Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 40 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
When people admit what they really think, then we have a problem
I had a fascinating visit with Mr. & Mrs. Jones a few days ago. They’re a pleasant couple from Connecticut in their mid-80s and have been married for over 60 years. Mr. Jones did extremely well in finance and retired to Hilton Head 30 years ago. Mrs. Jones has had four major cancers in her life. The most recent cancer was rapidly aggressive and has metastasized to her lungs. She can hardly breathe now. She gets out of breath just saying hello and talking about the weather. Her life expectancy is probably around 3-6 months. Mr. Jones has no major health issues, except he’s developing Alzheimer’s, and is starting to slip beyond the point that Mrs. Jones can care for him, in her weakened state.
I found Mrs. Jones’s cancer in time to delay its progression via radiation and chemo – right now she feels pretty well. She just gets out of breath easily. But she understands that this is a short-term reprieve. Her only goal at this point is to hang on long enough to care for her husband until he doesn’t know where he is or who she is, when going into a home will be less traumatic for him. A worthy goal, under the circumstances, I suppose.
They’re a wealthy New England couple who have been married for 60 years, so they bicker about things. His dementia has removed the filter between what he thinks and what he says, so they bicker more. She understands that he says things that can be hurtful sometimes, but they’re due to his disease, so she tries not to take them to heart. It’s often better not to know what someone is actually thinking, especially if you love that person. Which brings me to our visit last week:
Me: So look, Mr. Jones, I think you might have pneumonia. But if I put you in a hospital, in your current condition you’re likely to experience “sun-downing,” and your dementia will go from problematic to catastrophic. It may be difficult to recover from that. So it might make sense to try to treat this at home. On the other hand, your wife’s cancer makes it difficult for her to care for you. So you may have to go into the hospital whether I want you to or not. This is a difficult situation. I’m really sorry.
Mr. Jones: Why should I listen to you?
Mrs. Jones: He’s our doctor. He takes care of us, remember?
Mr. Jones: Yeah, well if he’s so smart, he would’ve found my wife’s cancer earlier, and maybe she’d still be alive today!
Mrs. Jones: Well, he did find it fairly early, so I’m on treatment now, and I am here today. Remember? I’m your wife! And I’m sitting right here!
Me: You have a lot of doctors. Hard to keep track of us all.
Mr. Jones: Which one are you? Are you the racist one?
Me: Racist?
Mr. Jones: Aren’t you from some small town up in the mountains of Tennessee?
Me: Yes, that’s me.
Mr. Jones: All you people are racist, right?
Mrs. Jones: I’m so sorry…
Me: No problem, Mrs. Jones. Yes, Mr. Jones, I’m the racist one. That’s me.
Mr. Jones: OK. You always seemed really smart. I never understood how someone like that could be racist.
Me: Yeah, it’s a mystery.
Mrs. Jones: Please understand that…
Me: Oh, I understand. No offense taken. It’s OK, really. It’s more important that he remember me, somehow. Whatever works.
Mr. Jones: So you think I should go in the hospital?
Me: Yeah, that’s a tough call…
Again, sometimes it’s better to not know what someone is thinking.
What’s interesting is that I’m sure Mrs. Jones thinks the same things. I’m from a poverty-stricken small town in the Appalachians, so I must be a racist. She’s a wealthy socialite from New England. What else is she to think?
But she would never say that. Unless she develops Alzheimer’s disease. Or unless she knows that she is among friends. Well, friends other than me.
Most people will never admit what they really think. Unless they’re compromised (children and drunks), or unless they’re hopeless and desperate. Only if they no longer fear the consequences of their honesty will they admit what they really believe.
Many Democrats have reached that point recently.
Our politics have become more coarse and polarized. But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
You just wait until it’s not just the Mr. Jones out there – wait until the Mrs. Jones start speaking their minds.
Oh my goodness.
Published in General
How very, very sad. And how very kind and patient you are, Dr. B. A difficult time for all of you.
According to some, one wouldn’t have to know you’re from a “small town up in the mountains of Tennessee”, it’s enough to know you’re white…ergo…
My experience with family with dementia is that they lose their memory, but their personality traits are enhanced. My mother, for example, was a very ornery woman (it’s how she lived longer than anyone in her first family despite being a sickly child), but also emphasized hospitality and keeping a gracious home. On our once a year visits she would clasp her hands excitedly and say, “Oh, look who’s here!” even though she had no idea who we were.
