What you describe is deeply sad and frustrating, and I think you’re exceptionally brave and clearheaded for facing the hurt and grief (losing your dad while he is still right in front of you, but no longer ‘there’ in any way that could fulfill your need for a father). So many, like the family in the video, just make it abstract and suppress the hurt.
The bolsominions are similar in so many ways to the trump fanatics that really I think we can reject the idea of some super charismatic leader making people go nuts, and contemplate this phenomenon as being the right and far right on a rampage around the globe.
The fact that your father has been trained to resist brainwashing and psychological torture are a whole extra layer of difficulty. All I can say is goddamn it, and I’m sorry.
Huh. I’d never heard that phrase, thanks! It reminds me of watching All Gas No Brakes with the Peas Twins this past year. It seems that in almost every one of his videos set in a gathering of “open minded” individuals, someone (or lots of someones) inevitably brings Jews into their conspiracies and often in the strangest and most nefarious ways. Being Jews themselves, it’s very instructive to see just how pervasive this particular form of hateful ignorance is.
Some are born stupid, some achieve stupidity, and some have stupidity thrust upon them.
My late mother was one of the first, if not the first female computer tech, and was the first woman to ever hold the job title Senior Field Engineer.
Those ignorant kids would be akin to pioneers’ children denying the existence of their parents’ home state/s simply b/c they themselves were born out west after long wagon journeys. How the hell d’ye think you/it (internet/computers) got here, anyway?! “Well, I still say New York isn’t real! Everyone knows it! Those newspapers are fake!”
My dad bought the family an Apple II+ when I was about 11 or 12, and he and I learned how to program BASIC together. Heck, he even went further and learned some simple Assembly programming. Computers have literally been a daily part of my life ever since, and I’m 52. My parents are in their early 80s and are more computer literate than many people in their 20s. Interestingly, they also have lived their entire lives in Texas, and both have remained liberal/progressive Democrats their entire adult lives. Whether or not there’s a connection, I can’t say, but it would be interesting to explore. They have also only minimally involved themselves in social media. My dad hasn’t at all, and my mom mostly posts pictures of gardening, her master naturalist activities (counting horned lizards in the wild mostly), pictures of her cat, and the occasional post about her League of Women Voters meetings. I am slightly more active on social media, but I really try to limit how much I post or engage in political discussions.
It’s not that simple, however–meditating around a pile of crystals doesn’t mean you’re going to believe “Oprah eats babies.” It’s that the folks in this video are obviously very comfortably wealthy, very well insulated from all hardship (she made a $700 bet without a care in the world, her house & property is grandiose). They live in such a privileged sphere that they have no need for common sense anymore, they don’t brush up against the world day-to-day.
When the former, failed *president won in 2016, it was in part because he drew together two disparate demographics: very low-income workers (who believed the Republican line that all their pain came from Democrats, while also suffering the effects of the decades-long GOP quest to de-educate their voting base) and the extraordinarily over-privileged (who were already detached from reality and primed to go off the deep end, and also believed that white-makes-right).
What those two demographics had in common was a culture of uncritical thinking, racism, and internalized misogynistic views (externalized as toxic masculinity, or just plain jackassery). The deplorable marbling of a failed steak. Er, state.
The fault lay not in our witches, but in American hate.
See… that’s what I’m saying. This isn’t someone who is cashiering in retail, is it? This is someone who is already living in a very comfortable position within American society–the system is already working for them, insulating them from any need for empathy. While embracing pseudoscientific ideas does show the potential for suggestability, I think it falls much too short of being a reliable indicator that someone is ripe for the Q-cult. Something something correlation ≠ causation…
I would suggest the fault also lies with our educational system. American children aren’t taught critical thinking, or even how to learn. They’re taught to memorize enough to pass a test. We shouldn’t be surprised when they show us how well they absorbed this training by memorizing catch phrases and regurgitating them all over the Internet.
I’m frustrated. But I had an ex-boyfriend a long time ago tell me that he was an adult and I wasn’t responsible for his decisions or choices. And I carried it with me as a lesson through life.
I don’t want to see my parents suffer, but I have my own children to parent. They are adults, I can be sad and frustrated but I can’t hope to change them. The only thing I can work on is how I deal with it.
When my dad refused to vaccinate saying that if he died he already had lived a long life, I said to him that it was his choice dying at home in his own bed surrounded by his grandkids or dying an horrible death drowning in his own pus alone on an hospital. I’d rather when he passed away, it would be peaceful and painless. He says that he only got it because my mom pestered him but I like to think that what I said ressonated within him.
