Welcome…I want to post a bit of backup here, once I figure out how….

I grew up in a second generation communist cell. My grandfather invented communism on Vancouver’s North Shore. He switched from being a Red Tory to communism in the late 1920’s.

In the late ’40s and early ’50s he ran the Northern end of an underground railroad bringing primarily black communists into Canada. Paul Robeson came through it in the early 50s to check it’s functionality, as he (at the time) was famous enough to BS his way out if apprehended.

Two of my uncles had their military careers  compromised because their sister had married the son of a known communist. There was a red glow around my parents until the day they died. While they had backed off from prosletising and softened in later years, my father was known to say ‘Now Stalin-there was a real man’ frequently.

Being good text-book communists they followed Marx closely. None of their six kids lived at home past age16-mother made no bones about how we were an interference in her life and the sooner we left the better for all. My father stated once at a dinner party ‘we raised our children without love or affection, and it looks like the chickens are coming back to roost.’ All are still breathing and more or less active, and there is not a communist in the bunch!

It was at my short stint at UBC when  the programming was brought to my attention. It took a long long time to deprogram myself, and unlike many nowadays, I have no warm cuddly feeling towards communism or any other totalitarian systems.

This life experience has given me a take on living which is based on usable skill-sets and sharing them. My father was always talking about  the need for co-operation. I said look at the word…co-operate means to operate with… FIRST you have to be able to operate Then you can co-operate with another who can operate.

All that said if someone asks for assistance my knee-jerk response is to drop what I’m doing for myself and go bail them out..