Bank of America Irony!

Yay!!!  Paying my bills just got easier!  Let me click "Continue", Bank of America, and see for myself!!!...

...

Occupy Movement, Solzhenitsyn and Gulags

I've been following the Occupy stories with some mild interest, as it seems like a story trumped up by the mainstream media yet really these events are little more than just bored college kids excreting what they've learned from their shoulder-patch professors that dwell in windowless cavern offices laden with musty books, the one's with the obnoxious "Card-carrying member of the ACLU" stickers on their office doors. Then again, it's a first amendment thing, so these folks are free to go out and say what they want. Heck, I'm no fan of big banks, especially Bank of America, who every time you need to speak to them you go through a soul-draining ordeal of ubiquitously-circular phone prompts (after draining so much money each month in escrow you'd think they'd be a little more human.)

But the side of the Occupy stuff that makes me uncomfortable is the noxious stench of communism from so much of the protest. When I see this, or hear some clown on the radio on the leftist Houston radio, espousing communism and Marxism, I wonder if these folks have really taken the time to study the horrific atrocities historically, and currently, in countries under communistic regimes. I wonder if these Occupy people understand the reality that there were, and ARE, gulags for dissidents and free speakers (and anyone the government doesn't like). Folks like Alexander Solzhenitsyn made it clear that when you speak your mind in a commie country that, if you survive, you can describe life from inside the confines of a gulag. North Korea is still at this, where people in these places get snatched up for "supposed 'political crimes'" and get thrown into prison camps where "Men, women and children are forced to work seven days a week as slaves and eat 'rats, frogs, snakes, insects' and even feces to battle starvation in the camps."

Unless I missed something in history classes in college, communism has been historically a global failure, that has left nations ruined, drained, and decimated, and where vestiges of this evil system still remain, this model of government goes hand in hand with grotesque waves of human rights violation. The Occupy people would be better served by sitting down and doing a comprehensive overview of the history of communism (from a teacher with a more conservative point of view), instead of tired protests that seem to elicit either a collective 'yawn' from the capitalist masses, or a cautious discomfort to folks like me who dread the State totally in charge and calling the shots.