As she was nearing the end, she was living in a senior facility and became unresponsive at one point. I wasn’t there (the family lives in Ohio and I’m living in Colorado and was dealing with health crises with my kids and myself), but my large extended family gathered at her bedside to see her through to the other side. As the story goes, they were singing to her and holding her hands and she (miraculously?) awakened. The first words out of her mouth when she saw everyone gathered were, “Is this what I have to do to get you to come visit me???” So very Mom. It was that personality that got her to age 93.
So maybe people with dementia who are inclined to call you racist based on where you’re from always had such a sanctimonious, judgmental personality, which I guess is your point. I prefer ornery.
I have no experience with Alzheimer’s so will refrain from commenting on that. Regarding the things people say when drunk, I disagree with your assessment. I used to assume that a drunk person who says something outrageous or offensive is letting slip what he really thinks. But then I remember being at a party where a teenager was drunk, probably for the first time. He was telling everyone at the party that he loved them, even though most of those people he had never met before. He wasn’t revealing his true feelings, that was just the booze talking.
I once was in a restaurant at a salad bar and a drunk man next to me was making a salad with his bare hands. He told me I should be burned up in an oven. We had never laid eyes on each other before. I doubt that deep down, he really always thought I deserved execution or that deep down, he thought the best way to make a salad was by grabbing everything with his bare hands. People do dumb things when they are drunk that they would never do while sober, and it’s not because social convention says that it’s improper to stick your hands in the lion cage at the zoo, and the booze has removed that social inhibition.
I’m not trying to be hard on you, my friend, but which is it? Is it right or wrong to presume someone is prejudiced based simply on their economic status and geography? Saying that white Southerners are mostly X, or Black people are mostly Y, or wealthy New Englanders are mostly Z is all the same problem.
The same thing happened with my dad a few minutes before he died. He had been “out” for a while, when suddenly his eyes popped open and he was “there” for about 3 or 4 minutes, carrying on a conversation and calling us by name (His first words when his eyes opened were “I’m still alive?”), before he kind of drifted off again and died about 20 minutes later.
The medical types on the thread can correct me if I’m wrong about this, I’m told it’s actually somewhat common as the body approaches death that organs shut down and release a shot of blood to the brain that kind of kick starts things for a few minutes.
I agree with you.
Lived through that with my dad. It is the ugly side of living longer. I didn’t lose him all at once, when he died, but gradually on those days he was in an alternate reality. Sitting up deep into the night until the last breath so he wouldn’t die alone wasn’t easy. I eat bacon now with no regrets.
Fortunately for all concerned my father remained quite cheerful as his mind went over about nine years. His wife was able to keep him at home until just a few days before his death from pneumonia.
His step-grandchildren (his wife’s grandchildren, they were adults by then) kept quite the game going with him as they had to reintroduce themselves each time they visited. They visited often, which I appreciated as I and my children lived on the other side of the country by then. Among the grandchildren they all decided to reintroduce themselves each time by claiming to be his favorite grandchild, to which he would cheerfully agree every time. He enjoyed always being visited by his favorite grandchild even if it wasn’t always the same grandchild.
Yes, it is stereotyping. We all do it. It is wrong, but in this case, I think Doc’s correct. Doc is probably the only person she’s met that she knew was from such a background. Met her type routinely in my line of work.
Except my mom lasted another few days after that. The family packed up and left and had to come back later.
Like I said — ornery.
I’m with the doctor on this one. I think that’s how my Democrat relatives think. What limited political discussions we have, they don’t think very clearly about any of it, and some of them are really smart.
I’ve told you about my PhD brother-in-law that actually does people a lot of good in his medical related profession. One time he insisted that Bill O’Reilly was racist. I said no, he isn’t. So then he goes to his computer and looks like Bella Lugosi playing the organ and some movie looking for racist videos of Bill O’Reilly. Of course he doesn’t find any.
Then I had to tell him that Sarah Palin didn’t really say that she could see Russia from her house. It was the chick on Saturday Night Live. Same Bella Lugosi BS on his computer. He had no idea.
He still thought that the guard at the Atlanta bombing of the Olympics did it. I mean, that’s terrible.
One time he blurted out arguably the dumbest phrase in the English language: “assault weapon”. So then I asked him to define it. He went crazy. He pretends like he’s shooting a semi automatic literally making gun sounds. No vocabulary. His family staring at him like he’s nuts.
I have a nice nephew that makes a lot of money doing naval intelligence for some think tank. Democrat. He said he’s worried about people that are worried about communism. Whatever that means. Then in a limited way he made it sound like he was satisfied with the number of people that are being jailed for January 6. I just dropped it.
