Still a little unclear as to the cause of the initial exodus. Certainly can understand the current situation.

More attention should have been given to building up the east's economy.

West Germans were bled dry to build the East back up from socialism. I visited East Berlin several times during the socialist regime. Except for a few Soviet-financed government show buildings, the place was a wreck. The whole place was one massive (re-)construction site for over a decade after the wall fell. So was much of East Germany, including Görlitz, as the clip noted. All Germans got a 5% “Solidarity Supplement” tacked onto their income taxes to help pay for the reconstruction effort—a supplement that was never rescinded, and one that even I, as a legal foreign resident, have to pay, even though all my income is in the USA.

But material improvement only tells half the story. To recover from the mentality of living under the DDR regime isn’t something that can be bought. If their women find life with a partner in the West easier on their psyche, then that’s where they’ll settle. It’ll happen in the USA, too, as other posts on this thread have noted. A gay woman I know from Arkansas moved to Minnesota, and hasn’t looked back. She just got elected to another term in the House of Representatives from her district in Minnesota. I doubt she could have managed that had she stayed in Arkansas. People who feel oppressed, and have the option to move where they feel less oppressed, will move. Who could blame them?

that living in there must have taken on people and all of the countries behind the iron curtain. I would have left, too. Very sad that even with help, they really didn't recover.

I know a few people from Saxony, in the former DDR. Some of them are well-adjusted, good-natured people. Some just never recovered.

If you want some really good insight, find the film “The Lives of Others.” It was made by people from the former East Germany and with mostly actors from there in the main roles. It even won an Oscar in the USA. It was said, by East Germans to be a supremely accurate portrayal of what it meant to live there, shown from the points of view of both the Secret Police and the ones they persecuted. If possible, get it in the original German with subtitles. My wife first saw it in Leipzig, one of the East’s main cities. She said that when the film ended, the audience sat in stunned silence, having their former lives played back for them.

It's sounds excellent and I'll look for it.

I have a book written by someone who lived through the Bolshevik revolution (1917), Leaves of a Russian Diary, and it's gut wrenching. It's terrible that history (of communism) wasn't taught in US schools.

Like Göring noted from his cell, any government can get its citizens to do its bidding by creating an enemy, a menace from without. Ours was “communism,” something we were all told was evil, but we were never really told why it was evil. The ideologically unpure were persecuted, and the death penalty was unjustly meted out. OK, is this the Soviet Union or Alabama you’re talking about?

“The Lives of Others” is so riveting because it was told by people who had the whole thing in recent memory. A true window into what life was like in “the true existing socialism,” as the East German propagandists claimed they had built. Not hoards of tortured people obsessed with climbing over the Berlin Wall, but ordinary people trying to make do with a system they knew to be unjust, but to which they saw no alternative or escape.

Our (then—talking 1977) group of friends in (West-) Berlin had friends in East Berlin. A young married couple. He was a musician and she was an artist—barely tolerable to the socialist regime, bordering on the crime of “parasitism.” They submitted an application to emigrate. They did it quietly, as her father was in the Secret Police, and would not have approved. They arrived in the west, living on handouts, from both friends and the West Government. They were kind of lost. They came from a socialist state, where the State proscribed every aspect of their lives, to a western society, where they were expected to make their own decisions and follow up on pursuing them. It was a concept completely foreign to them, and they were having a difficult time adjusting. We have no idea what became of them.

As an example of how deep the culture cleft was, when people from the former East came to Western hotels after the wall fell, they would ask what time breakfast was. They were told “between 7 and 10 AM.” They didn’t get it. They said, yes, but what time is our breakfast? The frustrated hotel clerk repeated, between 7 and 10. The frustrated Easterners said yes, we get that, but what time is our breakfast? Under the socialists, you were assigned what time your breakfast was, you had no choice. The western hotel clerk couldn’t understand why they didn’t get it after he repeated it three times, and the Easterners couldn't grasp the concept that they were free to choose for themselves. One German documentary put it best: they speak the same language, but nevertheless still can’t understand each other.

and thank you for sharing those stories. It's hard to fathom that degree of control (when one eats breakfast) and people being so conditioned that they're unable to make their own decisions.

and it is gonna get worse

Literally seething and dripping with anger and hate. And don't forget resentment. Those people love to blame everyone else for their miserable existence.

Dallas is a big blue island in a hostile sea of red. I know many people there, including some really well-off people (even one billionaire!) who are active supporters and fund-raisers for Democrats, both state and national. I’m told similar things about Houston, Austin and El Paso.

Half of that rant is out of frustration. Cheers and keep up the good fight!

And I say that as a Dallas "resident" who lives 5000 miles from Dallas!

just as there are red (usually rural) areas in blue states.

I live in the Western half of Maryland and about 10 miles West of me it's Alabama. Same for the Eastern shore, that's Mississippi. Cheers

Minneapolis/St. Paul, Duluth and to some extent the college towns - it's cold Alabama. It's liberal where most of the people are, which is why it's voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1972, but with the exception of the reservations, the rural areas are just about as right-wing as the deep South.

Odd, but true. Texas and Florida have more women by ratio compared to California.

People can say it will change - who knows, maybe - but America is a fair way away from East Germany in this regard.

The highest male-to-female ratios tend to be in rural, uninhabited areas. Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, etc. Places where people are more likely there working in some industry than setting up family shop.

Women live years longer than men, so retirees are skewed towards women. And Florida is the retirement capital of the US.

I wouldn't move to a red state if I was paid a fortune to do so. Having to live in such an environment would be a little bit o' Hell, at least for me.

I'll take a blue state EVERY time.

If I had a college-age daughter, no way would I allow her to attend college in a red state.

At a good blue state university. There were positions open in Texas and Florida, but she wouldn't consider applying there.