I’m meeting my grandfather for lunch on Friday. It’ll be the first time I’ve seen him in several years. He went all the way down the hate hole. Never heard him cuss but last time we talked he was using the N word.
He’ll be 87 soon. Most likely, I’ll never see him again. He’s going to find out we’re moving out of the south to yankee land.
Fuck it. He’s not the man I knew. He doesn’t have the wisdom I thought he did.
I hate it and it fucks me up. I’ve lost my people to hate and stupid. So fucking stupid. They all want to suck some orange cock. Fucking really? That’s your fucking Messiah? They didn’t actually fucking read the fucking book they claimed they believed in while shoving bullshit down my throat and the throats of any child they could get ahold of.
Fuck em. They could wake the fuck up if they choose to. They could read. They could think. I tried to tell them.
I’m real sad about it. Not a fucking thing I can do about it. They can live inside their lie holes.
Blackberry Winter has skipped two years. There are armadillos, geckos, and fire ants now. Those critters didn’t live here until things changed. The fucking woods smell and sound different now. They could wake the fuck up and quit listening to fox or their preacher but they choose not to.
I tried to tell them and they didn’t listen because they choose to be ignorant.
fuck em
He’s not the man I knew. He doesn’t have the wisdom I thought he did.
The grief is really, really real. I’m so sorry. I feel this way about several people I grew up around, It sucks to realize people you respected aren’t interested in doing the right thing or even acknowledging reality.
What’s the difference between your grandfather and a lib supporting Genocide?
We could be talking about the gestation period of marsupials and you linkerbaan, as is your wont, would try to turn the conversation to Gaza.
I’ve been having the same conversations. Told my family I love them as people but I’m moving because their politics quite literally are devolving into third world territory.
Can’t keep power on, roads and bridges falling apart, rights being taken away.
If that’s where you want to live that’s cool but peace.
Not sure what you’re saying about the local ecology. In any case, it’s changed radically since I was a kid in the 70s, plain to see.
FFS, you don’t have to clean the bugs off the windshield at every gas stop. That should be a major wake-up call to us old folks. The bottom of the food chain dropped out!
Nothing you can do OP.
They sound like my boomer parents. I just keep them far away from me. We talk once every 6 months or so, that’s it. They live a 2 hour drive away, but now that I don’t have a car anymofe it’s 4,5h with public transportation, so a good reason not to visit them. I love it. I’m just waiting for them to die. Stupid boomers. They fucked up my youth, they fucked up the world, now they spread hate.
Just live your own life, surround yourself with people who are like minded. I have a lot of friends around me, I left my family. The expression “blood runs thicker then water” is originally longer. Many people interpret it as family bonds being stronger then friends, but the entire expression is “blood runs thicker then water from the womb” meaning the exact opposite. You can choose your friends, you’re stuck with the people who are your family, you can’t choose your family. But you can choose to not talk to them anymore and to focus on friends instead.
He doesn’t have the wisdom I thought he did.
I know it’s armchair/backseat advice, but if it comes up I suggest telling him this word for word. It’s the kind of thing that would (or at least should) pierce the soul of a man his age.
I’m in a very similar spot. My mom is starting to slip mentally and the further she slides, the more hateful she becomes. Before she knew and were friends with many diverse people. Now she hates their kind. Gays, trans, immigrants, blacks, etc.
I theorize the more you decline mentally, and lose your ability to critically think, the most convincing arguments are most repeated ones. I’ve noticed that the strength of her opinions are usually based on the frequency that she hears it. I can predict how often she’s gonna start ranting about black people, trans pedophiles, electric vehicles by the amount of content she’s watching. The more she watches, the more she argues.
I can’t seem to break her out of this cycle. The right has thoroughly brainwashed her that Democrats and leftists are scum and should only exist to be shamed and exiled. If an opinion or fact is even slightly related to democratic values, she just shuts off and rejects it.
She had a PhD and was extremely successful but now she has difficulty just using the oven. There are days when she is lucid and relatively straight thinking but other days she is entirely unintelligible and relies heavily on hand gestures.
Sometimes I wish she would pass. She causes so much pain for everyone around her (my sisters went no contact) and she is in pain herself. She is so extremely stressed and fears that antifa is going to burn down all of the great American cities, the homeless and blacks are going to ravage and loot everything and the left will be complicit since it’s their “ultimate goal” to destroy america.
