James is gone, but not forgotten….

It has been going on for a year now since Jim left.  In a way, it’s a relief to know he doesn’t have to watch what has happened to his family(or the CDC).  There were eight of us kids and our two parents.  Dad has been gone for over ten years now.  We never agreed on everything, but politics could be discussed with a mix of seriousness and comedy.  The Gardner family is now split over political loyalties.  Not Democratic and Republic – no, but over common sense on one side and the Cult of Personality – AKA Trumpism on the other.  None of us are non-intelligent.  I expect that all my siblings would score around 140 on an IQ test.  Yet so many of them have fallen for the false promises of a guy who lies like most of us breathe.  They manage to pick one or two things he’s done that they agree with and ignore the thousands of things he’s done that actually hurt America.  They ignore the hundreds of thousands who’ve died of Covid that didn’t need to.  They ignore the attack on the capital, the attack on democracy that he is responsible for.  They ignore the BIG LIE about the election.  They ignore that he LOST THE ELECTION by nearly 8 million votes.  They ignore that nagging little voice in their conscience that is telling them – STOP THE BULLSHIT!!

But worse, they ignore the fact that their political insanity is tearing the family apart.  There are no civil conversations anymore.  Any attempt to communicate ends up hijacked with the latest retrumplican lies.  Our mother, now nearly 90, is fully brainwashed into this cult – caught up in a self-imprisonment of ideology in front of her Fox News TV.

I wonder if I’ll ever have a chance to go home again.  I won’t so long as what awaits me is a mother who would rather tell her kids they are completely clueless because they won’t follow Trumpy and his lies.  Other of my siblings do go home to visit mom, risking bringing Covid to her, so they can spend a weekend pumping her full of more Trumpy crap so she sits down and sends out yet another political mail to those of us who haven’t pledged allegiance to her false profit.

sigh

 

 

gryphon1123@comcast.net, rendrag007@gmail.com, johnrgardner@gmail.com, MaryKGardner@protonmail.com, HoosierGardner@Gmail.com, gardnermtn@gmail.com