Souvenirs of Yesteryear: Fellow traveler

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child; I felt as a child; I thought as a child. Now that I have become a man, I have put away the things of a child.” So said Saint Paul (1 Corinthians 13:11).

When Sally Chirlin was a Child (her maiden name) she also thought as one. Among her thoughts in high school was starting a young communist league. The results were rather harsh. She was expelled from school.

There she is in the photo, reenacting for me that pivotal moment as she left the front door of what was the Norwich high school in spring of 1953. Students did not normally use this door. Apparently it was reserved for solemn occasions.

I mentioned in one of my Souvenirs columns that I wanted to learn what it was like to grow up in such a small town like Norwich. Sally responded. I patiently listened to several of her escapades, but when she brought up getting kicked out of school, my attention piqued.

Communism is generally viewed today as a defunct form of social organization. It failed miserably when pitted against capitalism. Basically, communism tried to share common wealth whereas capitalism encourages most of the wealth to gravitate to those who place their capital at greatest risk in an intensely competitive free market.

Political involvement tarnished the altruistic aims of both ideologies and the adversarial confrontation became communism versus democracy. Polarization fueled itself with the incorporation of good and evil, theism versus atheism, truth versus lies, and the Cold War.

Today we may wonder what all the fuss was about. But to those of us who lived through all this stuff, it was serious business. After World War II ended in 1945, communism seemed to many of us as the next evil sequel to nazism. The Cold War (1945 to 1989) was a global extension of World War II. The Korean War (1950 to 1953) was a localized hot spot. The short synopsis is that being a communist was tantamount to being an enemy of the United States. To emphasize the dire nature of the adverse confrontation, the mighty Soviet Union was about to H-bomb us into oblivion, and of course, we likewise them.