A boomer who had spent the past half hour of the car ride talking about how much he related to Buddhist concepts of compassion mentioned that he thought the homeless people behind his house had stolen his telescope, so he wanted to give them IV drugs coated in rat poison

My mom is a Jewish Russian-American, 3rd generation, granted, but she regularly brings up her Russian heritage in weird self-flagellation shows of devotion to the State Department. If anything reminds her that Putin exists, anything at all, she goes on long genocidal rants about how Russians are evil and there’s something wrong with their brains - to prove she’s not a hypocrite she then says she’d volunteer to be executed herself if that was the only way to get rid of all Russians.

I pointed out that she is - verbatim - repeating Nazi rhetoric about people they tried to exterminate, and my mother, who, again, is Jewish on top of ethnically Russian, starts going in circles about how no, PUTIN is the next Hitler, because Russians are evil, we’re evil, oh my god we’re so evil, what is WRONG with us?!

Rachel Maddow has turned my mother into a hysterical gibbon and I don’t know how to fix it.

My hippie-turned-Christian-fundamentalist mother re: gay people

I had someone tell me that I am not voting for Kamala Harris because thankfully I’m not American I don’t care about politics and I’ve led a comfortable life free from hardship and marginalisation.

Wanna know my lore? [CW: child abuse, animal abuse, violence etc. ahead]

I grew up poor. Never poor enough that I didn’t have shoes on my feet or food in my stomach but enough that keeping the house at a comfortable temperature was often a luxury.

I’m queer. My dad is a violent homophobe who used to be part of a neo-Nazi street gang that would beat up gay men for sport in his younger years. You better believe that he would grill me and conduct minor inquisitions to “ensure” that I wasn’t gay. He used to be addicted to heroin and as a young person would torture animals for fun. He also came close to some big charges for violence later in life. So, zero empathy to speak of with this character. If that’s painting a very particular picture then yeah.

Suffice it to say that it wasn’t a peaceful household I grew up in and it wasn’t a safe one either.

As for my mum, being married to someone like that, you’d have to be pretty messed up and that was certainly the case for her who very much has an undiagnosed personality disorder. There was low-moderate grade medical abuse coming from that side of the nuclear family. Never enough to be at that threshold for direct outside intervention but definitely enough that it wasn’t just a few little whoopsies which happened over the years either.

On top of this I went undiagnosed for ADHD and autism for all of my childhood, well into my adulthood, and I’ve had to become my own case manager and advocate and (if you’ve ever seen me post about medical stuff then you’re probably already aware) my own armchair physician too. Autistic monotropism has its perks, I suppose. I got dealt a pretty bad hand but I’m extremely fortunate that one of the cards I got dealt was to be intelligent because that’s been just about my only saving grace.

I had a very-near miss with homelessness not too long ago as well.

I’m not trying to make this a pity party or anything but I’m just illustrating that my life has been an ongoing struggle and to tell the kid who grew up with the very real prospect of either facing homelessness, as the good outcome, or the credible threat of being provided a swift dirt nap if their dad ever found out about their sexuality that they have lived a cushy life free from marginalisation and oppression which is why they don’t take politics seriously… that’s pretty absurd.

The instinctive urge for this scratched liberal to immediately presume that because I’m not Blue MAGA that therefore I’ve never done it tough is kinda wild because it was an attempt to strip me of my identity and to deny the struggles I have faced. Their ability to empathise or even just to listen short circuited the moment that they deemed me guilty of the highest treason, of holding a differing opinion.

This sort of dehumanisation and vilification of a person simply because they don’t agree with your particular brand of politics is peak-scratched liberal imo.

I’ve had libs/chuds/suburbanites very confidently tell me that everyone who lives in cities would die in an apocalypse because the rural farms wouldn’t, like, give them food, etc. Very obviously false if you’ve ever worked in rural health or rural anything honestly. If I get the chance again I’ll ask why they think cities are where they are. I usually disengage or deflect right away though because it’s basically a convo about zombie movies.

I don’t want to be stuck living in a mud hut just so I don’t hurt someone’s feelings!

Wut? What does this have to do with political correctness?

Anyone who is ostensibly for socialist policies but turns into Little Hitler about homeless people.