It's so sad

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[–] 79 points 3 years ago (6 children)

This is definitely a real thing for the boomer brainworm crowd. They scream that anyone to the left of Marco Rubio is a pedophile and then are shocked—shocked!—that their kids don't want to expose their grandkids to that.

My boomer parents are wisely playing both sides. For example, they brag that their grandkids are getting homeschooled. They get Facebook Social Credit from their friends who are so happy that these kids will be avoiding the Woke Agenda. (Ha, haha, ahahahahahahaha)

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    [+] 60 points 3 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)
  • [–] 47 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    my kids became adults, realized im a shit human, and now i can't see my grandbabies!

    I mean, I wish this was more the case. But as often as not, its simply because the Millennial generation has needed to move across the country to find good work. I know more than a few chud grandparents who get plenty of grandkid time purely on the basis of free childcare being worth its weight in gold. I know more than a few based woke grandparents who never see their grandkids simply because they live on the east coast and the grandkids live out west. Increasingly, you'll see grandparents move halfway across the country to be closer to family. Or you'll see kids moving back in and forming extended households, entirely because of the cost of real estate.

    Even the worst politics can be forgivable, even the best negligible, when material conditions are a concern.

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  • [–] 55 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    My adoptive parents bought me so my adoptive mother would have control over my wedding/baby shower and what children I have and she wouldn't risk being alone on holidays when her biological children (all sons) get married.

    They've been so much worse to me after I told them I'm not having kids because now they wasted money on buying and raising me sadness-abysmal

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  • [–] 45 points 3 years ago

    "Transactional" thinking, such as seeing people they're supposed to nurture and raise and protect out of love and see it as some kind of "investment" with expected returns, is poison, the death of love and meaningful emotional connections.

    I wish there was a way to see it a long ways off to avoid those empty-inside fucks, forever.

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  • [–] 53 points 3 years ago*

    Man I fucking feel for you guys in this thread. My parents are just well-meaning libs who immediately cave when I apply pressure. Like when JK Rowling was first getting onto her bullshit and I whipped out an "actually my friend is trans and you knew her pre-transition" it basically blew the transphobia out of them like a shotgun blast. I'd rent my parents out to you guys if I could so you could have a couple old academic libs to very lightly dunk on with the understanding that they are still trying to figure out a confusing world even in old age.

    Edit: I should add that I empathize because growing up in the South, most of my friends had the parents you describe and I was pretty familiar with how unstable it made them feel at home.

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  • [–] 52 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    Yeah I'm literally in the process of trying to figure out how to stay in contact with my father but cut off all communications with my mother. She's gone off the deep end. Any conversation with her centers around her racist hatred of Mexicans. She always wants to tell me highly exaggerated and likely fabricated stories of encounters with Mexicans she's had. The woman carries a switchblade and always grasps for it in her purse if she sees someone with too dark of a complexion. I can't be in public with her because if she hears a single word of Spanish around her, her eyes get wide and she'll start muttering to herself about how "Mexicans should all go back."

    We live in Texas, so often these people aren't even from Mexico. It's just Latinos, mostly people born in Texas in the first place.

    She's super into Trump as well, obviously, but she's one of the odd ones who is also pro-vaccine, so at least she has that. She worships the British royal family too...and is also somehow an advocate for Irish decolonization (she claims we have Irish ancestry even though as far as I can tell our family came from Poland)

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  • [–] 49 points 3 years ago* (3 children)

    I already disowned one outright fascist parent (as in, actively and out loud wishing murder-by-police on us-foreign-policy for even existing in the same city), but while trying to maintain contact with the other, that enabling parent tricked me into meeting with the fascist parent again after years of no contact.

    Oops, two disownings. edgeworth-shrug

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    [–] 47 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    My MIL recently pulled the "Think about what your doing to [my daughter]." After we recently set boundaries about her not talking to my wife until she apologizes to her for a previous incident.

    After a couple instances of non-compliance we shifted to no contact. MIL threw a fit because she "didn't know what she did wrong".

