My lunch with my Russian/South African co-worker
I do videogames for a living and our staff is really mixed--on my wing alone we have people from England, Israel, Canada and two guys from India Today I went out to lunch with my friend Natalia who is originally from Russia (until she reached age 13)and then her family migrated to South Africa in the 90's. She's been in the US legally for a few years, and I always wanted to hear what life was really like in SA and Russia-- from a real person as opposed to the puff pieces in the media. I like to hear the whole story--the good AND the bad! Anyway--today I got my chance by taking her to lunch. I thought some of you might be interested.
As Natalia explained the history of Russia this century, I learned a lot of things that I never knew before, such as that Russia used a serfdom system before the revolution that brought Stalin and Lenin and Communism to the Soviet Union. I remarked that the serfdom thing sounded like old school Europe, and she said it was very much that way but that people were successful and well fed under that system. After the revolution, she said the gov't just came in a siezed everybody's property. That was so wierd a concept for me--being a 40 YO American. She went on and said the gov't took everything "for the common good" and personal property became virtually non-existant. Things rapidly deteriorated under that style of gov't, because there was no reward to work harder or to excell at anything. Natalia explained that people got poorer and poorer, and started stealing things to live. She said people didn't hate Lenin or Stalin, which surprised me, in fact she said people liked them! But that was because the gov't totally controlled all information that the people got--and, she explained, people didn't really understand that there were other options. Another thing she said which never dawned on me before, was that the gov't siezed all the banks and any money that people had therein! I found that so hard to fathom, being fairly young and American.
Natalia said that it wasn't like the gov't spied on everybody--it was more like you didn't know who you could trust when speaking openly about the gov't, so you didn't chance it. There was a real fear of the gov't and speaking openly. Natalia's parents grew tired of the lack of freedom, even though it was loosening a lot by the time they decided to leave Russia, so they took advantage of a work visa to go to South Africa.
SA, Natalia explained was a nice place but there wasn't much to do and she said outside of south Africa, places like Zambia and the Congo, were truly Third World and everything was about taking bribes. She said the other countries were horrible, but SA was nice. I sat there thinking the only view Americans have of Africa is that SA was a racist hellhole--the worst place in "progressive" Africa. She didn't know enough about Mandela to comment on him, but she said that once he was released from prison, Affirmative Action was instituted in all walks of life. She explained that suddenly all jobs had to have proportionate representation--in other words if a town was 80% black, 80% of teachers automatically had to be black. This proved to be disasterous, since very few blacks were educated enough to teach. Natalia is a sweet girl, anything but racist, and I found her candor refreshing. I told her I felt America was responsible for exporting this PC crap to all corners of the world, and that it was destroying the entire concept of MERIT. She completely agreed, having seen it in action. And she also agreed SA got it's ideas from the US, with disastrous results. When Socialism took over SA, with its contempt for merit, her parents decided it was time to go.
I found all this fascinating. I started to tell her about what I'd learned about this North American Integration scheme by Bush and others about dissolving are borders with Mexico, and as per usual, she knew nothing about it. BUT--when I explained the whole thing she just looked at me and said with unbelievable candor, "It will not work, Bob." Natalia explained that Mexico could never be merged with the US the way Canada could, concievably. She said that Third World people will not enrich this country, that they would only destroy their nation AND ours. I mean she really said that! I sat there thinking this girl understands reality better than the leader of the First World.
I Hope this thread doesn't bore people--I really think there's a lesson in all this. By the way, my producer is a Canadian and he is trying to become a citizen. He told me he's spent years and approximately $25,000 dollars trying to gain citizenship! I told him about the Bushs'plan of integrating a North American continent, and he told me flatly that Canadians would NEVER go for it because Canadians were very proud of their ethnicity and wouldn't put it up for sale. I heard this same sentiment expressed by the leader of the Council of Canadians when he got the leaked agenda of this North American Integration plan which would make for open borders, a common currency and a free "flow of goods." Unfortunately my producer didn'y quite "get" that nobody was asking Americans or Canadians or Mexicans what they wanted. This is the part that really, really infuriates me.
So what I learned here is that people like my educated, professional, law-abiding producer have to spend enormous amounts of time and money to get citizenship, while any third worlder from south of the border can just stream in, along with ALL their pathologies. This is a recipe for disaster, folks. Having the least educated people exploding their population in a First World Country is like committing national suicide.
Oh and one thing I forgot to say earlier when I talked about my friend Natalia's Russian experiences. She said Communist Russia frowned on education. Educated people were frowned upon.
Starting to get it, now?