“Smitty,” They call Me

Reader LauraW posted some interesting comments about my recent dealings with my elderly aunt.

My grandparents left some property to their descendants, and my 78-year-old aunt is in charge of getting rid of it and distributing the proceeds. She should have been finished with nearly everything in about 2012. She doesn’t provide bank statements or reports, and she says she doesn’t have to, which is something most prosecutors would disagree with.

She has Parkinson’s, and her health is very, very bad. She has trouble speaking and walking. She has been hospitalized at least once. Her husband is 89 and appears to be senile. He is also in bad health, and he is not expected to stay out of assisted living long. He takes care of my aunt, so a crisis is expected soon.

My aunt has two grown children. I can’t imagine her son offering to care for her. It would be very unlike him. I think her daughter and her son-in-law would want to do the right thing, but they have kids to deal with, and their house is not that big. In all likelihood, my aunt will have to choose between 24-hour live-in help or the local nursing home.

While I was in Singapore, my aunt texted me and said I needed to contact her right away about a property she wanted to sell, and I responded, saying I was in the process of flying home and I would try to contact her the next day. When I arrived, I called her. She was very angry with me from the second she answered the phone. She was angry with me for taking a trip, and she demanded to know why I had done it.

She asked me who goes on vacation during November, as though I had done it to offend her, personally. Well, can anyone think of a day in November when people like to travel? And who calls his aunt for permission to leave town? No one thinks, “I want to go to Fiji, so I better call all my elderly relatives who almost never talk to me.”

While we were talking, I spoke very bluntly about her poor performance, but I was not rude. She apparently felt she was being attacked personally. She said a lot of very insulting things about me which were shocking and untrue, and she speculated that I was poor and desperate and had no one in my life except a “sorry dog.” Paradoxically, she also criticized me for bragging that I was “filthy rich,” which I did not do. I didn’t tell her anything about my financial situation.

You can read more details in an earlier post.

LauraW says she was an RN, and she worked with psych patients and old people. She said urinary tract infections sometimes cause old people to go nuts, and she said antibiotics bring them back.

I don’t know anything about my aunt’s urinary health. We are not close these days, and even if we were, I would not be connected with her care in any way. She has her husband and children, and aside from that, she is not inclined to take advice.

I decided to look up Parkinson’s. I knew it caused dementia and other mental problems, but that was about the sum of my knowledge.

Parkinson’s is incurable and fatal. The web says it isn’t fatal, but that’s not really true, because it causes problems that shorten life. When it sets in in late middle age, you can expect to live about 20 more years, depending on the breaks. My aunt is at the upper range of that period now.

When I was a kid, and people got fatal diseases, doctors either told them they were going to die, or they told their families and let the families keep them in the dark. Now, the fashionable thing is to refuse to say conditions are fatal. It doesn’t mean they’re not. It just means the medical establishment has developed a bias against saying so. The official dogma appears to be that Parkinson’s isn’t fatal, but on the other hand, you can find all sorts of sites discussing deaths caused by Parkinson’s, so, yes, it’s fatal, unless something else gets you first. The same could be said of any fatal disease. You can get rabies and die from an unrelated heart attack.

We think of Parkinson’s as something that causes tremors, but it also causes hallucinations, delusions, and dementia.

I found out it can make people paranoid and likely to argue. They may become physically violent.

It is common for people with Parkinson’s to see things that aren’t there, like brightly-colored animals.

My aunt said some weird things to me, causing me to wonder if she was experiencing psychosis. She seemed panicked because I was questioning her actions as my fiduciary. Panicked people often lash out. Proud people with dementia do this when you question their faculties.

She seemed to feel it would help if she criticized my life to make me feel like a loser. Thing is, she doesn’t know much about my life because her side of the family started excluding me a long time ago. She had to guess. She attacked in various areas, including the area of romance and family. She said I had flown to Egypt to try and find a woman who would agree to come home with me and marry me. That was weird.

Did someone tell my aunt I went to Egypt last year? I don’t know. I don’t believe she knows. I know she has no idea I’m married, because she said she had grandchildren and all I had was the dog she imagined. One of her longstanding traits is that she wants people to admire her life and feel bad about their own.

