by Regina Rheda
Her speech had been written by her teacher, Miss Norma. It had some words and phrases that were a bit tricky for her to pronounce, and many whose meanings she couldn’t quite grasp. Foreign debt. Bolstering the national currency. Balancing the finances of the state. Strengthening democracy against the red peril.
“Don’t worry, Leona,” her mother had said, after her daughter had first shown her the speech. “You don’t need to know what those words mean. You just need to say them the right way.”
But Leona was a curious girl. A couple of days later, as Miss Norma was coaching her on delivering the speech in an empty room at school, Leona had insisted that she explain what those words meant.
“Your speech basically means that the gold that we’ll be donating will help our country pay its debts to the banks of the rich countries and get rid of the evil communists,” Miss Norma had said.
“What’s communists?” Leona had asked. She had heard that word before. Sometimes her mother got a little angry with Leona’s uncle Joel and called him a communist.
“Communists are people who don’t believe in God and use politics to steal everything that other people have in order to give it to lazy people,” Miss Norma had replied.
The girl had said nothing. She was confused. Concepts such as evil, lazy, and steal did not fit with the image she had of her uncle Joel. In her book, he was the nicest and most fun person in the whole world.
The following day, the girl had managed to stay awake until late at night. When she heard her uncle Joel coming back home from his job at the tire factory, she went to the kitchen and sat at the table, waiting for him to have his supper. She told him what her teacher had said about communists being evil and lazy and thieves.
“Nothing could be further from the truth, sweetie,” Joel said. He was munching on a piece of bread and savoring some bean soup, all the while trying to figure out how to talk about such matters with a six-year-old, precocious as she was. “Communists are people who believe that there shouldn’t be rich people causing other people to be poor. Everybody would be equal because everybody would have all they needed to live a good, healthy, smart and fun life. And it has nothing to do with laziness. Grownups who could work would work, but they would just have to work part time and until they were fifty. And in the future, they would need to work even less, because there would be robots working for them. Does that make sense?”
Leona nodded. “Uncle Joel, guess what I want to be when I grow up.”
Joel swallowed a spoonful of soup. “You’ve told me you want to be a scientist, a teacher, a soccer player, a dancer, and a hairdresser.”
The girl proclaimed, “I want to be a communist hairdresser robot!”
“Stop the nonsense right now, you morons!” Susi thundered, bursting into the kitchen. Leona and Joel were startled; she stood up, he dropped the spoon in the soup. Susi was wearing her flannel nightgown and a sculpture of curlers in her head. She cried, “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Joel: no more politics talk in my house! And you, young lady, forget everything your uncle said, do you understand?”
“But why?” Leona whined.
“Because our new president, Marshal Whitecastle, is a very, very stern, a very ruthless, a very scary military man who doesn’t like people who say things like that. He doesn’t like communists and he sends them to jail or worse. Now go to bed!”
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