The other night, I came down to the living room where my mother was watching reruns of a military law enforcement drama, where that plot was an illegal alien was likely going to be deported with his young daughter hugging him in tears. The episode aired in 2018 (the show was on it’s 14th or 16th season) around the time of “the caravan” drama. She thought it was 2020, but that was the year of COVID and there was lots of domestic issues if you remembered.

I feel like I am going to be “loosing” my mother at some point down the road from all this political manipulation and the rising levels of outrage, hate and resentment mixed with nihilism it’s almost as if she’s a lost cause and I may have to turn away from the very person who created me.

Back to the illegals: we both agreed that the immigration system has been a mess, and recently WBZ-TV had sent a reporter up on our end of the border (vis-a-vis New York and Vermont, because the border in New Hampshire is supposed to be by foot because the border between NH and Quebec is some park, and you’re not supposed to loiter either citizen of either side. The Customs and Border Patrol told the TV4 reporter there was more than 500 people who’ve crossed those 4 entry points on the Terrorist Watch List.

The tangent or conversation or what she said was a deep talk morphed into other what I felt was grievances. I am not trying to air her dirty laundry with all of this though.

I pointed out some of the arguments like using fictional films as some type of prophecy (though not the words she used) and just was politically anxious. As a result of being politically anxious, things ruminate. I told her that the reason why I don’t watch a lot of fiction is because it’s not based in reality. I don’t know how many films and TV shows where something that sounds like fact must be true, without any levels of skepticism, but believing it at face value. Now the autistic self is very detailed, and yes I do think some shows overdramatize the tech, overdramatize the process and overdramatize simple rhetoric too.

But as a sidenote, our media preys against these groups of people whom of which they tend to sneer towards. It’s ironic that the rural people who hate the media will watch these primetime cop-aganda content where producers and writers mock.

I did bring up economic stuff as away to be the pin to the taped part of a balloon like you’d do to a sensitive autistic. By Scotch-taping a balloon, the pop won’t be so loud. I feel like I have a duty to put a push pin on this taped ballon to kinda pop some bubble of 1/2 truths about the economy and how these hyper-free markets have really cost us. I mentioned that “Reganomics” was a knockoff brand to poor economic policies that brought us down the rabbit hole of nearly five recessions since the crash of 1987. While Regan started the dereg mess, Presidents like Bubba, I mean Clinton also did a number to deregs, as well as Bush, Obama and obviously Trump.

She mocked and balked at the 32 hour work week. I guess since that’s a European idea, and not our own, it must be bad. Ironically my mother was supposed to work on Saturday and didn’t work in the basement remotely yesterday. Lots of my mother’s anger of work, seems to sound like someone wants to unionize, but doesn’t like unions because people don’t want to work hard.

Her fetish to the work hard play hard, and not feel enough was really apparent when I brought up Uniform Basic Income and how people lower than her social strata are struggling to keep up, just striving. In this town, one of the top 5 largest populated towns in the 603 and is very hard right, their own political beliefs are killing them at the same time?

It’s hard to blame others, when the only jobs are retail and service work. While trade jobs should be suggested I think, the problem is our economy is really biased towards the Seacoast and Mountains (travel and tourism), so where does the people who live near the two cities do? It’s not just my mother bitching about overpaying entry workers in a part of the world where that’s the only job and they don’t see it that way. Then you add the overtipping culture seen by others, and it makes you think, what’s going wrong here?

She uses lots of pile-up words such as “also”, “and another thing”, and “that too”. This type of communication style just moves the crap but doesn’t seem to be constructive, it’s also a steamrolling tactic to silence anyone whose trying to question the system in a constructive manner. I didn’t do much talking that night, and really poor political maladaptive behavior

The meat of the conversation (that I wouldn’t consider a “debate” but was how she felt emotionally at work. She was very upset and I’d go so far to say angry against some of her co-workers because their personality is annoying I suspect. The company where she works 8-5 is pushing for more quality without hiring quality assurance people. Then I heard an alarming statement that she blames it on the executives not being American (“they’re all foreginers”) and are trying to cash in… well is that capitalism that is supposed to be so great to protect at all costs? (that was another thread, of which I didn’t get to yet, but will post at another time.)