They spent $30 million persecuting Trump over the Russias stuff. I started talking about that and my brother-in-law whips out this one thing about this one business deal in Russia and he literally thinks that’s worth it. Reportedly Jack, what’s his name spent $30 million persecuting Trump. Think of all of the ridiculous lawfare. I doubt he has any problem with it.
I had to learn a lot about what prosecutors are supposed to do. This is totally out of bounds.
He likes government force, and he wants more of it, and he doesn’t think any of it through and I don’t think any of them do.
The last time we talked about politics, we were somehow talking about Medicare. I had recently heard that the average Medicare recipient takes out $300,000 more than they put in to the system. This makes sense because it’s trillions in unfunded liabilities. Then I looked at him and only raised my voice slightly and pointed my finger down at the ground, but sort of move my hand towards him, and I said the most important sentence of all time:
Government Is How We Steal From Each Other™
He gets up and says, “I don’t know anything about public policy and I’m not talking about it anymore.”
He has been reading the nation and mother Jones and all of that crap for decades and that’s all he can come up with.
So then at Thanksgiving, I think he sincerely did me a favor, but it possibly had a political motive. As you know, I’m obsessed with narcissistic personality disorder, because my old man has it. So my brother-in-law gives me that book by Trump’s niece who goes on and on about how screwed up Trump is with narcissistic personality disorder. She has some level of psychological credentialing. I think she’s a psychotherapist.
I didn’t get any kind of political vibe from it and it may do me some good to read this book, but I don’t see how it changes anything politically.
Over and out…
Everybody says that Trump has narcissistic personality disorder, but his kids seem awfully well adjusted if he does. I can tell you nobody in my family is like that. Furthermore, none of my relatives except one is what I would call well adjusted.
FYI, this is what prosecutors and the department of justice are supposed to be doing
https://www.roberthjackson.org/speech-and-writing/the-federal-prosecutor/
I don’t think the left cares that much.
This is a very short speech about how all right thinking people think about the constitution
https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/spirit-liberty-speech-judge-learned-hand-1944
Again, I don’t think the left cares that much. They just love government force.
I probably would have said something like “Then maybe you should stop voting as if you DO know anything.”
Unless you’re an antiracist, that absolves you of the original sin of White Privilege.
Fascinating. I’ve always suspected that. Not just in Alzheimer’s but I’ve seen it with a lot of people in their furthest years. People with a broken hip who are otherwise healthy just go down hill quick. Are they just giving up, or is there something else behind it?
I am pre-judging here but there is a divide between old New England money and an average wealthy person. How did the Kennedy’s end up with their own accent? The isolationist bubble existed back then too.
Sun-downing is a common syndrome among old, sick, weak people. A basic rule of thumb is that if put someone in the hospital for pneumonia or a fracture or something, and that person has sun-downing, then half of those people are likely to be dead within a year. Cause of death could be anything. It’s a marker of poor health.
We love to hate each other. Some time it’s being racist to a different race or sometimes its assuming different kinds of whites are racist. It emerges from the same human flaws. I think it’s more pride than wrath.
There is nothing racial in that. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. Those guys never, ever close the sale on anything.
We don’t need more than public goods. They lie about inflation, and there is too much of it. The End.
not everything is about inflation. I was talking about how humanity likes to hate each other. Inflation wasn’t important in my comment.
OK `but racism wasn’t expressed in what I wrote.
Wiping out inflation and non-public goods would solve a lot of problems.
My 102-year-old mother-in-law began to sun-down two years ago when she was sent to rehab with a cracked pelvis. An ex-doctor said she should go onto a 1st generation antipsychotic. My husband had some trouble getting a doctor to prescribe the medication but eventually succeeded. Today she is still with us and (mostly) in her right mind.
It’s a form of “othering”, meaning a way to set yourself apart from what you label as bad people – ergo, you’re a good person.
I’ve heard all of this or seen it on social media for some of my family, which is hard for me to scroll past but I have to get over it. They’ve consumed this erroneous information because it reinforces the above (I hate Trump so I’m on the side of good people), and any reality presented to the contrary gets discarded or ignored.
It’s weird but it’s normal.
Agreed. There’s some truth to the whole “drunk people tell you what they’re really thinking”, just simply due to the effect of alcohol and the reduction of inhibitions. But in the example above, that guy was *seriously* drunk and probably in a blackout, and assuming something real is coming out of him is ridiculous. He’s taken a blowtorch to his brain.
Something as simple as a UTI had that effect on my dad.
Tribalism