Friday, November 03, 2006

Better dead than one red cent

I had the pleasure of riding the Metro with my father Tuesday and our dash through Foggy Bottom was briefly delayed by three costumed, college-aged girls with plastic pumpkins chanting “Trick or Treat for UNICEF.”

“No time for communists,” I muttered to myself as we breezed by.

But it was loud enough for my dad to hear and when we got to the platform he wanted to know the source of this belief. I told him I knew UNICEF wasn’t really a communist group but I have somehow always related the two. He laughed at my childish opinions and claimed he was the reason.

It seems that when I was a young’un he took me to the grocery store during a UNICEF change drive. He let me put a few cents in the 5 gallon water jug at the end of the checkout line so I’d feel like a big boy. But on the way to the car he explained that when he was growing up his grandfather turned away door-to-door UNICEF collectors because the money may “end up in the hands of Bolsheviks” and especially “Russian babies.”

Communism: Uniting families against UNICEF for 4 generations.

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