Mrs. Pemberton was my first-grade teacher. Not long ago, I appeared in front of the Richmond County Planning Commission to pitch a mixed-use real estate development. Mrs. Pemberton was a Commission member. It had been nearly 40 years since I was in her class.
Before the meeting started, and in front of the entire crowd, she said to me, “Robbie, are you going to speak tonight?”
I answered, “Yes, ma’am.”
She retorted, “Good God, we’ll be here all night.”
Apparently, I’ve always been the loquacious sort—even as a six-year-old.
I’m a rotten scoundrel with very few worthwhile skills or admirable traits, but one area where I excel is meeting new people and engaging them in conversation, especially if I find them interesting. No matter where I am, I get up at 5 a.m. and head to the nearest coffee shop. Inevitably, I start talking to strangers and make new friends. In the process, I learn things I would never know from books.
Lately, I’ve spent a good bit of time in Palm Beach. Damn, there are some interesting folks down here! One can learn a lot about the world by being an avid and curious reader, but there’s no greater learning experience than talking to people who have lived the life you’ve only read about.
If you’ve read my previous columns, you may know that I would love to see the Washington suburbs napalmed, then bulldozed, and then—just as Scipio Aemilianus did to Carthage in 146 B.C.—have salt poured into the soil so nothing would ever grow there again. I hate the Washington bureaucracy, mostly Northern Virginia, with its ticky-tack vanilla suburbs, pencil-neck dweebs, corpulent Karens, undeserved hubris, and the sneering entitlement of people with no roots or culture. These are the types who name their children from the most popular names survey in People magazine rather than honoring their ancestors. Mostly, I hate the way these people vote.
I’ve written about how progressive forces in the West are neo-Marxists and their similarities to the most brutal governments in history. I’ve done podcasts on what a mess Canada has become under Justin Trudeau’s 10-year reign of terror.
Enter Tony, one of my new coffee buddies. He ran a division of the federal government, and he pulls no punches. His dad worked for the government, as did his ex-wife, his daughter, and pretty much everyone he knew in Northern Virginia. The stories he tells about waste, fraud, and abuse are mind-blowing.
He says 80% of his employees did no work. Everybody—no matter how rotten and lazy—gets a bonus. No one gets fired. He finally got out because of DEI. He said all new hires were just “bone-chillingly stupid.” He couldn’t take it anymore. When he retired, he was shocked to find out that with all his benefits and perks, he was making the same amount of money as when he worked.
Every year, his division spent millions of dollars on tangible property it didn’t need just to exhaust its annual budget—so it would receive even more funding the following year. Everyone saw the fraud and waste, but no one spoke up. Like Sergeant Schultz, “they see nothing!” No one dared to expose the system for fear of ending the gravy train.
He’s told me endless stories about corruption. One involved huge warehouses filled with brand-new computers—completely unneeded and purchased just to burn through the budget. Then, after a month in storage, as the new fiscal year began, they were auctioned off for $5 apiece. Guess which class of people had the inside connections to make millions off the auction?
Another new friend is a woman high up in conservative circles. She was born and raised under Mao, during the time he was killing 50 million of his own people to create the “great socialist republic.” Her family’s land was stolen. Many relatives were murdered, especially the educated ones.
She and her family were sent to a labor camp. Millions were starving. She had to walk miles to school—a school that erased all history and all references to a higher power. On her way home, she was forced to scavenge for rice and grain to hand over to the government, while her own people starved.
Her grandfather lived in Hong Kong. Somehow—miraculously—her family bribed a communist official, and she was allowed to visit him at age nine, knowing she would never return or see her family again. She had nothing. Her grandfather, a doctor, had also fled China with nothing and could only find menial work in Hong Kong.
She studied hard and was accepted into a few American universities. She barely spoke English and only scored a 450 on the verbal SAT (still higher than what America’s teachers’ unions produce for native-born English speakers), but she had a near-perfect math score. She worked her way through college cleaning toilets.
Despite her hardships, she prospered—and she couldn’t be any sweeter or kinder.
We discussed Falun Gong and why the communist government hates them so much. We both concluded it’s for the same reason the American Left hates Christianity: individual liberty and free conscience are incompatible with a controlled society, which insists that the only god is the state. There can be no higher power than the state. A set of principles manifested in the individual through the divine must be destroyed.
At the end of our discussion, I was so moved I couldn’t help but give her a big hug.
This morning, I met Troy, who fled Canada after Trudeau froze bank accounts during the trucker strike. He couldn’t speak out against the indoctrination his kids were getting in school. Economically, there was no hope—not with 50% taxes and stifling regulations.
I’ve met others. Omar, the Persian escapee from Iran. Torsten, the German physician devoted to stopping forced organ harvesting—where governments kill people to sell their organs. Escapees from New York.
If there’s a common theme, it’s that people are damned interesting. Some sources report the news and record history accurately. They provide the steak—but not the sizzle.
Listening to individuals share their experiences of great events provides color and perspective—nuances that you can’t get from books. It’s like watching an old black-and-white movie 50 times, then suddenly seeing it in color.
I love talking to interesting people and hearing their stories.
