the shackles of the dogmas sold by these snake oil salesmen.
As I write this, I do it with a big smile on my face. My veil of innocence and ignorance finally lifted. I got my truth!
After all the promises and revolutions, Fidel Castro‘s tyrannical rule ended with his death in Office, and Cuba is still suffering; Hoxha’s Albania was the last country to get rid of Sovietism. Hoxha’s tyrannical rule ended with his death in Office, but Albania still suffers; Chairman Mao‘s tyrannical rule ended with his death in Office, China suffered, and China returned to Mao-style rules. The United States, guided by a new messiah, is heading to tyrannical rule and will suffer.
The original soviet comrades, all tyrants, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, died in Office. Trotsky, Stalin’s opponent, was assassinated in Mexico City while Stalin was still in Office. Comrade Putin will also die, as well, in Office, and the Russians will continue to suffer.
Liberation and paradise were promised in all those countries by all those leaders. They claimed that only they could fix their nations, liberate the oppressed masses, and take them to the promised land. Quickly enough, the promise never materialized. Only tyranny followed.
The Messiahs then turned into tyrants.
A fool-proof, time-tested method was inevitably put into practice. First, they destroyed all opposition, including the loyal party members and revolutionaries who, in the beginning, blindly supported him. They all end up assassinated. Second, all dissenting voices are deadly silenced or expelled from the country as “unpatriotic” enemies of the country, the state, or the revolution. Third, they changed all existing norms to perpetuate their ruling. Then, they make sure that they will remain in Office until their death.
And what about Nicaragua, our second successful revolution in Latin America? It has another dictator: Jose Daniel Ortega Saavedra, aka Danilo Ortega.
Daniel Ortega, our guy, our glorious Comandante of El Frente Sandinista de liberacion Nacional, FSLN, savior of the Nicaraguan masses and destroyer of the dictatorship of Somoza; the guy that I showed up almost an hour earlier to see speaking, and how he was dressed, became a ruthless tyrant. He’s now on his fourth term in government, on made-believe elections. He has launched a massive wave of repression in his country. He has caused more than 30,000 Nicas to go into exile to Costa Rica; has eliminated the opposition and shut all Nicaragua’s NGOs, newspapers, and… ready? Closed the Universities. He will make sure that he dies in Office.
My son, in the beautiful innocence of his childhood, one day asked his mother and me, “What party do we belong to? Are we Democrats or Republicans?”. Both of us, quickly and proudly, in our naiveté, answered, “Independents.”
If my son would ask me now, as my veil completely lifted and I read John 8:32, “What party do we belong to, Democrats, Republicans, or Independents?” I would not let my wife answer, and I would promptly reply, “Don’t waste your time.”
P.R. Thompson.
Ps: “He who has ears, let him hear.”
May 25, 2024.