Saturday, June 02, 2007

Democracy stuns Polish coma man

WARSAW, Poland (Reuters) -- A 65-year-old railwayman who fell into a coma following an accident in communist Poland regained consciousness 19 years later to find democracy and a market economy, Polish media reported on Saturday.

(snip)

"When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol lines were everywhere," Grzebski told TVN24, describing his recollections of the communist system's economic collapse.

"Now I see people on the streets with cell phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin."


I guess the reason this stuck out to me is that 19 years is exactly how long I've been back here in Indiana, so I can pinpoint exactly what the world was like back in 1988.

Check out this stuff from one of those, "This date in history" sites.


Bread: $0.61/loaf
Milk: $2.00/gal
Eggs: $1.13/doz
Car: $14,065
Gas: $0.96/gal

House: $138,300
Stamp: $0.25/ea
Avg Income: $38,608/yr
Min Wage: $3.35/hr
DOW Avg: 2,169

Top Songs

Sweet Child O' Mine by Guns N' Roses
Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley
One More Try by George Michael
Man In the Mirror by Michael Jackson
Anything for You by Gloria Estefan & Miami Sound Machine

And finally...

Bush moved with his family to Washington, D.C. in 1988, to work on his father's campaign for the U.S. presidency.

Imagine waking up now.

3 Comments:

At 9:06 PM, Blogger Paddy said...

If I could turn back time.

 
At 12:18 AM, Blogger dave in boca said...

Yeah, back to that Great Society Dream. Then there'd be “..... only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol queues were everywhere”, the normal situation in a workers’ paradise.

And let's just let the victims of academicide weave their magic nostrums in the USA with a John-Boy Edwards or Algorhythm tax-the-air-we-breathe as POTUS===or even the Hilarious Socialist===and we can all reverse history and be back in the happy past when Uncle Joe was our pal.

That's the ticket, even bigger government!

 
At 1:17 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Dave,

We have rationing in the West too, only here, things are rationed on the basis of having the cash to pay for them.

When meat is subsidized by the government so that the price you pay is between one tenth and one twentieth of what the “market price” would be, then the lines and shortages don’t carry the same connotation, do they ?

But of course, right-wing media never bother to provide this background.

 

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