My grandparents had eight grandchildren, and by God’s blessing and no virtue of my own, I turned out to be the smartest. I think this gnaws at my aunt. She used to tell me how brilliant her kids were, even though it wasn’t true. Then it was her son in law, who went on to die in a plane crash, removing him from the arsenal. Now it’s the grandchildren. Evidently, they are all prodigies, although no one else in the family seems to have noticed. She also tells me how incredibly intelligent various local eccentrics are, even though there is no truth at all in that. Smart people get out of Eastern Kentucky.

I think she was guessing about the trip I just completed, which had nothing to do with Egypt. If she had heard anything substantial about last year’s Egypt trip, she would know I was married. I took that trip with my then-fiancee.

I didn’t mention my marriage because I felt it could be helpful to me to hold onto that information, and I didn’t feel any motivation to get into the process of arguing with her about whether I was a loser and she and her family were to be greatly admired. That kind of bickering is not important to me. I didn’t insult her kids or her life, and I certainly had room to do so.

It would be pretty strange to go to Egypt to find a wife. The prime countries for foreign brides are the Philippines and Thailand, as far as I know. I believe Ukraine is also high on the list. Egypt is a Muslim country, so it’s not a great hunting ground. Nothing spoils a wedding night like a honor killing.

Finding a wife in the US is not exactly hard, so it makes no sense to suggest I would fly overseas if I were desperate. If you’re a desperate American male, stay where you are. You just have to make yourself available, have a net worth, and stop saying no. Finding a wife you actually want is another story. Only God can arrange that.

In any case, if I had been desperate for a wife, I would have looked here first. In fact, I did, when I decided to check out online dating. The Americans who popped up…there was just no way. Unthinkable.

My aunt must have come up with Egypt through a coincidental delusion or a guess. My wife and I have been to 4 countries, so the odds of her randomly picking one we had visited were not all that low.

I don’t think American brides will ever be hard for American men to find, and I doubt they will ever be in big demand overseas, because they tend to be spoiled, selfish, conceited, and misandrist. And they’re not especially attractive compared to the competition. Far Eastern brides get the best marks in that area, and Eastern European girls are also very impressive compared to Americans. American women also have a very high obesity rate. Over 40% of American women are obese, and 12% are severely obese.

I can say these incendiary things now, because I’m married and have nothing to be afraid of. Although, to be honest, I would have said them anyway.

I am checking Wikipedia, and it looks like I’m right. It says:

The majority of the women making use of these services in the late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century are from Southeast Asia and from Russia and other countries in the former Soviet Union.

It also backs up what my friend Mike, who does business with Ukrainians, has told me:

52 percent of Russia’s workforce is made up of women, yet according to some sources they often hold low positions of prominence in their home country and work jobs with less respect and lower wages (such as teaching or physician positions); and women earn 43 percent of what men do. Marriage is a substantial part of Russian culture, with 30 years being the age at which a woman is considered an “old maid”. With 4,138,273 more females than males from the ages of 15 to 64, marriage opportunities are slim at home and worsened by the life expectancy difference between men (64.3 years) and women (73.17 years), as well as the fact that a large portion of successful males are emigrating out of Russia.

I realize Ukraine is not Russia, but the foreign-marriage business is big not only in Russia itself, but also in countries like Ukraine which have similar cultures and are part of the same general area.

Foreign men who pursue American girls are generally looking for money or temporary non-Muslim demi-wives to serve as unpaid servants and sex providers.

For all their problems, I don’t think American men are as undesirable as American women. If you think they are, I have three questions.

1. Why is “bridezilla” a word, while “groomzilla” is not?

2. Why do American women crave marriage while most American men fear it?

3. Why are American men lining up to find foreign brides while almost no American women are looking for foreign men?

In at least three places, Proverbs cautions against the horror of an combative wife. I go further. I always say marrying the wrong woman is, literally, worse than cancer. America is a great place to find the wrong wife.

My aunt seems way more argumentative than she used to be, which could be a Parkinson’s symptom. I’m not sure, though, because I used to be one of her favorites, so I may not have seen what others have been seeing all her life. I have been told my sister and my other living aunt were chewed out royally by her. I have heard stories that made her sound pretty awful. Maybe she has always been nasty to other people.

In conversations with me, she always sought approval. I think she wants validation from people who didn’t grow up in Eastern Kentucky. I think she perceives them as more sophisticated, which is true.

My wife and I pray for my relatives. That’s all we can do. When thinking about what’s happening makes me angry, and it does, I use my supernatural tools to end it and get God’s help to love them. I don’t want pettiness to damage my relationship with Him.

