You know...
I think, for me, it all started with my father-in-law in 2008.
That was the year this person became my father-in-law. And also the year that I first heard someone loudly, with absolutely no concept of shame for it, tell a blatantly racist joke in my actual presence. Surprise. It was my father-in-law. Paul and I met it with stone-faced complete silence. And he retreated.
It's also the year I saw my father-in-law post the following on Facebook with a laugh emoji:
"Every Democrat should be shot in the head, point blank, and drowned in a shallow, muddy pond."
And what I remember most vividly, tied with my obvious shock that my father-in-law was saying that he thought me and my entire family should be violently murdered, was that no one else in that in-law family did or said....anything.
I watched. In person and online. As so many awful things kept coming. Waiting to see how this sort of thing played out in this new social system I married into. Surely they - the people of the family who actually have power over the culture of this space - they would call this insanity out. Right? Surely one of them would do something. Because this was so shocking. SO ridiculous.
They didn't.
And I definitely didn't. Because my father-in-law thought it would be great or at least amusing if I was shot in the head, point blank, and drowned in a shallow, muddy pond, afterall.
At first, for years, I thought it was because maybe they were scared. Like maybe there was an awful history of physical abuse or something there that my mother-in-law and her children were still threatened by.
But as people grew older and more independent, nothing changed. And so I finally realized that actually what was happening here could only be one of two terrible things. 1) That they simply were apathetic to blatant racism or political violence or misogyny or anti-intellectualism and on and on ("It's not real unless it's hurting me directly"). or 2) That they agreed with it.
One day, when I was living very far away in Denmark, my father in law posted a particularly awful picture and note about how evil all Muslims were - probably something along the lines of shooting them in the head, point blank, as that seemed to be a favorite theme. And I pushed back. I replied, "Please don't post these hateful and untrue things. They are wrong. And they do very real damage to my friends who are Muslim."
And on my own timeline, in a final, sad desperation, I asked my connections what a person should do in a similar family situation. Where they find themselves connected, legally in whatever way, to a person who has no concept of basic decency and also posts incredibly factually incorrect things? (I got some great advice on that thread - most of which was "Be strong and stand up".) I didn't even say who I was talking about. Just "family."
But what I remember the most was that within ten minutes of posting it, my mother-in-law called me internationally. And she was irate. And she said, "How dare you disparage the patriarch of this family?" And on and on.
I'll never forget that. That that was what she stood up immediately to defend. And never against any of the other, terrible, gross things.
And that's when I knew how much it was about appearances and "winning" against "them" and loyalty. And never about doing the right thing.
I'd hoped, in 2012 when I got that call, that it was a strange, strange phenomenon that was limited to my in-laws incomprehensible ethical code. Had to be.
And then we moved back in 2015. And then Nov 2016 happened. And I knew that it had spread. Or was there all along. Still not sure about that.
I blocked my in-laws from social media in 2012. I don't think they saw that as a punishment at all - just me being "mean" if anything. But it was actually just so I could stand to be in the same room as them because I wouldn't know what they passively approved or, in the case of my father-in-law, what he very actively approved. I could try to just see them as, almost like strangers in a cafe or something. And I could talk about the weather or ...just the weather. And get through it.
Sometimes I daydream though about me being the one to stand up to it all. It never ends well in my head - we're always shouted down or driven out. Sometimes it's a nightmare and my father-in-law pulls out a gun in the middle of the living room. I remember the one time in 2012 I tried so unbelievably mildly to push back, and I remember what happened so immediately it was breathtaking.
Maybe I daydream because deep down I want us all to finally be driven out. And for them to know they did it?
And all of this is from my side. You can't imagine the complexity of this all from Paul's. He's torn apart. I don't think they really notice or care. Or if they do, they certainly don't want to examine how they might be doing it. It's only his doing, of course. The intellectual. Who married a moderate-turned-democrat. It's so uncomfortable to be around us.
Why don't we hurry up and get shot in the head, point blank, and drowned in a shallow, muddy pond already?
