I must be getting old. That’s what my grandmother used to say, when things around her stopped making sense.

I went to college at one of those lofty bastions of Liberal thinking, in New York City. Although I didn’t, plenty of my friends proudly wore t-shirts emblazoned with “Che.” The posters were also popular, along with the red-eyed-man from “Court of the Crimson King” of which there was a mural in the lobby of my dorm’s floor.

As we grew up and out of that Revolutionary infatuation and left behind the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), we came to realize there was nothing good or glamorous in Che, or Castro, or Kruschev, or at least most of us did.

The rest that are embracing and glamorizing “Socialism” today truly know next to nothing about that “ism” and care even less.

Let me be clear…Socialism is nothing more than Communism-Lite. Anyone who claims differently is either grossly misinformed, or never had a relative living in close proximity to either “ism.” The misplaced love felt for the Scandinavian utopias, glosses over the very real and crippling tax burden, as well as the rationed healthcare.

YES. Rationed!

There isn’t enough to go around, so some either get less, or none at all. There is none left to buy, even if you had the cash that the taxman neglected to liberate from your pocket. If you are fortunate enough to have wealth hidden away, you travel to the nasty old US of A for your routine procedure.

My Uncle had the misfortune of being captured by the German Army during the Second World War. When he was repatriated to the USSR, it was determined that he had not made a sufficiently energetic effort to avoid capture…he understood that to mean that it would have been preferable to be a casualty. So off he went to the Gulag for Re-Education…in Siberia.

Until the day he died he always complained about the cold and never feeling warm enough. Before the war, he had been an accomplished violinist, after the Gulag he became a machinist, too many of his fingers had been broken to ever play the violin again. He visited us several times. My parents bought the airline tickets, which were far beyond his financial means. I remember the first year he was here, my mom took him to the local A&P Supermarket. I remember him commenting that he had never seen so much food in one place, together. He also had trouble understanding that it was possible, and permitted to buy all the store’s contents, as long as you could pay for it, and that no one would come to arrest you in the process.

Anyone still pining for the worker’s paradise, should seriously consider a vacation in Venezuela. Let that be your wake-up call before you muck it up for the rest of us.