If a 12 Year Old Can Grasp What is Happening...

why is it so many adults seemingly can not? Probably because this kid, at her ripe old age of twelve, knows more accurate history than most current MBAs.

I am lying in bed, reading with my daughter, the twelve year old. I am reading a book titled Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng. A highly recommended read, by the way. It is the story of a woman's six and a half year imprisonment in Mao's Communist China.

I get to a particularly poignant part and I read it to my daughter. It goes like this:

..They smashed flower and curio shops because they said only the rich had money to spend on such frivolities. Other shops were examined, and goods they considered offensive or unsuitable for a socialist society they destroyed or confiscated. Their standard was very strict. Because they did not think a socialist man should sit on a sofa, all sofas became taboo. Other things such as inner spring mattresses, silk, velvet, cosmetics and clothes that reflected fashion trends of the West, were all tossed onto the streets to be carted away or burnt. Traditionally, shops in China had borne names that were considered propitious, such as Rich and beautiful for a fabric shop, Delicious Aroma for a restaurant, Good Fortune and Longevity for a shop that sold hats for older man, etc. When the government took over the shops in 1956, the names had not been changed. Now, condemned by the Red Guards, they were forced to be changed to something more revolutionary. Uncertain what alternative would be more acceptable, large numbers of shops chose the name East is Red, the title of a song eulogizing Mao Zedung. The Red Guards had removed the goods displayed in the windows of the shops and replaced them with Mao's official portrait...

I then asked my daughter who that sounded like today and if she'd have a hard time imagining today's "liberals" performing the same types of acts. She said, "It already sounds like California and the bans on big screen TVs". She is right, it was a parallel I hadn't even drawn.

It is our responsibility to keep this history alive. Your children will get it better than you think and they'll never learn it in school. It is also important to note that the average age of a Red Guard Soldier was somewhere between 12 and 16 years old. If you do not help shape your child's mind and teach them independent thought, someone else will fill that vacuum. (cue in videos of school aged children singing praise to Barack Hussein Obama. mmmm, mmmm, mmmm...)

In the words of the great Ronald Reagan:

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."