All of you made me so proud that day. I am even more proud than ever before now to be an American, because now I know that the real American people will not willingly surrender their country, their freedom and their honor.
I want to tell you some very personal things. I am what is called a Cold War baby. I remember a childhood which many of you younger folk do not: one of air raid drills, fallout shelter signs on the wall of my school, terrifying stories of the Soviet Communists, and how they could bomb us at any time, bomb shelters in peoples' backyards, movies which brought home to us the Red menace. It was a terrifying time to be alive, especially for a child.
My mother used to tell me that if you entered a Communist country, they did not usually let you out. I used to travel to school on the subway, seeing advertisements for Radio Free Europe, the radio agency that sent shortwave news inside Communist countries in Eastern Europe, so that their people would know the truth about the West (and I learned that the Communists used to jam our radio signals to keep their people in the dark). I had a friend in elementary school named Sonia. She was from East Germany, and she and her mom lived alone in an apartment. Her mom never wanted to talk to me about their life in Germany, but Sonia told me that her father was not allowed to leave because of his job with the government, but she and her mom escaped. Knowing Sonia brought the whole Communist terror "home" in me in a very real way.
I remember learning about the Berlin Wall, which was built to keep people trapped in the "worker's paradise": East Berlin. I also learned how people were shot trying to tunnel under it or otherwise escape it.
I remember my Mom telling me about the "iron curtain" that surrounded Communist countries, and I remember as a child envisioning a shower curtain made of iron (kids tend to take things very literally!)
I remember as well, in the 1980s, staying up all night with my husband, in tears, watching as freedom-loving German people tore down the same Berlin Wall that had become a permanent fixture of my childhood.
I also remember the day I gave birth to my first child, a boy, in December of 1991...as I lay in recovery in the delivery room after a Cesarean section, I struggled to watch the TV they had..the nurse handed me my glasses, and that was when I learned that the Soviet Union was no more. I saw it as Providential that the birth of my first child took place on that day...I felt blessed that my children would grow up without living in a world that contained such a totalitarian monstrosity as the former USSR.
I tell you all this so you will fully understand why I reacted so horribly to the news that Barack Hussein Obama had somehow been elected President of the United States. For the first time in my life I felt I would have to live under Communism. I felt we had lost our country, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.
Months before the election, I had begun doing research to find out more about Obama, after friends suggested I do so. What I gradually learned horrified me. With a slowly dawning horror I realized this man was the genuine Manchurian Candidate: a Red Diaper baby carefully groomed to take over and destroy my country from within. I learned that he most likely was not even born in the United States, and was refusing to show his true birth certificate. I began to see that the Communists were trying to take our country over from the inside, as they had always said they would someday do.
I tried to warn as many people as I could...but it seemed that so many were misty-eyed, and just wanted to get rid of President Bush (even though he could not run again)...it seemed as if the whole country had gone mad. I felt I know knew how Biblical prophets must have felt, who could see what the future held if their people did the wrong thing, yet they were powerless to stop it.
When the news announced Obama's win, I sank into the deepest depression I can ever remember of my life. I truly felt ALONE. The same joy that came to me when my son was born on the very day the Soviet Union collapsed, now made me realize that Obama, a known Communist, was elected mostly by that very generation of youth who had no real memory of the Soviet terror!
And I continued to feel very, very alone....until all of you began to rise up. Who thought that healthcare would be the issue to wake everyone up? Yet it was!
And seeing all of you, marching, shouting, carrying some of the most creative signs I'd ever seen in my 30 years of political activism (amazingly, most of the people I spoke to at the march said they had never been politically active before!)....it made me realize that NO, I AM NOT ALONE.
And just as I was thinking that while at the march, and tears started running down my face, a young woman walked past me, and smiled at me....and on her T-shirt it said:
"YOU ARE NOT ALONE...SEPTEMBER 12, 2009".
