Posted by:
Cold-Dodger
(
)
Date: November 18, 2022 04:27PM
On election day, I showed up at the church down the street to cast my vote. The poll workers were having some issues getting the counting machines to accept the ballots. We learned later that the printers were not printing the right shade of ink on the ballots for some reason or something like that. But, given the theme of election rigging since 2020, it made a lot of voters nervous.
The man in front of me was clutching his ballot like the device in front of him would magically turn into a paper shredder just to spite him. There were large bags just below machines that the poll workers said you could slip your ballot into instead. He wouldn't do that either, as if they were going to burn it in an alley later but watching the machine take your ballot and beep means there's absolutely no way your vote is being stolen. I cut in front of him, and he let me, and just slipped my ballot in the bag and went home.
Brother, if your vote never mattered, the people who own this country never would have suffered you-know-who for 4 years. Your vote obviously matters. Just put it in the stupid bag. They'll count it within a week or two.
I was at my parents' place later that night, mostly to hang out with my cousin who was in town. We turned on the TV to see what the results were. About a fifth of the polling places in Maricopa county were having the same issue mine had had. Oh well. They'll just count them downtown, was my thinking. But my father chimed in, "oh no, they're doing it again."
This man is a YSA bishop whom a hundred plus young adults look up to in the place of God, a Chiropractor who chastens people daily not to trust the medical establishment under any circumstances, and anti-vaxxer, and I've learned recently a Q-Anon follower. I haven't trusted his judgement in years at this point, and I'm surprised I ever did when I think about it these days. He's my dad, and given how I was raised, you can forgive me for doing all the mental gymnastics I could to spare myself from taking up a position on his left hand. Even back when I was trying to see the logic of his positions, there were hella red flags going off in my mind. But he has consistently been a bishop or a stake presidency guy since my jr. high years, so the weight of the authority of God combined with all the local stake prestige that would quickly turn against me if I ever turned contrarian recommended to my mind that I'd missed something.
The weirdo with the painted face in a bull horn helmet that you've all seen in the newspapers covering the Jan 6 riot is apparently one of my dad's patients. He brings that up whenever somebody says that Jan 6 was crazy like that implies that it's not. No, it was crazy. The reason people were there was crazy, and the man they were doing it for was psycho. I think he's not used to being contradicted, because most everybody in his insular life is a yes man or a yes woman.
He was thoroughly convinced at the end of 2020 that the one million dead Americans were due to the vaccine and not the virus. This is what he was telling his patients and still is. I pointed out that his own prophet had recommended getting vaccinated, and he liberally threw Nelson under the bus on this one issue. So I threatened his office with a complaint to the state board, and he at the very least stopped posting his bullshit on facebook. We segwayed from that tension into the capitol riot drama, and I felt betrayed that he and my mother seemed determined to believe anybody but me, no matter how ill-intentioned, and to believe anything but what I recommended, no matter how stupid. So I didn't talk to them for about ten months after that and almost skipped Christmas too.
There is no reasoning with this mindset. I don't know what it is or how to reason with it. I think a substantial portion of the American population was not ready for the era of social media where people silo off into echo chambers where the appearance of evidence for any kind of claim that a community has organized itself around will spring up in a link to some website no one's ever heard of before within the hour of some new thing happening. I can understand skepticism of government narratives devoid of supporting evidence we're allowed to see for ourselves, but taking the contrary position to the government de facto moving forward is just dumb. It's dumb especially when the man you call prophet seer and revelator thinks you're an idiot for foregoing the vaccine to a deadly disease that gets deadlier with age and the former vice president was made to flee for his life from his boss's own supporters.
How thick can a man's skull get? You'd be surprised. I don't know what he sees in Kari Lake. Lake was talking for months like once she takes office, that's going to be the last free and fair election we ever have in this state. Arizona had several legislature-driven ballot initiatives this year that sounded like naked attempts to curtail all future voter-initiated ballot initiatives. Arizona has been growing very quickly for decades, and native-raised Arizonans are getting salty that that the state is turning purple. A lot of the newcomers are from California. If it was possible to make all the new people go somewhere else, our economy would collapse. We would not be a growing state; our real estate market would tank. I think this speaks to the anger of the ruralands, the parts of America least accustomed to change and most overlooked by economic growth.
Why was I encouraged to obtain as much education as possible by parents who don't value an educated mind? I still don't understand this one. I don't understand it. I want to. Because it seems to me that my father only values information when it supports something he already wanted to believe. He doesn't have the time of day to listen to someone say they have evidence that contradicts him. He's got young adults to help into self-destructive self-loathing mental health traps as a bishop, and he's got patients who count on him for a whole host of bad advice from skipping their shots to skipping their chemo and trying healing crystals instead. One of my friends who left the church with me has cancer, and before he left the church my dad felt comfortable enough in his presence to recommend in a hushed whisper that he forego his chemo. My father is the opposite of "wise, yet harmless." He is a moron "in authority" who gives dangerous advice, but he pulls it all off so unassumingly and with a humble sort of charisma that draws people into it.
People reason that my dad couldn't be wrong. But yes, he could be, and he often is. Having a sweet demeanor doesn't mean your shit is peer-reviewed and found to hold water. Being right some of the time about the over-commercialization of medicine doesn't mean the entire edifice of western medicine is a conjob: it means we need cost controls and maybe a single payer reform. When your prophet says "be a good global citizen," that's not code that the globalists have gotten to him. Nobody ever said not to trust your own immune system: vaccines work by tutoring your immune system to recognize a threat before the live, wild threat actually makes contact. There's no evidence of foul play in 2020, your chosen candidates got their asses kicked all up and down the 2022 ticket because they were extremists preaching nonsense that scared people who weren't already too far gone down some paranoid rabbit hole to be touched by new information.
I was relieved by the 2022 results. Maybe instead of a fascist reversion or a civil war, things will mellow out slightly.
My old man made a comment to me recently that makes me think that he might be more like me than I thought. I was trying to explain what autistic alixothymia is, and he said, "wait, does that mean I'm on the spectrum?" I don't know what to do with that. I said maybe but I'm not qualified to say. If he's like me, how did we end up so different? Is it growing up in the city verses the countryside? Is it access to the internet during your formative years? He and I have both agreed that my ADHD side is probably his contribution to my genome, so maybe that's just his 'DD causing him to have his head the clouds so often that he fails to read people in the moment. Or maybe he's like me: an AutiHDr. My whole life I've just wanted to have some sort of connection with other people that didn't require me to lie to anybody or change who I was fundamentally or give up on the ideas that drive me. I love knowing things, and I love discussing the same. He doesn't. How could he possibly be like me? If he is like me, how does he live with himself? I could never sit there and preach something confidently that I had any reason to believe was harmful or even just slightly inaccurate. He does it everyday.