With all precautions in place, I went to the dentist. Actually to the hygienist. She scraped and did whatever dental hygienists do in their most necessary, but unsung, craft.

My hygienist is the daughter of South Vietnamese refugees. Talking with her, before she started cleaning, I learned why her parents don’t particularly like Communism. They know how Communists came to power in South Vietnam by means of. murder and intimidation. They know how they run Vietnam today with tyranny, corruption, and incompetence. So when radical Left factions run amok in Portland and Seattle, her folks have a creepy sense of déjà vu. They understand when Leftist thugs threaten storeowners in Louisville with damage to their businesses if they don’t show support for The Cause. That is called extortion, what all urban gangs do. Only they put a veneer of Leftist Ideaology over it.

Reclining in the comfy chair, she cleaned, while I thought. Nothing earth shattering, just about the people I know who escaped Communist dictatorships, neighbours who fled from Hungary, fellow parishioners in two churches who fled Cuba, the patients of a Vietnamese doctor at the medical practice I use.

Then I remembered, from The Sixties, the “Teach-Ins” where professors would propagandize against American involvement in South Vietnam. They were the tools, witting or unwitting of the Communist tyrants.

I reflected on the South Sudanese “Lost Boy”, who, in the Twentieth Century, was held as a slave, by a Muslim Egyptian farmer, before he escaped. He and his compatriots came to America, like the Cubans, Vietnamese and Hungarians, before them, for the promise of freedom and, yes, its uncertainties.

So when Marxists/Communists start clamoring for “change” in this blessed country, my stomach turns. Lincoln called the United States, “the last best hope on Earth.” Nothing better has come along in the century and a half since he made that claim.