She actually said it

[MorningGlow]

In my several years on DU, I have occasionally vented about having to spend time with my uber-religious (Catholic), closet racist, Rush-listenin', Beck-lovin', Bush-worshippin' aunt. It's taxing, to say the least. I only see her once a week for about an hour or two at a time, but still...

Anyway, today she finally said IT. No, she didn't call Obama the N-word (thank goodness), but she said The Other Thing I've been waiting for her to spout for quite some time:

My son dropped a wrapper on the floor, and I told him to pick it up and put it in the trash. He grabbed it with his toes (the clown), and I said, "With your hand. You're not a monkey." And my aunt said...?

Yep.

"You know what bugs me? Scientists say we evolved (well actually she said "evoluted") from monkeys, but if we did, why are there still monkeys around?"

:banghead: :banghead: :banghead: :banghead: :banghead: :banghead:

Oh yeah--and about half an hour before this comment, she was rejoicing about the earthquake. I think she was implying that, because it hit close to D.C., it meant God didn't like Obama. Who isn't even there. Makes perfect sense.

And there isn't even any booze in the house with which to self-medicate.

:banghead:

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. You have my complete sympathies!

:hug:

[MorningGlow]

3. I'll take 'em, thanks Peggy!

:crazy:

[flvegan]

2. So what lesson did we learn here?

Correct, always make sure there's booze in the house.

[MorningGlow]

4. Dude.

Truer words were never spoken. :thumbsup:

[SlimJimmy]

26. Correct (nt)

[1StrongBlackMan]

47. Oh ... I was thinking ...

Since you pretty much know what to expect ... go over there self-medicated.

[hifiguy]

61. +1

And always make sure there's something inexpensive around for these kinds of emergencies. I like good Scotch too much - and it's too expensive - to be used in such situations. :hi:

[Parker CA]

5. Evoluted! Hahhahaha!! Thanks for making me laugh out loud! ;-) edited bc iPad doesn't recognize

Freeper speak and fixed evoluted to evaluated! LOL

[MorningGlow]

7. Them there conservatives are very edumacated. n/t

[OneGrassRoot]

11. I don't think it liked "Freeper" either...

:P

:hi:

[Parker CA]

15. Bahahahaa! I just saw that one after reading your post. Hilarious!

[tabatha]

6. I would probably have said

that all humans are created by God - thus you are unhappy with God's creation. (I don't know why religious racists do not see that.)

Also, I would have asked if that meant Obama's mother was the same? If so, does that mean all whites are the same?

[OneGrassRoot]

8. "evoluted"

:rofl:

[seabeyond]

9. there are still monkeys. did she say more? if not, why assume it meant beyond

monkeys.

curious, cause i dont know and i can buy someone saying if we evolved... why still monkeys. if they don't know anything about it.

[lindysalsagal]

10. Is it any wonder america doesn't value education? It didn't work for many of them.

Let's just open alot of theaters and show movies all day while the parents are at work.

[unkachuck]

12. was that....

....Beck beer or Beck the asshole? If it was the asshole, your Aunt is not nice and I feel she may have no redeeming value outside of your possible inheritance....

"I only see her once a week for about an hour or two..."

....reduce that to a half-hour....

[unkachuck]

13. dupe

[lob1]

14. My fundie sister once volunteered this to me:

She said, "I once thought about evolution, and I wasn't sure so I went to my pastor to enlighten me. The pastor said that man cannot be evolved from monkeys, because God created man first."

You just can't beat logic like that.

[EFerrari]

24. I've never met anyone who questions evolution.

I wouldn't even know what to say to them.

[LanternWaste]

63. Me too. I read about them quite often...

Me too. I read about them quite often, yet have never seen one in person. :P

[InvisibleTouch]

16. Curious why you spend time with her at all...

...if it's such a stressful experience? Not being snarky, I'm just genuinely curious.

[Auntie Bush]

28. That's what I was wondering. A couple hours a week?

What can you find to talk about with such a person? Just wondering! :shrug:

[MorningGlow]

29. Because she is my aunt, and when I was little she was like a second mother to me

And because I remember when she was normal.

[InvisibleTouch]

52. Well, your choice, of course...

...but I don't think I would do it. I've never felt that I owed allegiance to a person simply by virtue of their being a blood relative, if they didn't deserve it otherwise. But it sounds like you have some good memories of her in the past, so hopefully you can focus on those and try to steer the conversation away from stressful topics.

