Perspective: how do you deal with fear…
The earth’s present pandemic is requiring its inhabitants to alter their life styles in order to change the onward progression of sickness and death. It is disturbing and fearful for all concerned.
But to some folks who have seen tragedy in their life before this - it’s simply something to deal with… but not turn yourself into a fear-filled, paranoid acting creature, hiding from life.
This point in time…
Perhaps it’s only in this period of time that people expect a disease to be an unusual event.
What if you lived during the epidemics ravaging the world a hundred years ago? Or when marauding raiders came pillaging through your little village?
Even American school children in the last century had a taste of programmed fear when they were ordered to hide under their desks as a practice for when Russian bombs would explode outside their windows. Ever wonder what was being told Russian children?
And remember Korean “Police Action”, Vietnam, etc.
So while you are “hunkering down”…
Here is some insight from a gentle lady in rural Cannon Falls, who as a child went through the terror of her country being taken over in a revolution.
Marta Garbarino remembers her parents tried to keep her and her sister safe but they couldn’t hide the terror and misery surrounding them in Cuba during that revolution.
She remembers “cowering in bunkers and under beds when the planes dropped bombs and shot down into the towns with their machine guns.”
And what happened to “grown-ups”?
Marta remembers learning that a cousin of her mother’s had been shot by a firing squad… and that her aunt had been imprisoned for speaking her mind."
It was terrifying to realize that her father was being held in custody because he refused to sign over the oil refinery of which he was the supervisor. He tried to explain that he did not have the authority to hand it over!
Their schools closed…
Their Catholic schools were closed and most of the priests and those with religious vocations were forced out of the country. Food became scarce. (Not just toilet paper.)
Who could you trust?
They had to hide during the day “so the government agents wouldn’t know we weren’t in the public school. These were now schools of indoctrination into Communist ideology.”
Marta continued, “There was terror in not knowing which of your neighbors were collaborating with the enemy. You had to watch what you said to whom.”
They decided to leave…
Her family knew they would have to leave their homeland.
There was a block in time when they could visit the U.S. and ask for political asylum. To disguise the fact that they were leaving forever, they could only have “three changes of clothes and one pair of shoes.
Marta continued, “My mother said one of the hardest things she ever went through was looking out the window of the airplane and seeing her country recede beneath her and knowing she would probably never see it or the rest of her family again.”
“They eventually became naturalized citizens and were always deeply grateful to what they truly believed was the greatest country in the world. They worked hard to live the American Dream.”
And for Marta?
And then in the fifth grade in a U.S. elementary school, Marta met Joe, the boy she would marry… and end up living on a farm near Cannon Falls, Minnesota... in America.
And what good things can be ahead for you?
