@Pete: Hey man, thanks for your support. You guys are heroic!

One of the most profound events in my life occurred at age 14 when my parents took me on a trip to what was then East Germany, or the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik).

We had spent a few weeks in West Germany, which I remember as a place of vibrant warmth, tall narrow houses, and openly friendly people. It didn’t feel much different from my native Canada, just older, stuffier and more crowded.

The day we drove our rented car over the border from West to East was a day I will never forget.

While the West German border folks had greeted us with smiles and a little gift for us kids, there was only sullen icyness at the DDR border. Even as a kid I could sense the fear that permeated every aspect of that place.

The sights that met my naive eyes upon entering the communist DDR were unbelievable. Litter was strewn on the roadways. The vibrant fields of crops I had just witnessed were replaced by dusty, sparse fields where stunted plants sprouted only every few meters. The houses all looked the same, concrete and caked with dirt. Even the few people on the street looked dull, cloaked in long shabby coats.

I remember so clearly the uncles and aunts turning up their record players loudly, and then huddling with us, furtively whispering in their own living rooms because the secret police knew we were visiting. I remember how these old people were thrilled to have received extra food coupons from the government in order to impress us westerners with communist abundance (we went shopping 3x a day to get all the meat we could, because they normally could only go once a week).

The grocery stores were unlike anything I had ever seen. Cold, sparse rows of shelves with only a few tin cans faced up to the front of the aisles; all the cans with the same government labels and a word identifying the contents. I remember my mother sternly telling me to be quiet and not talk to our relatives about how different it was at home.

Seated in the abject gray apartments we listened to stories about how everyone in this communist nation had a four month wait for interior painting do be done by government painters; they weren’t allowed to just go and buy their own paint. The only people with vehicles had government connections and a four year waiting period. Plumbing repairs took weeks – the communist government employed all plumbers for life, who got paid in food stamps whether they worked or not.

The day we left was like escaping a prison. Every one of our relatives wept as we said goodbye. I’m sure a number of them were anticipating a visit from the Stasi after having spent a couple of weeks with us, just to make sure they were still thinking good socialist thoughts.

As we exited that horrible place, we met another relative at the border who had come to meet us. He lived in West Germany, and he had built his own airplane in his basement and managed to escape communism by flying over the Berlin wall to freedom. He lifted his shirt and showed me pock marked bullet scars from being shot at as he sailed over.

All of that in the Deutche Demokratic Republic. A communist experiment.

When that trip was over and I returned to Canada, the seeds were planted of a lifelong aversion to socialism and big government. More than that, I was siezed with a burning need to defend our personal freedoms from the ever encroaching hand of government bureocracy, groupthink and utopian ideology.

The most tragic casualty of communism isn’t even the appalling body count. Its the erosion of the human spirit.