More Crazy Religious Right Wingers

My mother took in strays. She started doing this when I was still in high school. She believed she could help people. It was her calling. Her degree was in English but that didn't matter.

She believed that if she let someone talk enough and she kept on mothering them, they would be healed. It didn't always work but often it did. The last stray she took in was a disturbed young woman named Dawn. Dawn Jones had been through a terrible divorce and mom took her in to try to save her from herself. The first time mom took Dawn in, she thought she could help her. But the second time she took Dawn in, mom told me she thought Dawn was "disturbed". If someone was "disturbed" in my mother's book, they were pretty well down the road to real craziness but my mother felt she couldn't turn her back on Dawn now.

She took Dawn in and gave her free room and board and the use of her car. Dawn was grateful and helped cook and clean the house a bit. But when mom got sick with pneumonia, so sick that she was literally out of her mind, Dawn was too unwell mentally to recognize my mother needed immediate medical care.

Both of my parents (divorced) had suffered some serious illnesses in the last year or so and I was driving to another state once a month to spend the weekend with one or the other of them. That weekend, I had been seeing about my father and phoned my mother to make sure she was home before driving to the city where she lived. She sounded normal on the phone but a bit out of it. She was after all, getting older.

When I got to her house, I could see she was seriously ill. She couldn't walk to the bathroom by herself. I took her. She was talking out of her head. My brother and I had her hospitalized of course but she never recovered. Apparently mom had been that sick for several days and Dawn hadn't seen the need to tell anyone or take my mother to the hospital. We didn't blame Dawn who was living on the 'kindness of strangers' and not responsible for herself much less my mother.

Mom was diagnosed with MRSA (Methycillin resistent staphylococcus auerelius ) or what is commonly known as staph pnuemonia. She had contracted it at the hospital when she had been in a couple of weeks before for some sort of treatment.

To make a long painful story short, my mother never recovered.

It is two years later and for the last two years I've been getting mass emails from Dawn, my mother's last stray. They aren't frequent but just when I think she's finally forgotten me, I get some crazy ridiculous email forwarded to me from Dawn.

What she sends en masse are the type of emails that most people would call spam. During the 2004 presidential election, she sent me a torid email outlining what horrific torture should be inflicted on all Democrats and or anyone who disagreed with the right wing agenda. I was shocked and asked her not to send me any more emails like that. I told her I was surprised that she would advocate violence that way. She told me I should find Jesus.

I haven't received any mail from Dawn in a while (thank goodness) and thought I had finally gotten taken off of her list of people to send mass emails to but was wrong. Today I received one from her asking me to sign a petition to send to the president to ask him to reinstate the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools.

Ask me what's NOT wrong with that petition and I'd be hard put to find anything. I tried to rein in my temper but apparently used no tact when I wrote back to her explaining that the Pledge of Allegiance is still being said in public schools and that the email was a scam that goes around every few years (I've seen it before of course).

I didn't even mention to her that I couldn't possibly care less about the Pledge of Allegiance. I defended my son's right not to say it in the sixth grade when he was learning to question authority. What I did say in the email to Dawn was that as people who have children in public schools know, the Pledge of Allegiance IS still being said and that instead of spreading the ignorance, why didn't she give a donation to St. Jude's Research Hospital to help children with cancer. I then asked her to take me off of her list of people to send mass emails to.

I suppose I could have been more tactful. But I am tired of being tactful with ignorant right wing people. My mother was a liberal but obviously she never talked politics with Dawn.

Or maybe I should have explained to Dawn that after watching my son's dearest sweet friend Caitlin die of cancer at 16, that sending bandwidth eating spams about the stupid Pledge of Allegiance irritate me. Maybe I should have explained that I was tired of chain mail asking me to send soda can ring pulls to the American Cancer Society or chain mails asking me to pray for so and so when the truth is that none of those things ever accomplish anything more than consuming my time and the internet's bandwidth. If you really want to change the world, give money to St. Jude's Hospitals. I guess that is what I should have said but instead I just wrote that : "

This is a scam that goes around every year or so. The pledge is still being said in public schools as anybody with children in public schools knows.
So instead of passing on the ignorance, why don't you give money to St. Judes Hospitals to help support children with cancer and do something constructive?

And Dawn, Please please take me off of your email list. I don't like spam.

Deeply Disturbed Dawn didn't take what I wrote very well. Something in those words just above really chapped her ass because the following is what she wrote to me and forwarded to the hundred or so other people on her mass email list:

You know what? You are a real treat, Karen. I like to call people like you pseudo-intellectuals...folks with no REAL education and certainly no people skills...you just like to feel superior and look down your nose at other folks just because they may not be as "well read" as you are and you have to service your feelings of inferiority. Your mother would be ashamed at your attitude. I remove you from my mailing list with pleasure.

I'm not the only one who thinks of you the way I do.

You have no idea how much you and the rest of your family other than Frank hurt your mother. She was one of the most giving, wonderful people I have ever known and I miss her everyday. How she raised someone like you is beyond me. I stayed with her not because I "needed" a place to stay but because I loved her as my own mother and friend. More than I can say for you.

And just for the record, I am not in the practice of forwarding emails very often and I do send my apologies for that.

Find Jesus. Your mother would have liked that.

Have a good life.

Luckily for me, my mother and I had a very strong and loving relationship or I might have been hurt by what Dawn wrote. I wasn't hurt, I was alarmed that Dawn is so much more disturbed than I had realized.

I just don't understand people who proclaim they are Christians and walking with God and Jesus and yet live a life so far removed from anything purportedly said by Jesus in the bible. Extremism is scary in all its forms, whether it shows up in Christians, Muslims or any of the big religions followers. Give me religious apathy any day.