Wow, you thought your mother-in-law was bad....
(from Salon)
Dear Prudence,
My brother “John” married “Kim” last
year. She is a perfectly nice woman, but we don’t have much in common
and aren’t close. At the wedding, her mother got catastrophically drunk,
sexually harassed the best man, and then got into a fight with the best
man’s wife (a bridesmaid). The next morning, when the best man quietly
moved tables so he wouldn’t have to sit with her, she screamed at him
for “shaming” her and tried to stab him with a fork. No one on the
bride’s side blinked an eye. The rest of us assumed they were just
trying to salvage the rest of the day by keeping the peace, but when my
brother asked Kim about it later, she said the best man shouldn’t have
“flirted” with her mom and then “acted coy” afterward just because his
wife found out. That’s … not what happened. We all saw her mother get
out of control in front of everyone.
....... (but wait, it gets better). .........
John said to let it go because weddings can get emotional. But then the
same thing sort of happened at Christmas when Kim invited us all to
their house for a party. This time, her mother tried to set fire to my
mother’s dress, supposedly for flirting with her boyfriend. Kim said
that it was my mother’s fault for being too friendly and that her mother
had been cheated on a lot. John said that Kim knew her mother was in
the wrong but was just really defensive of her. Now Kim has invited
everyone to a birthday barbecue for my brother next month. We don’t want
to go, but we also don’t want to skip my brother’s party. Every family
has a difficult member (we have an uncle who gets drunk and angry if you
won’t let him drive), but Kim’s mother actually tries to hurt people,
both drunk and sober. How can we handle this? Not go? Go and do
something if Kim’s mother gets upset again? (I wanted to call the police
at Christmas, but Mom is worried that will alienate Kim and John. His
best friend, the best man at the wedding, has already stopped talking to
him because of the wedding day incident, which actually probably could
have qualified as sexual assault if he’d wanted to push it, never mind
his wife’s black eye.)
—Family Freakout
(From On Tyranny) 2. Defend institutions. It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of "our institutions" unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about -- a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union -- and take its side.
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