Adaptation to COVID world

White Gloves and Party Manners should have been a late '60s country song.

 

So I spent some time with someone who I know well who is in the Fox News demographic and has completely drunk their Kool-Aid for years. We had a polite political discussion in which she had no qualms about me pointing out the Mitch McConnell has been on the guvment tit his whole life and is worth hundreds of millions now. She also had no problems with me saying that the payments we are making to soybean farmers in the wake of the China tarriff fiasco is text-book wealth redistribution, aka socialism...but the moment I asked, "and who is responsible for that?" and then countered her answer of "it's been going on for years" with, "no, it was put in place by Donald Trump" the conversation went so far off the rails I thought the waitress was going to toss us out. Her volcanic eruption in defense of Trump was really something to see.

It's never been more obvious that the fascist Trump cabal of supporters is 100% cult and we need to treat them as such.

 

I have really shown a great deal of patience with "friends" who blame the media for everything. I suck it up and don't comment/confront. I mean, these are "friends" of mine. The one I see frequently is, if the media went away for a month, 80 percent of the world's problems would go away, too. I have commented on that one, saying the problems would still be there, you just wouldn't know about them.

But my patience is wearing thin. I almost unloaded on someone last night -- a retired cop I have had other issues with -- who said the media is to blame for everything bad happening. I almost asked, "What news organization did Chauvin work for? It seems to me that bad cops are the root of the current protests and rioting." But I didn't. I might soon.

 

Thanks, @TigerVols!

@ChrisLong, we need to find our voices and start speaking up. As a friend of mine used to say about tourists we'd encounter in Memphis, they're depending on our good manners to be able to run their mouths unchecked.

 

hahaha. Yeah, except I don't want to get roped into a 30-minute back-and-forth confrontation because they devolve into the same ol' shit -- We're building a wall and Mexico will pay for it.

 

I have avoided a lot of similar conversations with friends/family/acquaintances with a "That's politics, and we'll never agree on it." I'm to the point that I've begun taking a stand and arguing my positions.

I may not be out in the streets demonstrating, but that doesn't mean that I can't support the people who are, and there are a lot of people out there who really need to have their noses rubbed in it.

 

I had a back-and-forth with my brother a couple of months ago, at the beginning of all this, when his true (Trumpian) colors shown through. I sent him 2 things, one was a New Republic story outlining presidential failures in curtailing Covid. The other was the time the reporter asked the president what he would say to people who are scared. The president answered, I would tell them that you're a lousy reporter.

To the first item, my brother responded that once he saw it was the New Republic, he only read a couple of paragraphs because they are always unfair to the president. To the second, he said that reporter is always unfair to the president. I said, don't kill the messenger, and we haven't talked about politics since. Our June trip to Vegas is canceled, probably a good thing.

 

Well they used to leave fancy cards during social calls
For weddings, baptisms or debutante balls
For graduations, showers and cotillions
But whether they were comfortable or they had millions
They all had in common were white gloves and party manners
Among the flowers and the banners
They had their assigned roles and everybody played their parts
For the people on the outside, well bless their hearts
Nothing seemed a miss
Everything looked fine on the surface
But some time after 1963
The only party that mattered was the GOP

 

That's pretty much my oldest brother. We don't talk much.

 

Keep it. Anybody who’s upset by it needs to be forced to read it over and over and over again … out loud.

 

I agree with him, @OscarMadison.

 

An adaptation which strikes me as clever. Cape Cod Technical High School had its 2020 graduation last night. They held it at the Wellfleet, Mass. drive-in theater. Instead of going onstage to receive their diplomas, pictures of each grad in their cap and gown were shown on the screen.