Some of you might be surprised to learn that I am a rather staunch anti-Communist.
You won’t find me testifying before a Congressional committee on the matter, nor will I try to pull a Whittaker Chambers by trying to hide damning evidence in my pumpkin patch.
My fight against the Reds has been almost entirely accidental, the odd offshoot results of a wayward Twitter hashtag and a beautiful young woman.
Years ago, my friend Tess Hollis sent me a tweet about some random memory from our time working together at Auburn University’s student newspaper, “The Auburn Plainsman.” Hollis took advantage of Twitter’s commonly used hashtag system and used the phrase “#pman” to get her point across.
Any of our friends or any Auburn people who happened to see our tweets would likely be able to infer her meaning, bolstered by my return usage of the same “#pman” hashtag in my response to her.
However, a few hours later, I received notification that my Plainsman tweet had been retweeted and favorited by some Twitter user in the tiny nation of Moldova.
Using the powers of Google, I was able to surmise that what we thought of as a simple abbreviation for our newspaper was actually a rallying cry for cadres of young radicals in Moldova who were attempting to free their country from the yoke of Communist rule.
After the country held elections that were widely seen as unfair and rigged, the Communist party attempted to form a government, but the small nation’s liberal and progressive youth took to the streets in angry protests, tired of the same old Communistic status quo.
To them, “#PMAN” was an abbreviation of “Piata Marii Adunari Nationale,” the name for the biggest public square in Chisinau, the capital of Moldova – a public forum to express their extreme displeasure with falsified elections and corrupt elected officials, as well as a symbolic place where the tree of liberty can bloom.
Unfortunately, the Moldovan progressive protests of early 2009 were unsuccessful. The fraudulently-elected Communist leadership ran roughshod over the Moldovan people and their rights. Some protestors ultimately lost their lives.
In 2010 I was in Destin, Fla., with a group of friends, celebrating the upcoming wedding of one of the guys in the group.
At some point in that evening, I came into contact with Yuliana – a gorgeous young lady who had an accent which vaguely sounded like she was trying to help Boris Badenov look for “moose and squirrel.”
I asked her where in Eastern Europe she was from, and she quickly replied “Moldova.”
My ears perked up, but I set myself to “Red Alert” status - what was the agenda of this lithe young creature before me?
Was she a freedom fighter who came to America to escape possible retribution and oppression for standing up for free and fair elections? Could she be a covert Communist plant, sent to our country as some sort of spy here to stir up trouble?
I made her say “shibboleth” by asking her directly about the Piata Marii Adunari Nationale, and, to my surprise, her eyes immediately sparked with recognition as she talked about her life and experiences in the still Communist country.
Yuliana hated the Commies, and she and her brother were both involved in protests against their corrupt late-2000s election.
One ill-fated protest almost cost Yuliana and her brother their lives, as the police sent to disperse the protestors used force and weapons – her brother was shot in the spine and lost the use of the lower half of his body. Yuliana’s parents thought it best she leave the country for fear the state police would try to find and punish her, so they moved her to Florida to stay with relatives.
To this day, I remain touched and somewhat haunted by her harrowing personal experiences.
What originally was, to us, a non-sensical abbreviation for an inside joke was a rallying cry for freedom and liberty to a group of young people roughly the same age as we are, trying diligently just to try to gain some basic rights we Americans take for granted.
I hope they keep fighting on – ever to conquer, never to yield.
A native Opelikan, Cliff McCollum is an amateur field herpetologist, news editor and chicken salad mogul.
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