Everyone Has An Uncle…

Everyone has an uncle…  It’s a familiar line I’ve heard through the most recent years of our country and world’s history.  Maybe from around the time of Trump’s first term and the Covid pandemic.  Well yes indeed, I have just such an uncle on my paternal side of the family.  He came to be of like mind with Trump supporters, conspiracy theorists, and evidently pseudo scientific information.  The whole pro Trump package.  He so believed in (and as far as I know still does) Trump and Trump being the best president ever.  He had been a high school teacher of math and physics and was well liked and he was still respected and exemplified by many of his former students through Facebook.  He posted a lot of crazy (in my opinion) stuff on Facebook.  It was all stuff that he himself believed.  There was one time that he shared a post about a supposed admission from the CDC about the inaccuracy of their information about COVID.  I can’t recall at the moment the exact details, but it was a story to the effect of the CDC having admitted that 96% of its information about COVID cases or deaths or both had been false.  The source for this information that my uncle shared was a link to a story on one of those Trump supporting  ultra conservative news sites like One American News.  I couldn’t help it.  I made a comment and questioned him about why he was sharing a link to a story on One American News and not sharing a link directly to the information at the CDC website.  I guess maybe it wasn’t a good question to ask of a former teacher who was followed by and respected in his beliefs and opinions by many of his former students.  That was when he unfriended me on Facebook. 

Yup, this uncle is my crazy Trump Uncle.  I’ll bet a lot of people have them in the family.  I just had the thought though, and have to admit that in this realm of experience, Mary Trump has certainly got my uncle and me beat!! Wow!  I never knew until recently that she had a podcast about her uncle and his political career.

So back to my Trump uncle.  I had a memory about him today.  There was a time when I was a young child and he came over to my parents house to watch home movies with my father that he and my father had taken of their dirt bike races.  My mother had gone out that night and and left my brother and I with our father.  At that age, I had the experience of having episodes of sleepwalking.  I know the sleepwalking was in conjunction with some kind of disturbed and anxiety ridden dream state.  I had a sleepwalking episode that night and walked to the living room, where my father and uncle were watching their movies.  I was confused and disoriented, and I asked my father, “Did we win? Did we win?”  He didn’t pay attention to my presence or answer my question.  I left them and then continued sleepwalking and went down to our basement garage.  It was my uncle who was concerned and came down to get me and bring me back upstairs and direct me back to bed.  I just had this memory about him today.  My uncle was actually a very nice uncle.  He was very young when I born.  He is the husband of my father’s 6 years younger sister.  He was fun and funny and seemed to enjoy being a young uncle.  I was a flower girl in his wedding.  I recently remembered that when I saw a flower girl charm on a charm bracelet that I still have from my childhood.  I do remember something unique about my uncle’s personality.  He often seemed to be very cynical of things and often expressed a lot of criticism and disagreement with things that he would talk about.  It was in a pretty good natured and not overly upset way though.  When I was young, I didn’t know or comprehend much about any of the things he talked about, so I didn’t have any opinions of my own.  Well, it came to pass that my uncle and I are of very different minds about a lot of different things.  That is okay though.  I don’t have any personal contact with him anymore.  I saw him last in 2016.  Each of us are on our own separate life paths with our own differing, beliefs, opinions and experiences.  I don’t though have to just think of him as my crazy Trump uncle.  He is a part of my and my father’s (and mother and brother’s) family history and past.  My parents just visited him and my father’s two sisters and my father’s older sister’s husband very recently.