It makes me extremely sad.
The irony being they are actually correct in some cases. Lots of leftists want to destroy the state, and national borders in favour of a unified world. You also have tankies that want death to America specifically, and honestly I can understand the feeling.
It hurts a whole lot. I can’t find a cure for their sick and I’ve tried.
Bless her heart, I don’t think she can help it. I don’t think you can fix it.
We can’t fix or help them. They’re sick in a bad way and we have to move on and take care of the ones that will let us.
I have no pity for willfully ignorant people
https://youtu.be/FS52QdHNTh8?si=Cr5PW-7FQJimgHbI your post reminded me of this amazing documentary called “The Brainwashing of my Dad” in which the documentarian talks about how Rush Limbaugh and the greater right wing fox news propaganda machine turned a man he once respected and looked up to for his strong character and morals into a barely functioning hatemonger.
So many people I love fell down this hole. I used to listen to Limbaugh, everyone did. As I was coming out of bad religion, I stopped.
I’d like to piss on that motherfucker’s grave. He killed my family.
Goddamnit southerns, you are Yankees. The only southerners that weren’t Yankees were confederates who can also be called treasonous traitors.
Essentially, if you’re not a Yankee you’re a goddamn traitor.
Yes and no.
I’m country as a pinto bean sandwich. Yankees were people that lived in the north and talked different.
I used to have a lot of pride in my people. We are tough and proud. Able to endure heat that most people don’t understand. Stretch a penny and squeeze a dime, fix a truck with bailing wire, JB weld and a coke can. Kind to others, stop on the road and help someone broke down.
Collard greens, corn bread, catfish, and a mess of green beans. There’s bacon fat in the beans and they’ve been boiled down.
Black folks around, you say Ma’am and Sir to make sure they know you respect them. We’re all people.
I started reading, left home, and lived near a big city for 20 years.
I come from profound ignorance. There’s a good naturedness that seems to have left my people.
Also, for what it’s worth, my family was from the south. My reunions and funerals and weddings all take place somewhere in a holler with 1 Walmart about 40 minutes down the mountain.
My uncle once said, and my mother agreed, in relation to gay men “I wish they’d put em all on an island somewhere, they’d be happier that way”.
But I wasn’t lucky enough to know my grandpa as a man of wisdom. He’d said enough stupid shit, or abided it in his home when his children begged for '“Barack Houssein O’bummer’s” birth certificate. He had a dog named Blackie, that I called Blackie because I wouldn’t dare say it’s real name if someone asked.
What was good in them did all truly disappear in front of me day by day from that point. Hell, I actually believed the ‘states rights’ reason for the civil war until I was at least 14 or so. Crazy what stupid can breed
I think he’s saying that “southerners call northerners Yankees, but they don’t know that EVERYONE in the US is a Yankee once the confederacy lost, because not a single confederate soldier remained, reclaiming those states as Yankee territory and any citizen therein is a Yankee. Anyone who disagrees doesn’t remember the lesson Ol’ Sherman taught em”
100% wrong, Yankee has a meaning and has only ever been a north south during and after the civil war, you know when we killed a bunch of racist ducks and burned their cities to the ground.
If you see yourself as anything but a Yankee I’m going to call you a traitor and a closet feddy, it is what it is no matter how many friendly southern afforisms you offer.
Wait. I’m a traitor?
Like, I have an entire culture that I’m grieving. Warts and all. Grew up in this. I talk different, look different, eat different from like the rest of the USA. I’m pretty much a walking talking stereotype of a redneck.
What the fuck is up with you that you think that’s a reasonable thing to say? Would Mister Rogers like the person you’re being?
If you say you aren’t a Yankee you’re either a traitor or long to be one. We fought a war over that shit and those southern “not Yankees” lost.
Neat, so you’re American and you do stereotypical shit and have a slightly different culture and dialect. You know what every other country on the planet would say a Yankee is? The stereotype of the person you claim to be, ie an American.
Mr.Rodgers was against racism so I’m pretty sure he’s ok with not supporting the racist legacy of the South.
My god, I figure we’re probably on the same side of the fence. You seem like you’re some kind of angry and I don’t know why.
There’s so much racist freight in the south it ain’t worth talking about. My banjo teacher’s daddy was the grand wizard. Fucking for real, true statement.
I’m not racist. I’ve made deliberate efforts to include black folks (the primary other in my neck of the woods) in my personal and professional life.