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  • [–] 31 points 3 years ago* (4 children)

    What's up with your MIL? Is it standard sort of racism or bigotry?

    Because I'm scared to have kids and introduce them to my parents. My potential kids would learn slurs just from the everyday conversations my parents have.

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  • [–] 32 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    My MIL has just been generally unsympathetic to my wife's mental health. We tried to be considerate because my MIL was raised in a different time where that kind of stuff was just shut away.

    She recently said some very nasty stuff to my wife along the lines of "You won't be a good mother because of your mental health".

    We've tried to mend that with talks but she never really understood the damage she caused. Giving half apologies like "I'm sorry you took it that way" or "I'm sorry you feel that way".

    We haven't received a true apology and we're starting to accept that we aren't going to get one. She thinks we're overreacting and tries to act like nothing is wrong and tries to interact with us as normal.

    So we finally set our boundaries for our peace of mind. And she's starting to get consequences from those boundaries.

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  • [–] 28 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Wait, your MIL is talking to her own daughter that way? What the hell, it's just genuine cruelty at this point. Your MIL won't listen to reason, you're probably right to cut her off. God, I'm really sorry you have to deal with this.

    I hope you and your wife are doing well otherwise.

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  • [–] 22 points 3 years ago

    There were signs of manipulation before everything blew up but it really came to a head once my wife recognized the signs.

    I'm just glad to be out of the situation. I'm sure it's far from over but the hard cut has worked wonder's on our mental state.

    Thanks for the kind words.

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  • [+] 46 points 3 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)
  • [–] 45 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I'm very thankful that my family is full of leftists. Some of these posts tell me I'd be traumatized if I lived in some of these households. Instead I get to hear my dad go on hour long rants about the US Empire and how the president of El Salvador is a fascist dumbass. He does tend to say things during those rants that could be labelled as problematic but he's also a farmboy from a rural area in a developing country.

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    [–] 45 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

    My uncle keeps sending group texts of straight-up Qanon or transphobic hatred shit and I just don't respond, nobody does

    My dad's Facebook page paints a profile of a painfully stereotypical boomer conservative, he thinks Bernie Sanders is a communist and Joe Biden pressed the make gas expensive button

    My mom listens to Adam Carolla

    My surviving grandma is 91 and watches Fox News all day, weeping for how bad California looks now with all the homeless people living on bridges but not a thought for the people and where they're supposed to fucking go since simply existing in public is basically illegal for them

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  • [–] 44 points 3 years ago

    Teaching my grandkid that racism was invented by Judeo-Bolshevik agent provocateur Trotsky to shame and silence white people from being, well, racist. Meemaw and Pep Pep are just happy you're back.

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  • [–] 42 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    My dad sends me these and also lots of pictures of flowers with Bible verses about forgiveness over them. I haven’t responded in almost a year, but I know when he’s having a bad night because he’ll just start sending me a bunch of messages. The reason I don’t talk to him has nothing to do with politics. Suffice it to say that about 3 years ago I started having very good reason to be scared of him being around me or my kids.

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  • [+] 37 points 3 years ago (2 children)
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    [–] 41 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    Yes, it is the child's fault for not attending to the emotional needs of the parent. How may I serve you today, my liege

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  • [–] 34 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    There's a weird inconsistency where kids are supposed to always defer to their parents and also expected to be independent. Like, what the fuck.

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  • [–] 39 points 3 years ago

    Just a little closer to the grave and feeling lonelier, boomers? hahaha

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  • [–] 38 points 3 years ago* (5 children)

    Lots of y'all are posting about the politics divide. My mom won't let the church thing rest. When I moved out for college she was constantly asking about me finding a new "church home" there. Eventually I had to have the talk and she just couldn't comprehend that I could be secular and have a moral compass without a bible. It helped me a little that my siblings have finally had the talk too, but every couple of months or years she checks in to see if we've changed our minds. At least we aren't being disowned or anything, but holy shit please just let me have my own beliefs. I think she's worried we're all going to hell (especially worried about grandkids), which I guess I empathize with a tiny bit if I put myself in the shoes of a concerned religious parent, but like, just pray on it and trust the Lord or whatever. We've made up our minds.

