Isn't it horrible the amount of self-censorship we have to engage in just to maintain a relationship with our family? There are certain topics I simply will not discuss with my own kids (and they honor that, at least, thank goodness). Because my relationship with them is always more important than anything else, but damn. I want them…
Isn't it horrible the amount of self-censorship we have to engage in just to maintain a relationship with our family? There are certain topics I simply will not discuss with my own kids (and they honor that, at least, thank goodness). Because my relationship with them is always more important than anything else, but damn. I want them and their kids to be safe and healthy too. And I'm scared to death they will (or they already have) fallen prey to the Narrative.
I let my family go, for now. All of them. I had to. Between the gaslighting, the over-the-top TDS (truly hateful sh*t, long, long after he was out of office), the adoration of that idiot Colbert, Trevor Noah and, so help me, Randy Rainbow, and the daily badgering to get my foolish, crazy, misinformed and unbelievably selfish butt vaccinated, I had no choice. I think of them every day, but I had to walk away. Thankfully, I have no children - that would be the worst. I'm talking about sisters. I am the youngest, and the lone conservative, so I don't get no respect. It's very sad, but I have found peace now. Is anyone else out there going through this?
Yep. I don’t live near them though. I think the last straw was when I asked my younger sister if she would have even allowed me in the house this past Christmas (in BC where Bonnie Henry, our ‘top Dr’ issued an edict telling people not to associate with the unclean over the holidays). Due to all the road washouts, driving from the Interior (no vax, no fly in Canada) was not an option, however. She wouldn’t answer my question and instead set my dad (recently had 4th shot) upon me to re-educate me. I chose not to respond.
I don't think there's any one of us who haven't had to break ties with some family and/or friends over this. I have had to choose some new family members. You are not alone. Some people just can't stand others who stand for something. People who stood on principle used to be respected, now they are considered outcasts. Amazing! I've never been a herd member and never will be. Herds go over cliffs. Together. We feel your pain and disappointment. Stay strong.
Fellow younger brother. I have done likewise with my eldest sister (she was a shit aunty anyway) .
My highlight was when she demanded a driveway socially distanced present swapping at Christmas and I walked behind her and fake-spat in her hair.
I have told her I will talk to her once she shows genuine contrition for supporting a post office worker that chased me out the shop for being maskless and beat my car (could have been me if not fleet of foot) and supporting vaccine apartheid on me and my unjabbed children (22,19,7)
This whole mess is nothing less than insane, and has most certainly highlighted those in need of some kind of therapy. Unfortunately, however, I think the lunatics are currently in charge of the asylum. Maybe we need dose them all with…? Mmmm…I could think of a few interesting things..ha! 😆
This would be hilarious if it weren't so sad. I wish that amongst the Babylon Bee's Christmas stuff they'd offered a catapult for delivering your gifts during the holiday season - after they were disinfected, of course.
OMG I can let anyone go except my kids. And of course THEY are the ones I am talking about. The rest? They can take care of themselves. You are fortunate in that regard.
Fortunately we respect each other enough to simply not 'engage" in the Covid discussion.
You are indeed fortunate, if your family respects you. Yes, I'd be heartsick if I had kids that subscribed to any of this mishegoss. I do have some goodhearted but naive young friends who live up in Portland, and a sweet but misguided niece in NYC (she stopped talking to me when I embarrassed her by questioning her FB cryfest over George Floyd). I don't ask about their activities. If they are part of Antifa I don't want to know about it. I pray for them.
I tried to save my sisters (all in Puerto Rico) and their adult kids by sharing all I had re: potential adverse events, the VAERS data on deaths and AEs, etc. Two of them were coerced to take the jabs or would lose their jobs. The oldest took the jabs and kept it from me for a long time. My 24 y.o. niece (mother of 2 little kiddos) also got jabbed voluntarily (she lives in FL but follow the Puerto Rican doctors and celebrities - all praising the clot shots. I'm heartbroken that I may lose one of them in the next 10 years. The oldest is dealing with uncontrollable blood glucose levels (post-mRNA jabs) despite diet and her pills. I don't have the heart to tell her about the possible link between jabs and spike in diabetes.
I'm so sorry, I do know the feeling. Everything I said was scoffed at and ridiculed, or treated with condescension. And it's hard to hold my tongue now, but as the truth becomes more and more apparent it seems like it's the worst, most painful I-told-you-so in human history. I've actually lost four people now to the jabs (no immediate family, thank God), and no one, not one person, to covid. Don't even know anyone who was hospitalized. I am dreading to hear of another friend's passing. And I am heartsick to think that my beloved nephew and his sweet bride may never have the children they are eagerly planning, and my sister may never hold the grandchildren she longs for. God, let my fears be groundless!