I shook hands with a man today and told him goodbye. Iranian, he got out when shit went bad with the Shah snd the CIA and such. He owned the gas station down from my old house and expanded. We talked about getting old and staying working otherwise we’ll die. We talked about his grandkids and how I want grandkids. I’m going to miss him a whole lot. He’s a good man.
I’m a redneck, not a Yankee, and that’s okay. I love my people even if they are sick.
He doesn’t have the wisdom I thought he did.
One of the starkest shocks I had during the initial trump candidacy and pandemic was the veil being lifted on so many people I worked with or knew.
People I thought of as intelligent, level-headed, and reasonable suddenly appeared hateful, mulish, and willfully ignorant.
They didn’t care about the environment. They didn’t care if they got people sick or killed them with covid. They didn’t care about the open overtures to authoritarianism or fascism - if anything they directly welcomed this. The wild and rampant stupidity behind the conspiracies and Q-anon. The concerted attacks on women’s or lgbtq rights, the denial of equality or justice for people killed by police. The complete willingness to throw their fellow humans under the bus for any reason at all to spare themselves the inconvenience of not being able to eat at Applebees without a mask.
And they manufactured whatever slights they could think of to justify their actions regarding the above. It was retaliation for loss of perceived status as White People In Charge.
It completely killed discourse because you can’t have a discussion with someone who isn’t willing to argue in good faith. Who Gish Gallops and buthwhatabouts. Who exhausts their opponent with conspiracies that are so full of shit that you don’t even know where to start rebutting because they have no place in reality.
The trump election sharply split America in two. The country and the world are a far less stable place than a decade ago.
Yes. it was an incredible shock. 9-11 was less of a shock.
It’s like a transmissible soul sickness that they willfully acquired because it seemed easy and it made them feel right and justified.
I’m moving on and trying to make peace with it. I’m trying to view it as a different kind of pandemic or an asteroid that came out the sky and smacked us.
When you realize all the people you admired for their love of freedom actually just meant the freedom to be an asshole… That’s a hard lesson to learn.
Yeah, that’s the truth. Their freedom to not be inconvenienced regarding how their fellow humans are treated.
Of course it’s them - hateful and aggressive - not understanding you.
Why would it ever be you - knowledgeable, well-informed guy writing nice, respectful posts about them on the internet - not trying to understand them?
Probably better to move out south.
I’m from the South so I feel your pain, people are painfully ignorant. I’m more interested in the fact that you said the woods sound and smell different, could you elaborate?
This will be hard to put into words. I figure it’s a result of climate change/global warming.
There was an eartheir note in the smell when I was a kid. Now I smell more clay and piss, I think the piss smell is from the insects changing. I smell less oak and a lot more privet. Less walnut and pecan sharp smells. Lots of a green smell that I only used to know in high spring. Fungus and wood rot way more often. Something like cut grass even in February.
There was a constant whine and buzz. It was a background noise and is mostly gone. There was always knocking in the trees and it happens way less. The ground had a buzz and shuffle that is way less, even though big beetles move through.
There are new whinings, there’s a deeper buzz.
It’s all subjective, it’s different, things have changed.
I’m trying to put words to this, but it’s like trying to talk about the way water feels.
Hang out with grandpa and just ignore the trump shit. If it’s just them liking trump and that then learn to let go and just be with people if you liked them before trump. Not your job to change people. But don’t burn bridges. Internet taught a generation there are these clear lines that we can’t ever cross. My dad is a die hard trump supporter. Love him to death. We have many heated arguments and he fully knows he won’t listen to facts. I also refuse to listen to sources like fox or New York Post or other bullshit. We have many impasses. But I love him and would never dream of thinking less of him or going no contact over something that use to be a thing we all kept to ourselves. Not worth it. Don’t let trump make you burn the people in your life that are family.
But I get if they’re violent or deep deep deep into it. But also we should all get better at looking past this stuff. Trump will be gone one day and the bridges we burnt over it will never be worth it.
Easy to say if you and yours fit into the demographics that trumpers support. Not everyone has the same privilege as you do.
Do what I do, play dumb. “What does woke mean, grandad? I’m out of the loop here.” It’s fun. I think I’ve made a few realize how dumb they sound by their facial expressions, but they’ll never admit it.
Luckily I don’t have any red hats in my family.