[MorningGlow]

56. I can't be that uncompassionate

She's my relative, and I love her despite her twisted views.

The woman has issues and has gone through a lot of misery in her life. She's taking refuge in what makes her feel better. Of course she's choosing the wrong thing, and I wish she would get counseling instead of embracing corporate-manufactured hate to control the unthinking masses, but that's not my call. It's her life. And she's at the tail end of it. I refuse to be her judge and jury when she needs what few family members she has left.

I just come here to vent, have a laugh, take a deep breath, and plunge back into the fray.

[duhneece]

60. I admire your honoring your aunt

Knowing we can't change others, even when we know how wrong they are, and love them anyway is a sign of a loving, big-hearted human being. I'm glad DU is here for you to rant. I'm hugging you in my mind's eye right now!

[nadinbrzezinski]

17. I am sorry you have to endure this

:hug:

[obxhead]

18. If god was pissed at Obama or DC

wouldn't he have centered the quake there and not in Mineral, VA which is Cantors district?

You just can't fix stupid though.

[MorningGlow]

30. Well, we didn't have much information at the time

We were at my mom's house, and she doesn't have an intertubes connection. (YIKES!) So we were back in the Stone Age, flipping through TV channels, trying to find out what happened. My mom landed on ABC and they were showing pictures of the Capitol. Of course, now that we all know where the epicenter was, she'll conveniently ignore that fact. ;)

[MissDeeds]

19. I feel your pain

Years ago, my husband and I were visiting Mount Vernon with my aunt. She griped about the handicapped accessible ramps that 'ruined the look of the place'. When we insisted on visiting the slave quarters, she didn't want to walk 'all the way over there' and said 'they didn't have it so bad'. (A slave 'didn't have it so bad'?) Honest to God, I felt the blood drain out of me. I was not only appalled, but was almost physically sick. This is a woman who used to be a Democrat, someone who I admired and respected. I don't know if it's age related dementia or the fact that she has lost all moral bearing, but her comments showed a level of callousness that I had never seen before in anyone so close to me. It was more than ten years ago, and I'm still not over it.

I have used this event many times in my college classes to show how human suffering can be ignored and mocked by some in our society. It shames me to have to tell them that someone in my family expressed such indifference.

[MorningGlow]

31. Ouch.

That is a bad one. It's great that you can use it as a lesson, though. I'll bet that hits your students pretty hard.

[MissDeeds]

42. Yeah

It really generates a lot of discussion.

[hootinholler]

20. She will be pleased to learn it hit in Cantor's district. n/t

[The Doctor.]

21. Did you even try?

Did you make the attempt to explain, or is she that far out of reason?

[MorningGlow]

33. Oh, I tried

I kept it simple, like for my 7 YO. ;) I said that the word is, actually, "evolved", then explained that we did not evolve from monkeys, but humans and primates had a common ancestor but we are completely separate now. I'm sure it went in one ear and out the other.

[madmom]

59. I use the common ancestor thing and take it a little further...

I tell them to take an acorn for example, you can use any seed. They start out as a sprout that turns into a tree, that has leaves, which are entirely different than a tree, but has the same "ancestor". You can go further if you use flowering trees like apple or cherry. They all have different legs of their evolution. This totally floored and silenced my fundie daughter-in-law.

[Skittles]

22. your aunt seriously needs her ass kicked

[MorningGlow]

34. As long as you have no qualms

about kicking an 83 YO's ass--! For the record, she's a very spry 83. Passes for 73 easy. ;)

[Skittles]

48. I intend to be mighty spry at age 83

:D

[MorningGlow]

57. I have every confidence that you WILL be! :) n/t

[Schema Thing]

23. you know that this is a fairly common anti-evolution claim, right?

YOu know her, so I won't say she didn't mean "Obama", but this is something the ignorants commonly say about evolution, as in "why didn't *all* the monkeys evolve, if we did?".

[MorningGlow]

35. Nothing ever comes out of her mouth

that hasn't been poured into her head via Limbaugh, Beck, O'Reilly, or Hannity. Or some of her cronies. She makes a very good parrot.

