"If mommy is a commie...."

"If mommy is a commie, then you gotta turn her in."

Maybe it's just my brain defragging and bringing bits and pieces of old files together, but lately I find myself remembering "The John Birch Society." Not only the1962 Chad Mitchell Trio song, but also the extremist idea that there is an enemy, a socialist, Marxist, communist enemy, lying in wait to take over the country. Could be anybody. Could even be your mommy.

"He keeps on preaching brotherhood, but we know what he means." ;>)

The irony of course is that in an attempt to free a nation from subversive radicals, we turn that very nation into what we fear. A visit to Cuba would show you that. Oh wait! I forgot that the US government doesn't permit the liberty of travel to Cuba. We are punishing them for being communist. That may be an oversimplification, but the end result is that we help to perpetuate a system where there are informers and the kind of suspicion that John Birchers think is prudent. The circle of life.

I visited Cuba in 2000, when Elian Gonzalez was in Miami, and couldn't help but feel for the sad, decaying beauty of the country. As I walked through crumbling Havana, I was several times taken for French because few Americans were seen on those streets even then. Havana, remember, is as close to our shores as Charleston is to Hilton Head. To have children there approach me and rub their forearms with their hands, a sort of sign language request for soap, and to have them also make a scribbling gesture request for pencils is unforgettable.

The point is that we should be careful about throwing around words like "radical", because certainly our Founders were radical, and "communist", because we often don't know what we are talking about. Life for some in Cuba was no picnic before their revolution or there wouldn't have been one. Life in Cuba after the fall of the USSR has been no picnic either. The danger, in my opinion, is ideology taken to an extreme in either direction. Social justice is not a leftist value. It's a human value. And it was a mainstream value in 1962.