Unsaved people who are too close to you will be used to drag you down to hell. This is why we are not to be unequally yoked. Provocation is one way they do it.

I’m very glad my relatives are only connected to a small part of what I have. Such independence is a gift from God, and it is an extraordinarily great gift I did nothing to deserve. I deserve poverty, but God lifted me up. Many, many people are in horrible marriages or are caught up in family turmoil or have cruel employers and jobs they can’t quit. I have been spared in spite of inviting these problems.

My aunt criticized my parents and me, saying we were ashamed of our people and our culture. Don’t ask me to explain it, but she felt this disqualified me from telling her she should advertise real estate on the web like everyone else, including people in Appalachia. She thinks I should be ashamed because I don’t admire my people, or former people. I thought about her remarks a lot yesterday.

If you’re a Christian, it’s very important to reject your earthly culture and to be ashamed of it, especially if you come from a backward place like the one where my aunt lives.

It goes beyond rejecting certain earthly cultures. You have to reject the culture and ways of the earth as a whole. Things that work to make you successful as an unbeliever don’t work for Christians. To make it without God, you are expected to be proud, aggressive, relentlessly self-promoting, greedy, and way too devoted to hard work. To succeed as a Christian, you have to be humble, peaceful, self-abasing, generous, and unwilling to sacrifice your relationship with God in order to make money.

Backward cultures are worse than relatively healthy ones, emphasizing stupid things like fighting, drinking, emotionalism, ethnic pride, racism, fornication, adultery, and contempt for education. All these things are celebrated in Eastern Kentucky.

My wife rejects Zambian culture. People ask me why I don’t go visit her, and I tell them she doesn’t want me to. We have no incentive to get together there. There is nothing in Zambia except wild animals and Victoria Falls. Her parents are dead. The relatives who looked after her when she was young treated her badly, and a number of them are witches who put curses on her.

Rhodah used to want to enter politics so she could fix Zambia. Now she wants to get out and move to America. She’s not stupid. She can look around and see that her country isn’t going anywhere. There are a lot of good Christians there, but they are outnumbered by pagans and Catholics. America is doomed, but it offers a better standard of living and a husband who will be unified with her in her relationship with God. Most importantly, I think, it will get destructive relatives out of her life.

You have to hold onto the family God gives you, but you should also cut the old one loose.

Yesterday we talked about our names. She said she wants to dump both of her names, both first and last. She was a neglected child, and her first name was issued as an afterthought. She was so neglected, her birth date is uncertain because no one cared enough about her to keep good records. She says I should pray for God to tell me what to name her.

I plan to get rid of my dad’s last name. I like the idea of taking my mother’s father’s name, which is a very common one. I want to get rid of my middle name because a middle name is one more thing to write down on forms, and it makes you easier to trace. We can have nice, common names that are very hard for people to use to look us up on the web. Perfect for making a new start. I don’t want people from my past, especially hopeful divorced women, bothering me. My life and my real brothers and sisters are in the future.

I don’t know how my aunt feels about people of other races today, but I know what she said in the past. I have to wonder what will go through her mind if Rhodah and I show up with a mixed-race son who has my grandfather’s first and last names. I think my grandfather’s family name is a bit like an Hermes “H” to her.

Time for yet another digression. A year or two ago, my dad’s email address got a message from a woman who used to work for him. She was an associate in his firm. She wanted to know how he was doing. Mind you, this was a person who probably had not contacted him in 10 years, and she had no idea he was dead.

I emailed her back, letting her know my dad had passed away. So of course, she responded with condolences, asked what happened, and said she hoped I was okay.

No, she didn’t! She didn’t respond at all. And I know her and her husband. We are not strangers.

Googling, I see that she and the man I knew as her husband now live in different states.

Here’s what I think: she took her shot. Best guess. Maybe she emails other elderly single men.

I don’t think she had a heartfelt interest. My dad was rude to his subordinates and said all sorts of offensive things to them. I recall two colorful terms he used to refer to this lady.

I don’t think she’s a malevolent person, but it’s common for older women to need money, and marrying is one of the most common ways to fill the need.

The older a man gets, the more women will see him as a potential musical chair. Something to be aware of.