[FirstLight]

25. ack!

makes me have a Bill the cat hairball moment! sorry hun :hug: I have to deal with that when at family stuff with my B-I-L & my Dad...ugh

[MorningGlow]

36. LOL

I knew this was you before I saw the username pop up! :hug:

[unblock]

27. for the record, scientists do NOT say humans evolved from monkeys

and they certainly don't say we "evoluted" from monkeys.

rather, they say humans and monkeys both evolved from a common ancestor that was neither human nor monkey.

and the species that vanished are the ones that were sufficiently poorly suited to their environment at some point that they became extinct; the species that remain are the ones that evolved adaptations that successfully met every environment they lived through, so far.

i'd guess most on du learned this at some point but you never know....


i grew up in the bible belt and there were PLENTY of my peers who didn't believe in evolution INCLUDING my social studies teacher who was SUPPOSED to teach us evolution and instead made us do a book report about a book that described how improbable each specific mutation leading from a single-celled organism to human would have been, and how many mutations there needed to be, and therefore how incredibly improbable it is that humans came into being at all. the idea being that the odds are so remote that it's not a plausible explanation.

i didn't have enough time to research any counter-arguments at the time, but later in life i learned more about factual, logical, and mathematical holes in that argument. not in time to create a controversy in high school, though.

[MorningGlow]

37. Oh, I explained it

Doubt she was listening, though.

[unblock]

43. can't teach an old...

what's really interesting is that there's tons of evidence about evolution in fast-breeding species, such as fruit flies.
and plenty of anti-evolutionists understand and accept that viruses and bacteria adapt.

yet, while they often recognize and accept that evolution happens to all the species around them, somehow they refuse to accept that humans are a part of that game as well.

[MorningGlow]

44. Becuz hoomins are speshul

God went "ding" and poof there was man; "ding" again and there was woman. None of that nasty animal stuff for us, nosirreebob. Etc. etc. etc.

[lindysalsagal]

51. It even happens when an antibiotic no longer works for your infections

But all of that would require analysis and transference and inference, so.....Much easier to go with the simple, emotional, short, black-and-white answer.

The world is only 6000 years old and Sarah Palin could see dinosaurs from her front porch....

[Lucian]

53. Thank. You.

:applause:

[frogmarch]

32. Would it help to explain to her that

humans and modern day monkeys had a common primate ancestor far back in time, probably between 40-50 million years ago? Lots of my husband's relatives didn't get the monkey-human relationship either, till we talked about it a little. Like your aunt, they couldn't understand how humans could have evolved from monkeys, since there are still monkeys. Now some of these people even like the idea of evolution and think it's interesting.

[MorningGlow]

Tried

Not sure that I succeeded. :shrug:

[frogmarch]

40. Some people don't want to

understand evolution. The people in my husband's family who don't want to understand it believe evolution goes against the teachings of the Bible.

[OneGrassRoot]

58. That's the bottom line. They don't want to learn, knowledge is evil. n/t

[unblock]

39. although this is true, it's also the case that not all species evolve at the same rates

species that are well-adapted to their environments can continue to survive without great changes, and some species simply don't have high mutation rates. some species are very different from their ancestors of 40 million years ago, while other species may be remarkably similar.

there's no great logical reason why the ancestor we evolved from 40-50 million years ago couldn't have also survived, independently, to exist today. there is, however, factual evidence that suggests that none of today's primates were around at that time.

[LadyHawkAZ]

38. And if we all evoluted from grandparents...

why are there still cousins around?

You can't explain that!

[provis99]

41. wanna really blow her mind?

tell her humans are members of the great ape branch of hominids; yes, humans ARE great apes. And our genes are about 98% similar to chimpanzees, using the singlen ucleotide polymorphisms measure.

[notadmblnd]

45. I agree, to the point where I think their behavior is treasonous'd stick to just sending her a

Christmas Card. But that's just me:shrug:

[1StrongBlackMan]

46. Phew ...

From your build up, I thought the conversation was gonna go in a different direction.

[WCGreen]

49. I always pick up stuff with me feet....

You never know when you might need your feet...

[Catlover827]

50. Absolutely disgusting

When will this crap end?

[ChoppinBroccoli]

54. If Adults Evoluted From Babies, Why Are There Still Babies Around?

You can't answer that!!!

[noamnety]

55. oh oh oh

please show her the photo of god attacking the pope with a sudden windstorm!

[EOTE]

62. Better yet, why are there still single celled organisms around?

Your aunt may be on to something.

Seriously though, I wonder if people who posit such questions think that they're being smart. As if scientists around the world actually contemplated such a "paradox" and conveniently ignored it because it didn't mesh with evolution. Honestly, you wouldn't think that the phrase "common ancestor" would be so challenging.

[Mr Deltoid]

64. My standard answer

Why are there not half humans running around? There were until about 20,000 years ago when modern man killed off the last of the neanderthals.