Advice from my grandmother
There is a lot of talk about ‘the talk’ in the media, in all shapes and colors. And it got me thinking. See, I never got any talk from my parents, but after reading several articles on the recent John Derbyshire affair, I suddenly recalled some things my grandmother had taught me when I was very young—so young in fact that I don’t even remember being told this or that for the first time. For example, that I should never talk to a stranger.
My grandmother was born well before the Russian Revolution, and as an adult, she managed to survive the major historical upheavals such as the WWI, the change of the regime, the collectivization, the siege of Leningrad, the Red terror, the Stalinist terror before and after the war, the Cold War period, and the rest of the Soviet reality, until her death at the venerable age of 90. I still remember her as a good old grandma but, being a kid, I could hardly appreciated the considerable survival skills that kept her and her family alive, out of prison as well as could be expected all through the troubled years of modern Russian history. Although she was poisonously contemptuous towards all things Soviet (her favorite nickname for V. I. Lenin was “the Antichrist”), she had realistic attitudes through her entire life. What she tried to instill in me also, ever since I was three years old, was certain norms of behavior that, as I realize now, were the basic rules of survival. How well they served me later in life! Obviously, those rules were survival strategies in an age of anarchy, wars, a totalitarian regime and finally multiculturalism with its abundance of crime, dirt and diseases. So here it is — some advice from my grandmother. And since her wisdom was simple and commonsensical, I didn’t even need Bill Ayers’ help in writing it.
Who would’ve thought her advice would be so painfully applicable in contemporary multicultural, PC-vigilant US of America? Read more