How to please Momma without looking retarded?
When La Baby Doc went back to the old country to visit, she stopped in to see my parents across the border as well. Mom, as always, sent a few items down for her "white sheep in the family" son who is always trotting around the world. They call me that because the other white sheep in the family is my old man, and he also has a passion for moving around and seeing something new whenever he can. The rest of them are homebodies who hate to fly, hate to travel, and would never try to learn a foreign language.
So anyway, two of those items sent were Obama t-shirts. Now you have to understand mom. She grew up in Mississippi during Jim Crow and was fire-hosed, tear gassed, billy clubbed and arrested during the marches, diner sit-ins, voter registration drives, and sometimes just plain going to school. She's still deathly afraid of German Shepherds to this day. Despite the fact that they gave her a high-school diploma, she was functionally illiterate well into her 30s. She learned to read at the same time I did in grade school (from my books and tutoring). That was how it was done back then. Blacks spent most of their time in the cotton fields, not school. The schools only gave them diplomas so that they could tell the federal government that they were educating their negroes.
To her, the election of Obama is a big deal. Even my centenarian injun grandmother went out to vote for the first time in 30 years. To a half-breed Navy brat like myself, it takes more than melanin to get my support. I don't bother to tell her any of that because I understand we're using two different yardsticks. To her, this means America has finally gotten past its racist past, and that was the most important issue in her life. She lost two brothers to lynchings and one house to KKK torches; she also married a white man, so they had plenty of their own struggles in their 45 years of marriage and I can understand why it's so important to her. In my life, the only racists I met were mostly functionally retarded individuals whose opinions mattered little to me. Institutional racism is not something I've had to live with (at least not as far as I know), so it's not high on my priority list. I'm far more concerned with the abolition of the Federal Reserve than I am with Affirmative Action.
So now the question arises. What do I do with these shirts? I'll be damned if I'm ever seen wearing one. My old solution would have been to use them to wash the cars, but I don't have a car anymore. I could give them to the locals, but I don't want tourists looking at them thinking I have retarded neighbors (though the Europeans simply LOVE Obama). There are enough wacky t-shirts being worn here as it is (waiting for the World Champion Philadelphia Phillies shirts to pop up).
I'm also stuck with the possibility that she'll notice that I don't have them when she comes down to visit, which may be in the next couple months. If I tell her I threw them out or gave them away, we'd finally have to have that long discussion I've been avoiding: that Obama is a tool for the banks put there to make people think that something has changed and by the time he leaves office, America is going to look like the Weimar Republic. I avoid these kinds of discussions with mom because she doesn't need to hear it (nor does she know what Weimar Germany was, despite having lived right near Weimar) and she's already paid her dues to my generation. Like grandma always said, nothing will get as violent a response as changing someone's reality. Momma is happy in her current reality and I might as well let her stay there.
Your creative solutions to this dilemma are greatly appreciated.
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Originally Posted by El Doc
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