Many of the questions I asked were direct Five -Ws with a question “what makes you think that?’ “Why do you feel that way?” By using Five-Ws ( the who, what, when, where and why with a narrative) will make it easier for the other person to open up and not feel interrogated, but that alone I think she felt interrogated because she was so defensive.

One of the killer conversations was on religion, where she was complaining how so many people are working many hours and putting their kids into sports, they don’t have time to go to church she thought. Recently a couple journalists have published books both on their own experiences and interviewed others I’m blanking on their names because they aren’t name brand people (of which I thought rural people related to, these no-namers) but she then went and felt she as under attack, that one of the churches she would like to go isn’t the extremist as they make it out to be, and that one bad apple is going to ruin all of them. But then I gently challenged, that the Bible Belt is a large politically geographic area of this country. Of which I got a no-answer to other than “they are attacking the church”. Whose that “they”? She said whoever these people are.

Then she had to take a swipe at me for probing me of where I get this information. This is another tactic of shutting up the conversation, because apparently I know too much about issues so what I should do instead is to run away from the problems is playing games on my iPad and watch hours long movies, which was kinda against what my mother used to believe 15 years ago.

I’ll answer it, I listen to podcasts, watch them on YouTube if I am not subscribed, yes some of this information is algo-driven. Most often if it’s the latter, I make the decision to watch it and be skeptical at the same time to make a conclusion if what I had consume is believable or has some weight. I don’t use Facebook often to read or watch political related stuff. If anything Facebook and X formerly known as Twitter really can lock you into a political echo chamber since 3l0n has silenced other groups to amplify no-namers and hard right agendas.

Then she accused the church for being “woke” then I gently asked “how do you define woke?

She then said “they support the LGBTQ groups [etc]”  She also denies that other marginalized groups haven’t had a voice, and “they’ve always had a voice” and ironically she’s a woman and women didn’t have any significant independence from men until the 60s and 70s. 

So I live in a dark red town in this state, with selective tolerance, with a mother who can’t seem to share, that she appears to be entitled to wealth, power, status, etc., despite those same freedoms being lifted around the time she was born, that the bitterness of being seen as privileged breaks the ego. She had to counter every point I had, or not comment because she didn’t know the subject matter. I know she’s denying me, because of her tactics of power control just in the house. This trend i have written for in the last couple of years, is just more confirmation of a bruised ego, which I think many Americans are dealing with that is bleeding into the political sense

What really alarmed me was she wanted to end the hour’s long discussion of real nihilism – which scared the living crap out of me “this world is going to shit, this country is going to shit, I don’t know what little ol me […] just an individual can do, other than work 40 hours and stay to myself”

And many New Hampshirites are feeling the same damn thing. But I find that Gen Xers, my mother is turning 54 next month; and many of the people in her generation stuck to themselves when in other generations people got politically interested earlier in life. This is the prime generation in this state. No millennials anymore after leaving college, and there’s plenty of Gen Z, and plenty of older boomers and remaining Silents.

I am pretty sure the few Xers (born between 1965-1981) who have gotten engaged in politics will soon check out and find this broad hopelessness of people choosing to be picky in tolerance and taking annoyances as grievances, that in reality is juvenile will only get worse over time.

The world is at your fingertips. Not all media is bad, there are tons of sites and blogs. We all do have confirmation biases, it’s in each of our’s duty to ensure that bias is checked in a healthy manner. And both sides needs to stop trashing “the other”.

The most important part of this division with people you care about, is to show as much empathy as possible, because they need to be heard. However for me, it was only when she was starting to go on the deep end with the “other” that I lost her.

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