Your parents were kids when your grandmother was exposed to attempted brainwashing and intimidation. If you ask them, they each have their own story to tell as she was exposed to threats, and the family as a whole was left to share in the madness that surrounded them.
The day after the college journalism office was compromised and the newspapers were burned, mysterious phone hang-ups created a sense of danger. SL had experienced similar harassment when she worked on the “Archbishop’s Committee for Human Relations.”
In the event that she encountered danger, friends placed a tube, tear-gas-trigger-device in her hands. There was a question of legality and effectiveness, so she stored it in a safe place at home. SL was on her own and completely unprotected, as were her children.
The question arose: how much danger was there? SL’s mind revisited the moment when she met with the newspaper’s sponsor and editor. Initially they met to discuss the damaged journalism office. Quickly, their thoughts moved to more dire circumstantial evidence.
SL was slowly pressured to back-off any further expose` reporting. The word came down that the staff was to write strictly about student interests, or the paper might be cancelled. It wasn’t clear if a high authority had made the directive, or the final decision was made by their journalism instructor.
SL suspected that Mr. Weldon had been pressured. No inexperienced novice, he had written for Stars and Stripes and had traveled extensively in the course of his work. He dejectedly disclosed that he had encountered communism in Europe and was stunned that in 1968 he was witnessing the loss of protected rights on a small community college campus in the United States.
SL felt heaviness envelop her as if contagious, tentacles of gloom momentarily immobilized the small group of three, as they silently attempted to measure the ferocity and likely outcomes of the vile events that had been recently thrust upon them.
The three silently glanced at each other as they seemed in unison to weigh the merits of Mr. Weldon’s words. Things had changed. He had encountered virulent communism elsewhere, in places far removed from free America. This was something else….
SL surmised he was shocked by the discovery that militant, radicalized communists didn’t reside only in far-off places or leftist universities. Was he just now realizing that they were also embedded in the heart of blue-collar America?
Mr. Weldon’s measured words left SL with mixed feelings of anger and a sense of determination. She had supported the Domino Theory that soviet inspired communism would cause helpless, poor countries to fall like dominos, as it pursued its lust for world conquest and a Marxist-Socialist, One World Order.
The idea of being targeted as a slave for an atheistic world government was naturally repugnant. She remembered the Cardinal Mindszenty trial and communist barbarism that in many ways had outweighed the horrors of Nazism. Her mind perused a catalog of historical events and searched for safe harbor, but could find none.
For the first time she entertained the possibility that while we supposedly were fighting to win in Vietnam, our country’s soft-on-socialism liberals were prepared to accept a truce, rather than a victory. In shorthand: “Better Red than Dead,” had seemingly won out over: “Better dead than Red.”
Far from being cowed by emerging events, she wanted to write that the enemy wasn’t just now coming. More accurately, an army of American misfits had long been serving a foreign power with one aim in mind: the destruction of the Constitutional Republic of the United States of America.
Momentarily stunned, SL realized that with the failed publication of her minor news article, she had inadvertently uncovered a pit of vipers, and there was little she could do to fend off the coming assault.
To be continued
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