TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Brewing Up Another Revolution?

ADVERTISEMENT

By TOM JACKSON

tjackson@tampatrib.com

Published: March 29, 2009

HUDSON - To commemorate an achievement no less than a lifetime in the making, newly minted U.S. citizen Regina Simmons received from her very best American friends ... a book. But not just any book. It was "1776," David McCullough's well-woven tale about the struggling birth of American liberty - a condition that today is as often taken for granted as it is poorly understood.

Happily, neither describes Simmons, who has spent all her life in pursuit of freedom. And for as long as she can remember, freedom and America have been synonymous. Which helps explain, as Washington races toward enslaving debt, why she worries today.

Simmons was born in a tiny fairy-tale town in Germany's heart in 1942, the high-water mark for Hitler's sprawling global redesign. Her earliest memories are of grim-faced men in stiff boots marching to the beat of oppression.

What follows, condensed for space, recalls one of those souls, longing to breathe free, memorialized by the Statue of Liberty: At 10, the age Soviet masters began indoctrinating their Eastern bloc subjects with lessons in Russian and communism's moral superiority, Regina was secreted to kin in Vermont - where, influenced by Howdy Doody, the Mouseketeers and President Eisenhower, she was soon Americanized.

Returned to her parents in 1958 (they had escaped to West Germany), she could no longer converse in her native tongue. But within two years, possibly not by accident, she tumbled for Malcolm Simmons, a Canadian soldier. Says Regina, "I became his child bride," and before long they had set up housekeeping in the New World, first in Winnipeg, then, starting 29 years ago, in Florida - Casselberry and Hudson.

Alarmed And Motivated

Last month, Regina Simmons took the oath of citizenship. This was done, in part, to move her daughter, shivering in Manitoba, up the legal immigration queue. But as political events unfolded, she grew alarmed. Alarm became agitation, and agitation has become motivation. As a citizen, she can act.

Thursday, the eve of her one-month anniversary as an American, Simmons joined about 140 other similarly inspired Nature Coast residents crowding the Sea Pines Civic Association clubhouse for the latest in a series of "tea parties," orderly grass-roots gatherings denouncing the spend-borrow-and-social-re-engineer tsunami about to be triggered with too darn much glee by Washington Democrats.

"America is the country I always loved," Simmons says. "The first time I said the Pledge of Allegiance as a citizen ... it was unbelievable. There were tears everywhere."

Share Your Wealth, Or Else

Simmons came to defend that ideal, one that rewards preparation, diligence, integrity, prudence and faith - but one she senses is under assault.

"People work hard for their money," she says. "Why should they be forced to share it with people who don't?"

A fair question, one increasing numbers of astonished citizens are just now getting around to asking each other, and are eager to ask their elected officials. The question then becomes whether there is time enough for a critical mass of astonished Americans to discover, and act upon, their own inner Reginas.

Keyword: The Jax Files, for additional musings on the state of things in Tom Jackson's blog.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT