Dealing with Deplorable Family and Friends

Politics & News
1974

So another High School reunion is coming up. I don’t want to go. I guess I’m wondering if I just politely decline without giving a reason, or if I decline with a reason. Some of those reasons include:

  1. Sorry, but I always think of everyone in our class as they were as kids, and that’s how I want to remember everyone, when we all believed in Democracy and we all believed in science.

  2. Sounds like a super-spreader event and you organizers have not even mentioned Covid-19 and whether he’s invited to the reunion.

  3. There are those among us, including some of you organizers, who work tirelessly to divide us, and now you wonder why we don’t want to hang with you, even for an evening? Let’s put it off five more years and maybe within that time you’ll come to your senses.

2 Likes
1975

Just tell the truth and say that reunions are stupid and ask to never be invited again.

With social media around, there’s no reason to go reunions anyways. You can see everybody through that.

1976

I went to my 25th high school reunion a couple of weeks ago in Central IL. The only masks I saw were at Ohare Airport. I am vaccinated and my stance is if they don’t want a mask/vaccine then I dgaf either. That said everyone I talked to at the Reunion was vaxxed.

1 Like
1977

I have a family member who asks everyone he interacts with “are you vaccinated.” If the answer is anything other than an immediate yes he shakes his head and leaves. I could never do this because it’s so socially weird but it’s a pretty reasonable approach, IMO.

7 Likes
1978

You can’t sleep with your old crush who may now be desperate enough–or married long enough–to sleep with you over social media.

You can start the process, admittedly.

2 Likes
1979
  1. Go and hang out with some old friends and feel good about it and cut the bullshit. Reunions are a lot of fun.
1980

You’d have to pay me a LOT of money to go to a high school reunion. More than 5k I think.

1 Like
1981

Well yeah, if you had friends in high school.

3 Likes
1982

I’m everyone’s least favorite number years old and can’t name a single person I went to high school with.

1983

I’m calling bullshit on this. Gun to your head, I bet you cough up at least one.

1984

I was friends with a kid named “Jimmy” and I don’t know his last name so uh does that count?

1985

You are the outlier. I went to one school from K-3 and remember kids from then even. I stayed at the next town from 4-12 and could probably name somewhere between a 1/3 and 1/2 off my graduating class (it was only 123 people).

1986

I’m afraid not. I still think you pull one out gun to head. Unfortunately, I don’t see how we’re gonna be able to test that hypothesis.

1987

Oh wait duh I went to prom with a sarah s. who is now hugely into hedgehogs. Cool story.

1988

I know her!

1 Like
1989

No fucking way

1990

Not about a deplorable per se (well maybe?), but figured I’d share anyway.

I was chatting with a friend from France recently, and Facebook messenger is the way we communicate. As I finished, I happened to see that my yoga teacher had posted something at the top of my feed “who knew Biden was such an idiot”. Now, my yoga teacher has always seemed like a guy who was probably a lefty, pretty outspoken against religion, but in the past mostly tried to avoid politics.

I made a light-hearted comment like “hmm maybe if we elect ANOTHER 70s-something, corporate white guy that might work!”

So then he immediately comes back with “what does race have to do with it?” and I replied “well I’d just like to try something new in the WH and get some fresher ideas.”

He sticks to his guns and says “again I ask, what does race have to do with it?” and I said “well we’re a 58% white nation who has had 98% white presidents while supposedly being a representative democracy, I don’t think that’s fair”.

Then he says “my comment was about intelligence, not race, the left is always bringing up race blah blah blah” and I was like “bro, my comment offered up 4 qualifiers and you choose to zone in one of them”.

Anyway, my point isn’t so much that the exchange was super interesting or anything, but for me it’s really disheartening that even many of the problem who are not in Trump’s corner, aren’t really on our side either. It was the same thing with my Skype travel group, which seemed like it would be filled with well traveled people who have grown more thoughtful through exposure w/lots of different cultures and ideas, then I find out like 85% are anti-vax bozos.

It’s already bad enough that there are like 75 million complete morons in our country, but even those in the middle are not much better. Like it seems like our group here is just a massive outlier and the vast majority of America has already drunk the Kool-Aid and our never changing.

Oh, and I unfollowed my old yoga teacher.

2 Likes
1991

I’ve had similar experiences with the expat groups on FB (who should at least have some perspective on immigration), and my men’s circle (third-way bros who did ayahuasca together and thought there was a Tim Ferris-like solution to everything).

With the expat groups, I’m not sure if it’s a majority of them, or just a very vocal minority - but they seem very consipiracy-minded.

Most of the third way bros, except the one dude who was all in on Trump and happened to be a semi-famous actor and one of the the group leaders, didn’t think much about politics. But when they did it was usually from babe-in-the-woods first principles like Joe Rogan. I was surprised as they’re all hippy types who I expected to be quite liberal.

1992

I heard something interesting the other day that even the term “expat” is a way of white-washing the fact that we’re just immigrants ourselves. Like being an immigrant is such a dirty idea that we have to have our “own” term.

Yah, I often wonder too if it’s maybe just a vocal minority who makes it seem like the group is more deplorable than maybe it actually is.

1 Like
1993

I’m all about cutting off deplorable idiots, but even I think you might have been a bit trigger-happy here.

If this was the only objectionable convo you had and his opinions were otherwise reasonable, then I don’t think he is that terrible. Maybe it’s because this thread has gotten me accustomed to much worse.