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March 28th, 2024

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The Generation Gap between two New York Latinas

Alicia Colon

By Alicia Colon

Published March 12, 2019

The Generation Gap between two New York Latinas

If Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez had grown up as I did during the Cold War in the 50's the very last thing she would be promoting would be socialism.

Granted our circumstances were very different as my family was dysfunctional, poor and we lived in the tough streets of Spanish Harlem; unlike the new Democrat congresswoman who spent most of her teen years in a more posh neighborhood.

Nevertheless I benefitted from a solid parochial education taught by anti-Marxist nuns.

AOC, as she is now known, is a product of academic indoctrination by Marxists professors who have obviously never read Animal Farm or 1984 and are enthralled with the socialist agenda.

I would spend nights on the fire escape looking up at the sky where searchlights would scan for enemy aircraft. It was the height of the Cold War when Russia had stolen the formula for nuclear weapons and their leaders had promised to "bury us."

New York City would be their prime target.

In school we learned quite a bit about living under communism where neighbors could turn you into the KGB if you dared to criticize the government.

As poor as we were, we felt fortunate to live in this great country where we had the freedom to become whatever we chose to be. Most of us wanted to become wealthy enough to leave the inner city and raise healthy families. That was not possible under communism where the state ruled over everyone's lives.

It is quite clear that today's millennials and those voters who respond to Democrats who propose socialist reforms haven't a clue about what Marxism and communism entails. They have never read the goals of the Communist manifesto that point out how our capitalist form of government will be destroyed from within.

Fox's Geraldo Rivera actually defended AOC's ridiculous socialist demands by calling them compassionate and reminiscent of his younger liberal passions.

I'm sure Geraldo was thinking of an old axiom that's falsely attributed to Winston Churchill-"If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain."

I remember being quite young and arguing with a co-worker that it was sinful for Elizabeth Taylor to spend so much on a dress when so many people were starving in the world. It was years later when I wised up and learned that rich people's larger than life living gave jobs to so many people.

Although I was naive, I was never dumb enough to think that the government should be taking money I had worked hard for to give it to people too lazy to work for their living.

The much better and accurate quote attributed to Churchill is: "Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery?"

Several years ago I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace. At first I expected him to be one of those environmental militants but Patrick Moore, however, turned out to be one of the sanest people on the issue of climate change and the environment that I have ever met.

I was delighted to read the comments he made about Alexandra Ocasio-Lopez and her inane Green New Deal proposals. In a tweet he called her a "pompous little twit' and "You don't have a plan to grow food for 8 billion people without fossil fuels, or get the food into the cities. Horses? If fossil fuels were banned every tree in the world would be cut down for fuel for cooking and heating. You would bring about mass death."

Socialist promoters like Bernie Sanders and AOC are always given softball questions by MSM interviewers. The few anchors who dare to question how they are going to pay for Medicare for all, free tuition and other government handouts, never follow up the ridiculous responses they receive.

Making the rich pay for this Democrat munificence is absurd because the rich won't stay around to be robbed. It will be the hard-working middle class that will end up paying with high taxes and suffering the loss of benefits consumed by those who have not paid anything for them.

It was in the mid 50's when the political dynamics of the left began the destruction of the families. What was once called home relief became welfare which removed the husband from the family. I would see the men hiding on the fire escape when the inspector came to check on his family so they could continue getting government checks; eventually, he didn't bother hiding and just left believing the family was better off without him.

Democratic social clubs were prolific in the barrio but they were really just a conduit for residents to secure benefits and in gratitude to vote for the party. The demagogues were out in force preaching that civil rights meant making the rich pay and it wasn't long before all the wonderful cultural venues that were formerly free to the poor were no longer available without costly fees. Noblesse oblige among the wealthy became a costly endeavor.

AOC and so many poorly educated millenials have become useful idiots for the progressive Marxists disciples of Saul Alinsky and the Frankfurt School that Andrew Breitbart warned us about. We, who lived in the ‘50's, learned how to think and reason so that the very idea of global warming smelled to high heaven. How on earth could we plan to save a planet that old based on data that has only been around for a few hundred years?

We also find the idea of killing a baby once out of the womb is infanticide whether it is wanted or not. We've studied history and know that the Holocaust was real and we knew immediately after 9/11 who our enemy is.

We know that historically dictators immediately disarmed their citizens to control them and as law-abiding gun owners we refuse to have our government pass laws that only leave guns in the hands of the unlawful. We also know that there are only two genders, male and female, and only the feeble-minded could dispute that biological fact.

Unfortunately, the feeble-minded have the stage right now and it is up to us older citizens in the silent majority to cut through the lies of the progressive and lamestream press and recognize that it is no longer viable for Americans not to get involved with politics. One of the major parties has been hijacked and supports infanticide, anti-Semitism and boos when it hears the name of G od.

To MakeAmericaGreatAgain we must all become deplorable as we were in 2016.

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