To get back on track, I am expected to be excited about my people and be loyal to them, but who are my people? Not my grandfather’s descendants. They don’t care about me at all. My people are those who are Spirit-led. Jesus said the same thing. He said, “whoever does the will of My Father in heaven is My brother and sister and mother,” and the word says it is impossible to please God in the flesh, so he was talking about Spirit-led people.

Maybe we should call ourselves Mr. and Mrs. Jim and Mary Smith. Does it matter whether our earthly names have any connection to our ancestors? People who claim to have died and visited heaven sometimes tell us we have new names there, which is probably true. I can’t imagine heaven having three million people named John Jones.

I used to think Eastern Kentucky was my refuge and a sort of paradise on Earth, but now I have no desire to go there again. It’s like Miami to me. I hope I never have to visit again. Drugs, laziness, violence, racism, self-inflicted poverty, childishness…these are the things it offers me. It offers to pull me backward and take away whatever improvements God has made.

Eastern Kentucky is rich, or it used to be before leftists killed the coal industry. It should be like Texas. Instead, Kentuckians sold their mineral rights to less-backward people from places like New York City, and they became laborers for the people who owned the coal. It wasn’t theft, regardless of what apologists say. They did what Esau did. They gave their birthrights away for fleeting short-end benefits.

Fools are supposed to lose their money to responsible people. It’s not an aberration, and it certainly isn’t unjust. Appalachia has poverty because it earned it.

The funny thing about what my aunt said is that it applies to her, too. She is also ashamed of her culture and her people. She’s always trying to make them look better, and she likes to claim accomplished people who came from the area. The problem is that she claims people whose parents got out before they were born. She likes to talk about J.D. Vance and Cameron Crowe.

Until my aunt told me, I had no idea who J.D. Vance was or that he was connected to Breathitt County, Kentucky, where my grandfather sat as judge. I didn’t know who Cameron Crowe was or that he had a parent from Powell County, another county on my grandfather’s circuit. Vance is a senator-elect who wrote a bestseller about toxic mountain culture, and Crowe wrote Jerry Maguire.

The problem with using them to prop up Kentucky is that both these men are from other places. Like many Kentuckians who wanted better lives, Vance’s parents moved to Ohio, and he was born there. Crowe has only one parent from Kentucky, and he was born in Palm Springs.

Obviously, the Vances and the Crowes were unhappy with our culture, and their sons probably would not have succeeded had they stayed in Kentucky. Furthermore, Vance clearly has a low opinion of his parents’ culture, because his book, Hillbilly Elegy, has a slur in the title and depicts a family destroyed by mountain ways.

If you thought Mexico had a great culture, would you write a book about car thieves and gangs in Los Angeles and call it Wetback Memories? The name of Vance’s book killed my interest in reading it. I don’t think anyone should call another person a hillbilly.

J.D. Vance has no accent. How about that? Neither does Crowe. Losing your accent is considered one of the most important steps in masking your Kentucky roots. It’s a tradition among social climbers who leave.

Loyalty to earthly connections is a tool of the antichrist. The spirit of antichrist pulls people backward and makes them feel a groundless loyalty to the cultures of the earth. Satan wants us to put our families and ethnic groups above God. Clinging to degenerate ways out of mindless loyalty is a great way to make sure you are never transformed by the Holy Spirit, and it can also help you on your way to hell.

It’s also a great tool for starting wars. We identify with nations instead of the family of God, so instead of having the unified interests of God, we have the conflicting interests of squabbling countries.

I don’t know what will happen with my biological relatives, except maybe the one I baptized, but I have a great Christian wife and a number of friends who are my true brothers and sisters. My biologicals distanced themselves from me a long time ago, so I don’t feel much of an attachment now.

Kentucky is getting worse and worse. I was there in 2019 for my dad’s burial, and my second cousin told me she had told her kids to leave the area. Appalachia had its big revival about 80 years ago. Since then, in Eastern Kentucky, there has been more deterioration than progress.

I still like the idea of moving to a Christian area in Tennessee. Kentucky and West Virginia are a mess, but it seems like there are places in Tennessee where a Christian could enjoy life.

There is a guy in Scotland who pops up occasionally and makes Youtube videos about things God has shown him. He has nearly no subcribers. He just put up a video in which he discusses the fact that Spirit-led Christians lose their interest in carnal pursuits and the things of the world. To me, it’s obvious that maintaining your unity with stubborn unsaved people is an example of a worldly pursuit.