I'm a "Bleeping Useless Socialist", according to freeper family member

liberalhistorian

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Sat Dec-27-03 07:14 PM
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I'm a "Bleeping Useless Socialist", according to freeper family member

Christmas night I made it to my dad's family Christmas gathering, despite some nasty weather during my drive from Cleveland to Toledo. Since my grandparents are both gone now and the family home was sold, we don't get together nearly as much anymore and we were all enjoying ourselves since a lot of my cousins were able to make it as well.

Well, it was at the house of my aunt, my dad's sister, who had remarried a few years ago after eleven years of widowhood. She married a widow, a retired doctor who was very well-off and who has a mansion-like home. To say that he's a repuke freeper doesn't quite do him justice. He got along great with my dad until the whole 2000 election fiasco, my dad is on our side, believing that Shrub blatantly stole the election and that he's not the legitimate president. You can imagine how that went over with the freeper repuke doctor.

I once asked him what his daughter had gotten her master's degree in (he has five grown children), and he said, and I quote, "Tree-hugging granola-crunching 101, or some such shit like that." As you can easily imagine, I'm glad I don't have to see him that often, as much as I love my aunt.

Well, I had the misfortune of being in the same room as him when he started bitching about how much vacation time is mandated in Germany and France, and how "socialism" was destroying those countries and it couldn't come soon enough for him. So I made the mistake of joining in and calmly saying that, in countries where five weeks or more of vacation is mandated, their worker productivity and morale is so much higher. Most people were lucky to get even one week of vacation, if any, in this country, I continued. Well, maybe that's why we're doing so well economically now, he said, I kid you not, in all seriousness.

Well, yeah, if you're a retired doctor worth a few million dollars with a million-dollar house, I suppose that's true. Again, I was very calm as I talked about the three million jobs lost just in the past two years and how those jobs are likely never coming back, about the financial difficulty my own boss, a small business owner, was currently dealing with, and then talked about all the outsourcing corporations are doing now and are planning to continue, costing hundreds of thousands more jobs just in the middle class. He casually dismissed that, saying people will always find work if they really want it and it wasn't his problem at all. I could sense a couple of my laid-off relatives starting to get warm, and so could my dad and stepmom as they quickly tried to change the subject. But then he said, well, then, just move to Canada if you don't like it, they are (dripping with sarcasm here) doing so much better than we are economically, aren't they? Actually, they are, I said, in many areas they're doing a lot better. My stepmom nodded her head in agreement. Then he said, well, you must be reading different sources than me. No fucking kidding, I thought. I'll bet you're reading that leftist un-American socialist garbage like The Nation and shit like that, aren't you, he said. Figures, since you're a goddamn useless socialist.

Well, at that, I very calmly stood up, saying I needed to check on my son and see how he was doing. My dad and stepmom didn't say anything after we left, even though I know they've had similar conversations with him. But thank God most of the rest of my family isn't like that!!! Do you think I'll still be on his Christmas list next year?