Utopia will never be true

Submitted by Prashant (United States), Aug 30, 2022 at 21:12

Dear Dr Pipes,

Michael Gorbachev's passing took me back to the 1980s when the end of the cold war and beginning of Glasnost brought a new hope to the world. For some years we thought that democracy and free markets will spread around the world and draconian regimes will die for ever.

How wrong could we be? Little did we know that vacuums created by disappearance of bad influences are filled by brand new and worse influences.

We failed to realize that Islamism will more than fill the vacuum created by the death of communism.

We failed to realize that communist dictatorships will be replaced by Xi Jinping style non-communist dictatorships which would be more powerful and more moneyed.

We failed to realize that apartheid and discrimination against blacks will be replaced by the modern worldwide inverse woke culture.

We failed to realize that innocent he/she/it in the conference papers will be replaced by he/she/they/him/her/them/none-of-the-above.

We failed to realize that socialism of Asia, Africa, and Latin America will be replaced by the leftist divide-misguide-and-misrule politics in most of the world.

We failed to realize that innocuous and secular ethnic saris and other foreign clothes on the streets of New York, Ann Arbor, Boston and Philadelphia would be replaced by religiously overloaded hijabs in every city of the country and world and the latter will pass for the former.

We don't want to ever go back to where we were but I still long for the days when Reagan debated Mondale or when Bentsen debated Dan Quayle.

Gorbachev brought a lot of hope to the world. We dreamed of Utopia. I wish I can get back my circa-1988 rose-colored glasses. I hope that they are not made in China!

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