Recently my wife's grandfather passed away. He was 93, so that's a good run. However, the saddest part is seeing what happens to the family. I've seen it happen before and I predicted it would happen: there's always one of these in every family... a douche. (I realize that since I'm an only child, I'm automatically the douche of my generation, but I'll only be douchey to myself, so I'm okay with that.)
The douche in my wife's family shall be called "Dick." Not so much to protect his identity, but because he's a dick. I take issue with a lot of things Dick says and does, but when it comes to treating his own family the way he does, it is down-right deplorable. I find myself wondering how our society got to this level. Morality came about as a social tool to ensure integrity amongst the tribes. It levels the playing field by setting forth rights and wrongs and evolution favored the altruistic and those who played fair... up to a point, it would seem. Obviously when society grows to a certain point, morality is left up to a government more than anything. Lots of things slip through the cracks, as is to be expected, so long as we live without an all-seeing government (which is becoming a thing of the past). Dick slipped through the evolutionary crack, apparently.
Only his own self-interest is on his mind. He displays no care for anyone else and goes so far as to publicly snub my wife's grandfather's girlfriend that took care of - and loved - my wife's grandfather for the last 10 years of his life. Without making this all about Dick, just some of his antics include: leaving the grieving girlfriend out of the obituary, attempting to "get his hands on the money" before she did, sending invitations to a memorial only to his upper-crust friends (not even family, and certainly not the girlfriend), and the big one being that he bought his house from his now-deceased father 10 years ago for $100,000, paid $40,000 of it, then stopped paying years ago. He had signed a quit claim deed with his father, leaving no legal action available to collect the money owed to him. Seems to me like any inheritance he feels entitled to has already been taken, and then some.
The level of hatred for this barely-human creature among his own family is understandably large.
Sometimes I wish evolution could take effect within a lifetime. I often wonder what our world would look like if we still had to struggle to survive. Oh sure, we struggle, but not much. With technology and medicine at the level they are, and always improving, our own advancements have become an integral part of our evolutionary standing in this world. But there's always a bit of pollution that comes with progress, isn't there?
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