Currently not talking/shunned by 3 siblings and their adult kids, and my husbands sister and her family. They're all far too educated to put up with us questioning mask or vaxx efficacy... so we haven't seen them in 2 years. Much less stress, but i miss family parties, we used to have so much fun.
Exactly the same situation. Talking to my sisters at the beginning of the plandemic had smoke coming out of my ears - their uncritical acceptance of everything the “experts” fed them was more than I could take. Of course I was the one with the tinfoil hat and the condescension from my sisters (who are older, and much wiser in their estimation) was infuriating. I had to stop talking to them for about a year. We communicate after a fashion now, but only about things that don’t matter. I will never understand how they could be so stupid.
All my family (I don’t have children, thank goodness) is vaxxed, so I can’t help wondering how much longer they’ll survive. I’m hoping that some of them got placebos. And I wonder if they’ll ever see the truth.
talking "only about things that don't matter" ... this is what has the potential to drive me out of my mind, up a wall, around the bend and utterly crazy. and this is where I, too, am at with my older siblings (we should start a 'youngest and sanest' page). superficiality has become a strange manner amongst families thanks to the demons' influence. i remind myself to be prepared to forget all the low-density behavior they are engaging in during this covidiocracy because it is better for us all if i do. they won't but i will.
My old friendships with covidians have turned into the occasional text or email to say hello. Not much else. Perhaps a monthly brunch and "have a lovely weekend" type of convo. It's very hard for me to keep that up once we're done eating. So, 1x/month is all I can handle. Light convos are painful and take so much effort. UGH!
Remember that they are your family and love them anyway :-). Family is one of the things that "really matters". Even the part that drives you nuts.
Political parties exist to create a kind of blindness, a loyalty over sense kind of blindness. It seems to me it's gotten much worse in the last 2 decades but perhaps I've just better at seeing it as I've aged and learned. Separate the party from the person. It can be painful to watch people you care about, who you know have the "smarts" to do better, parrot things we know to be false because that is the belief they've chosen, because that is the belief the high priest of The Party has dictated to them. For me it helps to remember the "who I care about" ahead of the rest. And then I smile and change the subject ;-).
Thank you for the reminder, what you say is true, and I love them all more than words can say. But in my case there is stuff beyond politics; there is generational gaslighting, ancient role-playing and family baggage. But the current situation has brought matters into sharper focus, and also I somehow seem to have grown a spine sometime over the past 20 years, which my bossypants older sisters were not prepared to deal with. I've rocked our dysfunctional boat and it's created chaos and uproar. I hope in time we will achieve a new level of understanding, trust and respect, but for now what I most needed was to step back and let be, and wait upon the Lord and the Tao. And, like Jo, hope that we will all live to be reconciled.
In my case we worked hard to raise our child to be open minded, and most importantly, tolerant of other's with differing views. My son has a critical mind and thinks independently, rejecting party conformance. He also avoids certain topics around other family members who have let party loyalty overshadow their moral code (and tolerance is key to our moral code).
While me and my son are together, working on cars, frightening paper targets, or whatever, we can talk openly and freely. We need not agree (and often do not) but we converse and enjoy each other's views. But we understand that some people can not handle such open dialogue and have lost the ability to enjoy a challenge. Instead of being angry, we feel sympathy and compassion for their loss.
Aw thanks. I guess I've always been the black sheep, though I was at one time very liberal, like the others. Our family was true blue. Hell, my grandfather's cousin, Alben W. Barkley, was VP under Truman and led the first Democratic National Convention. Amy Goodman played an archival tape of his speech - you don't get more Yellow Dog Democrat than that (though he'd be rolling in his grave now, for sure). But I lived alone in the woods for 20 years, off grid, dirt road, no TV, no internet to speak of, living pretty close to the earth. I read and read - I've been a reader since I was four years old. I learned to think and act for myself. And what I'd always accepted started looking more and more crazy. More and more I began to challenge my old beliefs, and it helped that all my life I had always believed that it was okay to change my stance about things, and say "I was wrong about that". Thirteen years ago I started dating a man who was very eccentric and very independent in his ideas (like me, I guess, and yes we are still together). He never tried to change my thinking, but invited me to start questioning the whole "Global Warming" narrative (this is after I had worked for an environmental publisher, mind you). Once I was willing to set aside my liberal bias and really look with new eyes, I soon saw what an epic lie it all was. It had a domino effect, one cherished fiction after another began to fall, I swallowed the red pill, stepped through the looking-glass, and here I am. Pretty much lost my family, but I can never go back.
