This afternoon, I'm going snowshoeing through the woods with my girlfriend. This morning she's at work, caring for a quadriplegic man, helping him to enjoy the holiday. My daughter's at her mom's, and the rest of my family's on the other coast. My brother's in the hospital, having been admitted to the psych ward recently after experiencing a lost month culminating in a week he spent in the bed of his pickup truck, semi-conscious, suffering from pancreatic failure.
Me, I'm enjoying a quiet morning, a nice cuppa joe at my side and a snuggly cat in my lap. I'm in a pensive mood, and wish to share some of my thoughts with y'all here at kos. Follow me beyond the fold if you'd like to be part of my audience today. Oh, and Merry Christmas.
Ran3dy's diary :: :: My stepmother and I do not get along. We haven't gotten along for some decades now, ever since I decided to open my big mouth about the conditions of my home life--shedding light on the abuse, the violence, the alcoholism, the molestation my father and she had loosed on us children over the years. As coincidence would have it, I was coming of age at about the same time as she and my father were finding God. God had forgiven them for their sins, so their sins ceased to exist. God instructed my stepmom to no longer love me, because I was sent by the devil to challenge her faith. I am, in a word, totally evil, with not a single saving grace in her eyes. And worse that I'm a life-long liberal atheist who does not buy into her argument that America needs to become a Christian theocracy in order to save itself. Long story, with many sordid details you probably don't want any part of, but I needed to set the stage.
So you can imagine my surprise last week when I got an email from her advising me that my brother had been found. The first email was succinct and fairly straightforward, and I acknowledged it by thanking her for keeping me in the loop and leaving it at that. Unfortunately, she couldn't leave good enough alone, though, and felt compelled to send a follow up, telling me that my brother's two adult daughters were complete losers and how she was walking away from them. OK, to be expected from her; she has always tended to see the world in black and white. But then, in the very next paragraph, she shares some news about her biological daughter's children: two straight-A students, the oldest of which just got a full ride to Pepperdine on a baseball scholarship. About him, she says:
he will play baseball for the "Waves". Even gets to go to Japan and play. He is a very smart (4.3 GPA) will be a business major, is a wonderful young man, totally as good as gold. He is a left hand pitcher who throws accurately at 94 MPH at 17 years old.
Now, I wasn't in a very generous mood, so I send back a somewhat snippy reply, questioning her diplomacy of her combination of subject matter. To which she tells me:
RAN3DY, YOU ARE A FOOL A STUPID NASTY UGLY FOOL.
I was wrong and stupid to even try and understand or reach out to you. YOU NEED MENTAL HEALTH HELP TOO.
So it's on. Again. The flamewar between us continues for a week, encompassing 20 emails, going over the same ground as many times before: I'm delusional and making stuff up; she's only letting in what her filters allow her to see; blah, blah, blah. Turns out that my blood siblings, the four of us from my father's first marriage (but now she takes the opportunity to share that three of us probably weren't even HIS...you know my mother was that type, after all....) ruined her life when all she ever tried to do was spread love. Amazing stuff, really. I don't take any of it personally.....I learned many years ago to do that brush off thing that Obama made famous during the campaign.
And then in her final email, she wrote this wonderful passage:
Things were different then, people did not think about things, they just lived from day to day. A good day was not to many problems, a bad day was loosing a job or the president being killed. Things were easier, not so much drama, not so much looking at how hard stuff is. The Andy Griffin Show was fairly real, the way things really were, and frankly, I wish were still that way. Nice people did not talk about bad stuff. Bad stuff was ignored or you pretended it wasn't in front of you. Nothing was in your face, not sex, not booze, not drugs, not affairs, not being poor, nothing, you just worked from day to day and kept going.
And that got me to thinking. The world she describes is once of ignorance, of bliss. Don't think about bad things...not that they didn't exist, just that people didn't TALK about them. Don't talk about real life in which bad things happen to real people, sometimes even good people. No,
Bad stuff was ignored or you pretended it wasn't in front of you
So, they lived a lie. One that allowed them to look the other way, accept no accountability or responsibility for one's plights or those of others. Just keep your nose to the grindstone and soldier through.
And the Andy Griffith show was filmed, after all, in black and white.
So who did deal with the bad stuff? Umm...must've been Them. Or Him. It sure wasn't John or Jane Doe. The population was just living one day at a time, ignoring hard things. They listened to the news and obeyed the newscasters. Let someone else deal with it. It's not their problem.
And then it occurred to me that there's no surprise then, that she's a conservative Christian. Let go, let God. Trust someone else to deal with the bad stuff....just go about your daily life and don't think about it. Conservatives want us to go shopping, be good little consumers, and don't think about it. Trust what the almighty They says and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Listen to what They says and under absolutely no circumstances should the population ever stoop to think for ourselves. If we think, our ignorant bliss will be shattered. Andy Griffith will be canceled and Gays will want marriage.
Continued>>>
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/12/25/818986/-My-stepmother,-the-conservative
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