Now my mom’s a bit of a right-wing nut, but for the most part she had learned not to forward this kind of stuff to me anymore. I guess the re-election of Bush the Incompetent has emboldened her, though, so she sent me the this forwarded “joke” that is decidedly unfunny.
Now if it had just been a stupid anti-gay joke, I could let it pass, but the violent aspect of the punchline seriously rubbed me the wrong way. So, I responded thusly:
Oh, and she made the mistake of including the email addresses of several friends that had been “sharing” this joke, so I CC’d all of them as well.
Christmas might be a little chilly this year, but her initial email back doesn’t seem like she’s upset.
This lefty actually thought it was kind of funny too. Hell, you could even turn it into an anti-rightie joke if you want. Kinda in the “see what happens if you take this stuff too far” vein.
Ahhh, the first few steps are the hardest. Welcome to my world duality72!
My mom forwards the most ridiculous righty stuff, so easily refutable I usually don’t even bother, but right before the election it got pretty deep. She’s got this passive aggressive noise happening where she’ll email me the most ignorant things but never engage in a conversation about them. So I kept constantly replying and asking why she’d forward something she doesn’t actually endorse, allowing her the out of ‘well, I didn’t really agree with it all…’ if she wanted it, but I was finally finished politely responding with appropriate linkage discussing whichever topics and just started challenging her to put up or STFU and voila! I’m finally removed from her forward-all listing.
I didn’t think the joke in yours would have set me off, but I can totally understand if it was a final straw type situation. And just remember, if it gets really hairy you can always remind her that your strong moral convictions came from her to begin with.
Yeah, the CCs might have been a bit much. But trust me, people, she and her friends are those conservative Texans and they think it’s funny because it’s true. Maybe it’s just more chilling to me in that I know her and her fundamentalist bent.
Being a Texan myself, I completely understand how you feel and the compulsion. However, I knew the people I was dealing with would never change their minds, so replying was pointless. I eventually took the pacifist role and changed my email address, then didn’t give it to them. By the time some had acquired it, I’d permanently been left off (banned?) of those kind of cutesie homilies. That may not be the route you can take with your mom, initially or otherwise, but it sure helps the stress and blood pressure levels.
[Although I agree that the CC thing was a little over-the-top. Everything in moderation my friend. ;)]
I can’t believe anyone found that joke funny. Not because of any perceived anti-gay message, but because it was horrible. It was like an unholy marriage between Family Circus and the jokes in Readers Digest. Gah!
How could any of you have laughed at that? Hang your heads in shame! Unless of course you actually like Family Circus and/or Readers Digest jokes, in which case you have my sympathy.
I’m with Giraffe. I kind of rolled my eyes at it. Whatever the intended message, it really wasn’t that funny IMO.
Also, I hate spiders, so I felt oogy for reasons other than the anti-gay sentiment.
I didn’t think it was funny either, but then most of the time I don’t like kid-type jokes. Kids are funny all by themselves, they don’t need words put in their mouths.
Plus I really, really like spiders. I might want one as a pet.
Don’t worry. Being on a e-mail joke list is so 90’s. Not a single person on the CC list was reading the e-mails your mom sent out, having long ago either set up an inbox rule to automatically delete her messages, or having abandoned that address to escape her mindless jokes. Unlike your mom, they spend all their time working on their blogs.