It sounds like your time off the grid and close to nature helped you see the world more clearly. Plus your smart man who respected you enough to let you come to your own conclusions. Plus your innate smarts!
Thank you. I am a natural hermit, and regret that circumstances forced me to leave my solitude in the woods. My man also loves his solitude. We live side by side and give each other tremendous space for this precious time alone, which is as necessary to us as water, air and food. It's why it works. Thank God we found one another, and saved two other people in the world from suffering!
I’m not sure I have an answer to that given I’ve never been politically driven one way or the other. I was raised, as an oldest of three girls, to set an example, but also put down when I tried to exert my rights (eg., sister runs by me, kicks me in the kidneys, got up to go after her, told to sit down, and when protesting ‘you always told me to fight my own fights,’ apparently that was the wrong answer). Highly dysfunctional my family was. What shocks me though is my father’s attitude now, given that I was also raised to think independently and to question everything (note: he is the partner of a now retired pharmacist, and they think that technology will save all, with which I strongly disagree, but I am a land dweller, as opposed to a city dweller). I’m not a conservative, nor am I liberal. I do not care about these nomenclatures. I am a free thinking human being and I do care about where we are headed (not a good place, in my mind). So, to this I say, no matter your race or creed, your politics or not, your gender (OMF, don’t get me started on that), your country, whatEVER…this is about HUMAN rights. Which, by the way, certainly does not mean obliterating the planet by way of PROFIT. We are currently all puppets in a grand puppet show. It is time to stop the madness.
I agree with most of this, Jon, and while my own views could be called liberal in the past, there were already areas in which I was conservative at that time. Just as some of my beliefs could be categorized as liberal now, for those people who like to pigeon-hole. And I have always been an unaffiliated, independent voter. Richness - well said.
Some of this is of course age old wisdom: politics and religion have always been wise to avoid in social contexts. My wife has had "the look" for all of our 35 years of marriage when I'm around certain family members and politics comes up...
Isn't it horrible the amount of self-censorship we have to engage in just to maintain a relationship with our family? There are certain topics I simply will not discuss with my own kids (and they honor that, at least, thank goodness). Because my relationship with them is always more important than anything else, but damn. I want them and their kids to be safe and healthy too. And I'm scared to death they will (or they already have) fallen prey to the Narrative.
I let my family go, for now. All of them. I had to. Between the gaslighting, the over-the-top TDS (truly hateful sh*t, long, long after he was out of office), the adoration of that idiot Colbert, Trevor Noah and, so help me, Randy Rainbow, and the daily badgering to get my foolish, crazy, misinformed and unbelievably selfish butt vaccinated, I had no choice. I think of them every day, but I had to walk away. Thankfully, I have no children - that would be the worst. I'm talking about sisters. I am the youngest, and the lone conservative, so I don't get no respect. It's very sad, but I have found peace now. Is anyone else out there going through this?
Yep. I don’t live near them though. I think the last straw was when I asked my younger sister if she would have even allowed me in the house this past Christmas (in BC where Bonnie Henry, our ‘top Dr’ issued an edict telling people not to associate with the unclean over the holidays). Due to all the road washouts, driving from the Interior (no vax, no fly in Canada) was not an option, however. She wouldn’t answer my question and instead set my dad (recently had 4th shot) upon me to re-educate me. I chose not to respond.
My siblings have had their teenagers vaxxed…breaks my heart.
heartbreaking
My nephew was first in line to vax his 6 year old. And proud of it. Idiots.
how can otherwise intelligent people be so damn ignorant?
That hurts just to read, Jo. I'm sorry.
I don't think there's any one of us who haven't had to break ties with some family and/or friends over this. I have had to choose some new family members. You are not alone. Some people just can't stand others who stand for something. People who stood on principle used to be respected, now they are considered outcasts. Amazing! I've never been a herd member and never will be. Herds go over cliffs. Together. We feel your pain and disappointment. Stay strong.
Thank you, Rob. The support I'm finding here is so helpful; bringing balm to my aching heart.
Fellow younger brother. I have done likewise with my eldest sister (she was a shit aunty anyway) .
My highlight was when she demanded a driveway socially distanced present swapping at Christmas and I walked behind her and fake-spat in her hair.
I have told her I will talk to her once she shows genuine contrition for supporting a post office worker that chased me out the shop for being maskless and beat my car (could have been me if not fleet of foot) and supporting vaccine apartheid on me and my unjabbed children (22,19,7)
This whole mess is nothing less than insane, and has most certainly highlighted those in need of some kind of therapy. Unfortunately, however, I think the lunatics are currently in charge of the asylum. Maybe we need dose them all with…? Mmmm…I could think of a few interesting things..ha! 😆
Most would suffer a bad trip, I'm afraid.
