I firmly believe he will be unrepentent to the end. We avoid contact with him as much as possible.
On a cheerful note, he does suffer from depression and has been on Prozac in the past. And he smokes. And he had a mild heart attack some years ago. So the end may come sooner rather than later.
I know other people with virulent prejudices. My brother is one who hates blacks. But his best friend is an Alaskan Indian. He’s selective in his racism, for some reason. But the BIL hates everybody. It seems such a waste of time to spend your life figuring out how deficient everyone else is…
Preferable, to some, to spending your life trying to understand why you yourself (er, he himself) are so deficient. Not that this is news, to you, I’m sure.
This guy sounds like the soulmate of my mother-in-law. Though when I told my mil to shut it after her ranting about Tubby Smith, she actually did. For about ten minutes.
This is an eerily a propos suggestion, since I have a vivid memory of spending Christmas '96 with my dad’s family, when my Grandfather defended his use of the term “Nigger toes” to refer to brazil nuts.
It was mostly him against his (late-teens) grandsons, with quiet cheering from his sons and his wife (grandma) acting as ref.
Screw him. He isn’t worth the effort to dislike. Just head over to PJ’s and marvel at what medical science can construct, and try to remember the good parts of the family.
Sure, go ahead, feel free to frivolously spit in drinks while Bush is spending trillions of dollars on an illegal war. Thousands of innocent Iraqis are being murdered by sadistic American soldiers every day, and you have time to spit in drinks? Whose drink are you going to spit inwhen you are drafted as cannon fodder for Oil War 3 or sent to a Bush reducation camp? Huh? HUH? WHOSE FUCKING DRINK THEN???
It took this and the “eenie-meenie-miney-mo” threads to finally figure out what the hell was up with Brazil nuts. I’m dense. They were just the good stuff my sister and I would squabble over in rare dishes of “company” mixed nuts, along with the filberts. Cashews were strictly mid-grade squabbling fodder.
Since this guy’s 70, he ain’t gonna change, and your sister won’t either, ChefGuy. Just about your only consolation is that he’s gonna live, and die, with that arid, hating soul. Offhand I’d say he’s deliberately chosen his own hell. Just imagine living inside that mind and heart. ::shudders:: His inner landscape beggars the worst SF portrayal of desolation.
Wait him out. If you just plain can’t bear his hatefulness, you can always just look him in the eye and impartially note, “You’re dying, old man.”
I do think we have to cut the oldsters a break. They were brought up differently, and the World was not the place we live in now. Of course- they are still dead wrong, but…
Remember- your Grandkids will be calling YOU a "racist bastard’ because you “didn’t let Bonobos & Dolphins vote”. :rolleyes: And- you know what- then they might be right.
I think there is a difference between occasional lapses of sensitivity due to having lived with a different set of mores, and hard boiled ongoing nastiness. Since I believe that age does not preclude a person from personal growth, I would not cut slack for serious nastiness.
Chefguy, keep in mind that racism is nothing but a symptom of self-loathing, which is the most difficult thing for a person to face and conquer. So no, you’re right, he’s not likely to change much in the time he has left.
I do think, though, that someone should take him firmly in hand around his g’kids.
Wow. Can we get dad and uncle some sort of honorary doper award?
And for those who say it’s sometimes too late… Sometimes it’s not. My sis-in-law’s dad was very anti-asian (was in Viet Nam and Korea), to the point that, yes, you could easilly call him racist. He was also a -very- self-destructive man (alcohol, bad marraige, etc.), but… In the past four or five years, he’s really turned around. Granted, it took some tragedies in his life, and some blessings that he realized he wouldn’t be around to enjoy if he continued, but… Well, I guess what I’m saying is, it’s never too late to change.
(And I’ll tell you, the day I first saw the evidence of his turning, it was… Just amazing. I’ll never forget it.)
I wonder if there is a living history sort of project that gets guys like this down on tape. I presume (and hope) when we tell stories of people like this in fifty years, nobody will believe us.
There will always be people with self-loathing, who don’t have the courage to turn that inward and so project it outward. So these peopel will never go away entirely.
It was in the early to mid sixties and my uncle was in the Marines. He had just received a package from my grandfolks for him and it had some goodies in it - cookies, etc. One of the goodies happened to be a tin (or bag or whatever they came in back then) of brazil nuts. When he saw these, my uncle got excited and said “All right, they sent me nigger toes!” Just as he said that, he realized that one of the black guys in his squad happened to be right near him when he said it and he pretty much swallowed his tongue because he was embarassed and completely expecting a swift punch to the face (apparently, the black guy was one of the biggest guys in the squad).
So my uncle starts stammering out an apology and the black guy just looks at him and says, “It’s OK - we call 'em that, too.”
Anyway, my uncle felt a little better but he stopped calling them nigger toes after that little encounter and was a bit more careful in his vocabulary.
In the USA, anti-German sentiment was replaced by anti-Irish and anti-Jew sentiment, which was replaced by anti-black and anti-Hispanic sentiment, which was replaced by anti-homosexual sentiment.
While most American people now alive can’t seriously imagine a relative holding massive, irrational hatred for Irish people, we can easily grasp the basic foundations of such hate. Humans aren’t going to change.