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    [+] 36 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (6 children)
  • [–] 58 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    Likely real. The 'I can't see my grandkids due to my political views' isn't new.

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  • [–] 34 points 3 years ago

    I'm glad that the one aunt I have who went down the conspiracy rabbithole has been cut off from the rest of the family (she tried to force her unvaccinated ass into the hospital our grandma was staying shortly before her death to rant about the dangers of vaccinations, luckily no one gave her the room number)

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  • [–] 33 points 3 years ago* (13 children)

    In the past few years my parents, one a tail-end boomer and the other an early Gen-X’er, have become increasingly more and more difficult to have conversations with. They spout this FoxNews rhetoric every chance they get and my step-mom foams at the mouth blaming literally anything and everything on Biden (open a pack of chips and the bag splits on the side and it’s “Biden is ruining this country.”)

    They’re irrational and exhausting. If they ever talk to my children about politics or even life in general, I’m sure I’ll see this post shared in our family group chat along with the other fucking stupidity they share.

    Idk what happened or when, they were normal. Now, they’re banging on the walls of the looney bin waiting for a bed to free up

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  • [–] 33 points 3 years ago* (9 children)

    I feel like in 30 years (if we're all still alive by then) we're gonna talk about like FoxNews and Facebook like cigarettes or amphetamines. This is an observable phenomenon. Certain age and wealth groups have taken to the whole internet reactionary ideology like catnip. I don't know how else to describe it. If you're 55+, white, a homeowner, and you regularly wear polo shirts with khakis for fun it's like your whole brain got scooped out and replaced with conservative dipshit madness spinkled with minion memes. It's so common it should be a statistically noticeable blip.

    They've become so heightened, so hair-trigger, they really do froth at the mouth once any of their activation words are said. They're often deep into Qanon, they concoct elaborate conspiracy theories that get more confusing every year, and they can't tear themselves away from Facebook. Is the problem they weren't weaned onto the internet like younger people? Like when I was growing up the internet as it is now was being constructed, I watched it grow and learned how to parse information presented to me. Older folk slammed face first onto the internet in like 2015, without the decades of acclimating to it.

    Stories like yours and mine are so common I'm surprised there isn't yet an industry of family counseling specifically about de-programming reactionary parents/grandparents (there probably is already and that makes me sad)

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  • [–] 25 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    I feel like in 30 years (if we're all still alive by then) we're gonna talk about like FoxNews and Facebook like cigarettes or amphetamines. This is an observable phenomenon.

    I sure hope so. It's exhausting pushing back against the "it's just entertainment; entertainment has no effect on me" mantras of those consuming it. No one is immune to propaganda, least of all those who believe that they are immune to it.

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    [–] 27 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    the tears are CGI of course

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    [–] 27 points 3 years ago

    1upvote = 1prayer

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  • [–] 27 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Why is the child naked though?

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    [–] 26 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    I don't talk with my mom too often but she'll email me the most horrific reactionary comedy central comedian stand-ups. I don't even know how to respond to the latest, they were usually just problematic but the most recent one is just a straight up fascist creating a "class" out of nothing, insulting it, and dividing it from every other imaginary class he can come up with.

    It makes me feel really sad sometimes. I made it very clear that we hated fox and wouldn't let her have it on the TV while visiting her but the last time I mentioned it she said she doesn't watch them anymore anyways - it's OAN all the way. Someone else mentioned it below and I hadn't really noticed it before but, if she's away from the TV, tablet, or phone for too long she does seem to get fidgety and agitated.

    I sometimes wish I had spoken up sooner about it to her. I doubt it would have stopped her but maybe it would have slowed the descent, or I could at least absolve myself of a little bit more of the guilt.

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    [–] 23 points 3 years ago
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