Just thought to extend my sympathies for your nephew in law for his tragic accident. This kind of stuff sort of forces families to confront things in a fundamental human sort of way. I can relate to your alienation from the in law family; my sister, who is my only sibling, is a right wing nutjob as well as a Christian religious fanatic. We live a couple hundred miles apart, which is probably for the best. I still love her as my little sister but can never reconcile or accept her extreme right wing politics or fundamentalist religious beliefs; she believes that Rapture shit, like folks are just gonna float up into the fucking sky at the appropriate time, even though from what I understand of that nonsense, only 144 thousand floaters will be accepted.....the Jesus lottery, as it were. I just roll my eyes about it and carry on. Anyway, just wanted to let you know you're not the only one who has to accept, or at least accede to, the kind of shit a normal person would discard as bullshit. Hang in there. I have a Ralph Steadman t shirt with one of his splatter drawings and the caption "I am not like the others." It's an affirmation of my resistance.Boatrocker wrote: ↑Thu May 16, 2019 4:48 pmI wish it were that cut and dried. These people have been my family, for 43 years. I have always gotten on very well with most of them. Given, it has always required me to avoid religious discussions, and I did not engage much in political discourse, mostly because I did not relish talking politics.O Really wrote: ↑Thu May 16, 2019 10:06 amI think if it were me, I'd offer the following comments/choices to Lady Boatrocker:
1. I really really don't want to go visit your family. You know that I'm very uncomfortable and that the only things I can do are to (a) suck it up and accept the toxic environment or (b) be rude and argumentative to them. Casual conversation isn't an option.
2. I'm pretty sure they don't care if they ever see me again.
3. If it's truly important to you that I go, we should stay at a hotel so I have some opportunity to be away from them, and I will take advantage of that opportunity a lot.
4. If I have to go and we have to stay with them, I will take every chance to get out by myself (or with you if you want to come along), but I absolutely cannot sit around with them any longer listening to their politics and religion.
5. If you go visit them by yourself, I'll be sure to do something majorly nice for you - what would you like?
Or, you could just go, be a total asshole, start fights and your wife would get told never to bring you back, but that probably wouldn't set so well with Lady B.![]()
Even as I began drifting to the left, I was not so put off by their RWingy-ness as I was just not going to engage in debate. The issues were not that dire and our ideologies we just not that far apart. But all that shit changed with the election of Obama, who counted me among his voters, twice. The hateful, racist bullshit emails, the eagerness with which they dived into the birther bullshit and the Moozlum bullshit, all that shit just caught me off guard, coming from people whom I, mostly, found to be intelligent, thoughtful people with differing politics. And since 2016 I have, right or wrong, begun to question everything I once believed about people I loved. And still struggle to love. I know my wife's heart; I know she is very put off by the trumpsucking and doesn't understand it any more than I do. She is struggling, as well. But she in invested by blood; I am not, I have come to realize, and I don't know where I stand anymore.
I really isn't as simple as I wish it were, even as I find myself unable to be silent any longer.
Edit: that bit about the 144 thousand is not part of the Rupture; it's from a different sect. I get these tales mixed up. My own theory is that when the time comes I will put on my my my my my boogie shoes and my mistletoe belt.