This would be hilarious if it weren't so sad. I wish that amongst the Babylon Bee's Christmas stuff they'd offered a catapult for delivering your gifts during the holiday season - after they were disinfected, of course.
OMG I can let anyone go except my kids. And of course THEY are the ones I am talking about. The rest? They can take care of themselves. You are fortunate in that regard.
Fortunately we respect each other enough to simply not 'engage" in the Covid discussion.
You are indeed fortunate, if your family respects you. Yes, I'd be heartsick if I had kids that subscribed to any of this mishegoss. I do have some goodhearted but naive young friends who live up in Portland, and a sweet but misguided niece in NYC (she stopped talking to me when I embarrassed her by questioning her FB cryfest over George Floyd). I don't ask about their activities. If they are part of Antifa I don't want to know about it. I pray for them.
I tried to save my sisters (all in Puerto Rico) and their adult kids by sharing all I had re: potential adverse events, the VAERS data on deaths and AEs, etc. Two of them were coerced to take the jabs or would lose their jobs. The oldest took the jabs and kept it from me for a long time. My 24 y.o. niece (mother of 2 little kiddos) also got jabbed voluntarily (she lives in FL but follow the Puerto Rican doctors and celebrities - all praising the clot shots. I'm heartbroken that I may lose one of them in the next 10 years. The oldest is dealing with uncontrollable blood glucose levels (post-mRNA jabs) despite diet and her pills. I don't have the heart to tell her about the possible link between jabs and spike in diabetes.
I'm so sorry, I do know the feeling. Everything I said was scoffed at and ridiculed, or treated with condescension. And it's hard to hold my tongue now, but as the truth becomes more and more apparent it seems like it's the worst, most painful I-told-you-so in human history. I've actually lost four people now to the jabs (no immediate family, thank God), and no one, not one person, to covid. Don't even know anyone who was hospitalized. I am dreading to hear of another friend's passing. And I am heartsick to think that my beloved nephew and his sweet bride may never have the children they are eagerly planning, and my sister may never hold the grandchildren she longs for. God, let my fears be groundless!
Currently not talking/shunned by 3 siblings and their adult kids, and my husbands sister and her family. They're all far too educated to put up with us questioning mask or vaxx efficacy... so we haven't seen them in 2 years. Much less stress, but i miss family parties, we used to have so much fun.
Just all soooo much BS. Divide and conquer BS. Time to find our new families, and create new communities.
True. Coasting, for now is OK. Much less drama.
Amen to that!
Sad. Perhaps the real purpose of mask mandates - to separate the true believers from the presence of doubt.
I know the feeling, it sucks when it's everyone else against you.
Exactly the same situation. Talking to my sisters at the beginning of the plandemic had smoke coming out of my ears - their uncritical acceptance of everything the “experts” fed them was more than I could take. Of course I was the one with the tinfoil hat and the condescension from my sisters (who are older, and much wiser in their estimation) was infuriating. I had to stop talking to them for about a year. We communicate after a fashion now, but only about things that don’t matter. I will never understand how they could be so stupid.
All my family (I don’t have children, thank goodness) is vaxxed, so I can’t help wondering how much longer they’ll survive. I’m hoping that some of them got placebos. And I wonder if they’ll ever see the truth.
talking "only about things that don't matter" ... this is what has the potential to drive me out of my mind, up a wall, around the bend and utterly crazy. and this is where I, too, am at with my older siblings (we should start a 'youngest and sanest' page). superficiality has become a strange manner amongst families thanks to the demons' influence. i remind myself to be prepared to forget all the low-density behavior they are engaging in during this covidiocracy because it is better for us all if i do. they won't but i will.
My old friendships with covidians have turned into the occasional text or email to say hello. Not much else. Perhaps a monthly brunch and "have a lovely weekend" type of convo. It's very hard for me to keep that up once we're done eating. So, 1x/month is all I can handle. Light convos are painful and take so much effort. UGH!
My God, you could be my twin soul, Jo.
I feel the same way.
Remember that they are your family and love them anyway :-). Family is one of the things that "really matters". Even the part that drives you nuts.
Political parties exist to create a kind of blindness, a loyalty over sense kind of blindness. It seems to me it's gotten much worse in the last 2 decades but perhaps I've just better at seeing it as I've aged and learned. Separate the party from the person. It can be painful to watch people you care about, who you know have the "smarts" to do better, parrot things we know to be false because that is the belief they've chosen, because that is the belief the high priest of The Party has dictated to them. For me it helps to remember the "who I care about" ahead of the rest. And then I smile and change the subject ;-).
