‘Socialism is chasing me!’

“Socialism is chasing me!” he declared with a smile.

We had just met.

In fact, we hadn’t really met.

I just turned around and he was there.

Actually, I hadn’t turned around, I had spun around.

I had stood up from a Sabbath dinner table in a New England congregation where I had gone to visit family. I was seated next to a hat wearing woman who, after learning I was from Florida, West Palm Beach, specifically and had met Donald Trump on numerous occasions, sneered

“You won’t be seeing him around in the future!.”

I refused to engage with her.

After all, I was a guest.

But she was just getting warmed up.

“He attempted to interfere with the election!”

“Actually, he had already been elected when his office reimbursed his former lawyer whose own former lawyer had told him that Trump knew nothing about the original payment to the time. And federal election violations are the exclusive jurisdiction of the DOJ who declined to prosecute him. The NYC trial judge barred the former Chairman Federal Election Commission election official from testifying on the issue.”

“He was guilty!”

Of what? No one knows the actuall charges. The Sixth Amendment provides that the defendant has a right to ‘be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation’ That didn’t happen here. There is Supreme Court case law that reaffirms the same.

“He paid to silence someone!”

“People pay for settlements of claims all the time. It is not a crime.”

“He’s going to jail!”

“What about Hillary Clinton? Her organiztion paid $10 million for a false dossier which implied Trump conspired with Putin. She wasn’t prosecuted.”

Maybe it was the name “Clinton” that triggered her but at that point she jumped up and sped away announcing “I didn’t come here to discuss politics!’’

“Then why did you? You just don’t like the fact that someone doesn’t agree with you,” I send to her retreating back. “And there was no jurisdiction.”

I, too, rose and began to walk away as I found the conversation disturbing.

Then I bumped into the chasee.

I immediately understood what he was saying.

“Do you speak Yiddish?” I asked.

“Some,” he said.

“Not everyone here agrees with you and me.”

“I came from the Soviet Union. This is what I ran away from.”

“I know! My dad lived there during the war and to me if you had something to say, you went into the fields. Everyone was an informer. After the war had ended, his employer, the First Secretary of Tajikistan who had hired him as a chauffeur and bodyguard told him ‘We like you you and want you to stay in the Soviet Union!’”

“I have learned so much about the glories of Communism,” my 25 year old father said, “I want to go back and teach it to the Polish people.”

“Your father was a smart man.”

I smiled.

I saw the woman one more time in the room.

We kept our distance from each other.

She would probably have even argued with my new friend and when that failed, shrieked “You watch FOX News!

It was the basest, conversation ending insult she could come up with.