I have an uncle, Dale. I remember the last time he came to the family reunion, some four or five years ago. Things went great until just about the first beer, and then he immediately started talking politics. And not intelligently either - you’d think from how he was talking about it, the man was completely shitfaced. For those of us who had seen Dale shitfaced, this was a far cry.
He complained up and down to anyone who would listen about how awful those damn football players were for not just shutting up and playing the game, for caring about political issues and racism, and using their substantial pull to actually change things. Man, did that piss him off! He didn’t even go to or have anything to do with the school whose team he was mad about! And it wasn’t like he had much of a coherent statement. Just “those pansies are pissed about racism? Fuck 'em! They should grow a thicker skin!”
One assumes, he means one with less melanin.
Then he went off on the teachers union. Again, nothing about it particularly coherent pissed him off, he was just mad at the teachers in his locality for standing up and protesting police brutality. He wondered aloud, in his typical angry, drunk fashion, why the teacher’s union should give a damn about what the police were doing, and ignored people pointing out that the police had a fairly large presence in inner-city schools. Again, his drunken, inane ramblings had more than a tinge of “got mine, fuck you”, and several people asked aloud, “What do you care, Uncle Dale? You don’t go to school. You don’t have any kids*. What’s your problem?”
- (No woman could stand to be around him for more than a few hours at a time. Really almost a tragic story, or at least it would be if he weren’t such a terrible person.)
Apparently they were blocking him from going shopping. He didn’t care that there were more important things in life than 50% off a flatscreen that didn’t even fit in his dingy trailer, he was just mad, mad, mad.
Then he went off on the people protesting racial injustice and police shooting. By then, the few black members of the family were feeling horribly uncomfortable, and asked him kindly to change the topic. But he just kept going, calling them out personally as whiny crybabies, and refusing to acknowledge in any way that racism still existed - after all, it’s Obama’s America, and everyone knows that having a black president makes everything okay.
I never saw Uncle Dale after that. He’s been barred from the family reunions on account of absolutely nobody liking him. It wasn’t even that everyone was opposed to his views. I remember my Grandfather making some arguments not unsympathetic to Dale. But he actually made decent points, and he refrained from making those arguments around Dale, lest people think he was somehow defending the stupid bigot. I removed him from facebook after posting yet another racist screed - ironically, about something which not only was trivial, but which didn’t affect him in the slightest, making him even more pathetic than the “microaggression pansies” he was bitching about.
But it’s nice to see he’s found a new home here at Straight Dope. One hopes the ignorance-fighting machine works well… There’s so many things wrong with this man, and almost all of his problems are self-inflicted. Welcome aboard, Uncle Dale. Just, do us all a favor? For your favorite nephew? Either learn something or go away. Not because this is a safe space, but because there’s a reason absolutely fucking nobody likes you.