Thank you for the reminder, what you say is true, and I love them all more than words can say. But in my case there is stuff beyond politics; there is generational gaslighting, ancient role-playing and family baggage. But the current situation has brought matters into sharper focus, and also I somehow seem to have grown a spine sometime over the past 20 years, which my bossypants older sisters were not prepared to deal with. I've rocked our dysfunctional boat and it's created chaos and uproar. I hope in time we will achieve a new level of understanding, trust and respect, but for now what I most needed was to step back and let be, and wait upon the Lord and the Tao. And, like Jo, hope that we will all live to be reconciled.
Sad. But I understand.
In my case we worked hard to raise our child to be open minded, and most importantly, tolerant of other's with differing views. My son has a critical mind and thinks independently, rejecting party conformance. He also avoids certain topics around other family members who have let party loyalty overshadow their moral code (and tolerance is key to our moral code).
While me and my son are together, working on cars, frightening paper targets, or whatever, we can talk openly and freely. We need not agree (and often do not) but we converse and enjoy each other's views. But we understand that some people can not handle such open dialogue and have lost the ability to enjoy a challenge. Instead of being angry, we feel sympathy and compassion for their loss.
Curious what made you the lone conservative, besides inheriting all the smarts?
Aw thanks. I guess I've always been the black sheep, though I was at one time very liberal, like the others. Our family was true blue. Hell, my grandfather's cousin, Alben W. Barkley, was VP under Truman and led the first Democratic National Convention. Amy Goodman played an archival tape of his speech - you don't get more Yellow Dog Democrat than that (though he'd be rolling in his grave now, for sure). But I lived alone in the woods for 20 years, off grid, dirt road, no TV, no internet to speak of, living pretty close to the earth. I read and read - I've been a reader since I was four years old. I learned to think and act for myself. And what I'd always accepted started looking more and more crazy. More and more I began to challenge my old beliefs, and it helped that all my life I had always believed that it was okay to change my stance about things, and say "I was wrong about that". Thirteen years ago I started dating a man who was very eccentric and very independent in his ideas (like me, I guess, and yes we are still together). He never tried to change my thinking, but invited me to start questioning the whole "Global Warming" narrative (this is after I had worked for an environmental publisher, mind you). Once I was willing to set aside my liberal bias and really look with new eyes, I soon saw what an epic lie it all was. It had a domino effect, one cherished fiction after another began to fall, I swallowed the red pill, stepped through the looking-glass, and here I am. Pretty much lost my family, but I can never go back.
It sounds like your time off the grid and close to nature helped you see the world more clearly. Plus your smart man who respected you enough to let you come to your own conclusions. Plus your innate smarts!
Thank you. I am a natural hermit, and regret that circumstances forced me to leave my solitude in the woods. My man also loves his solitude. We live side by side and give each other tremendous space for this precious time alone, which is as necessary to us as water, air and food. It's why it works. Thank God we found one another, and saved two other people in the world from suffering!
I’m not sure I have an answer to that given I’ve never been politically driven one way or the other. I was raised, as an oldest of three girls, to set an example, but also put down when I tried to exert my rights (eg., sister runs by me, kicks me in the kidneys, got up to go after her, told to sit down, and when protesting ‘you always told me to fight my own fights,’ apparently that was the wrong answer). Highly dysfunctional my family was. What shocks me though is my father’s attitude now, given that I was also raised to think independently and to question everything (note: he is the partner of a now retired pharmacist, and they think that technology will save all, with which I strongly disagree, but I am a land dweller, as opposed to a city dweller). I’m not a conservative, nor am I liberal. I do not care about these nomenclatures. I am a free thinking human being and I do care about where we are headed (not a good place, in my mind). So, to this I say, no matter your race or creed, your politics or not, your gender (OMF, don’t get me started on that), your country, whatEVER…this is about HUMAN rights. Which, by the way, certainly does not mean obliterating the planet by way of PROFIT. We are currently all puppets in a grand puppet show. It is time to stop the madness.
I agree with most of this, Jon, and while my own views could be called liberal in the past, there were already areas in which I was conservative at that time. Just as some of my beliefs could be categorized as liberal now, for those people who like to pigeon-hole. And I have always been an unaffiliated, independent voter. Richness - well said.
Some of this is of course age old wisdom: politics and religion have always been wise to avoid in social contexts. My wife has had "the look" for all of our 35 years of marriage when I'm around certain family members and politics comes up...