By Andrea Widburg
Growing up, I religiously read Dear Abby and Dear Ann, enjoying both the wisdom they dispensed and the foibles they exposed. After they died, I stopped reading advice columns. I’m beginning to think, though, that I might better understand America in 2023 if I pick them up again. That’s because of a letter to the Chicago Tribune’s Ask Amy column in which a woman complains that her brother, the cheapskate, failed to send a wedding gift to the woman’s daughter. It’s only when you read why he didn’t send a gift that you get a sense of the immensity of that woman’s (and America’s) problems.
The letter opens with “Angry in Philadelphia” explaining that, at her daughter’s request, Angry explicitly disinvited Dave, Angry’s brother, from the daughter’s wedding. The daughter explained that his attendance “would make her feel unsafe.” At this point, I’m expecting to read a letter about how Dave, when liquored up, attacks party guests with steak knives or assaults women in unisex bathrooms.
How wrong I was. The problem is that Angry’s daughter is “very politically progressive.” Even though the daughter has always had a “good relationship” with Dave, “he is a conservative voter and has supported candidates we all abhor.”
Although Angry professes that “my daughter’s request surprised me,” she immediately accepts her daughter’s marching orders. Angry proudly explains that she “wrote Dave a very nice note” telling him “we would not be comfortable with him at the wedding.” I don’t know about you, but I’m not really sure how you can ever say “nicely” that someone’s very presence makes you uncomfortable. Once you’re saying that, pretty much by definition, you’re not being very nice anymore.
Despite being offended by Dave’s existence and casting him from her sight, Angry’s not a mean person. Instead, she sent him pictures of the wedding, “all in an effort to make him feel like he was not being totally left out.” To Angry’s shocked dismay, “I have not heard from Dave since then.” I feel Angry’s pain. She disavowed and humiliated Dave from a place of moral goodness. In the spirit of every parent punishing a naughty child, what she did hurt her more than it did him.
But Dave’s rude silence after being honorably and morally chastised isn’t Angry’s problem. The problem is that Dave is a cheapskate:
Another problem is that Dave has not sent my daughter and son-in-law a wedding gift.
In the past, Dave has given family members wedding checks in excess of $1,000.
She says she was counting on receiving the same type of gift.
[snip]
How can I get my brother to recognize and change his petty behavior?
Please don’t tell me that I’m the one who started this by not inviting my brother to the wedding. After all, he’s a grown man, while my daughter is young and just starting out.
Have you ever read a more perfect distillation of American leftism? You get up on your high moral horse and tell someone that he is a disgraceful human being with whom nobody should associate. But then, good leftist that you are, you add, “Give me your money for the benefit of ideas and people you find repugnant.” And if the pariah from whom you demand money refuses, rather than examining your position, you castigate the person as petty and cheap.
Put in more political terms, on the one hand, you see the Democrat establishment that controls all of our institutions and views ordinary Americans as “deplorables,” “racists,” “transphobes,” and bitter clingers. And on the other hand, you see the mass of American voters who are forced, quite literally at IRS gunpoint, to turn over their money to those who hate them and their values.
Dear Amy responded credibly to Angry’s letter. After first taking some swipes at the tacky behavior Angry and her daughter showed in exercising their prerogative to exclude someone from a wedding, Amy tackles the real sin:
[I]t’s your second “problem” which I believe will enter the Bridezilla Hall of Infamy.
In short: Brides who are too afraid of family members to invite them to a family wedding don’t then get the pleasure of receiving their money.
You seem almost as afraid of your daughter as she is of your brother, but I hope you’ll find a way to courageously tell her that the Bank of Uncle Dave is closed, at least to your branch of the family.
So far, your silent brother is the only family member who is behaving appropriately. He’s steering clear, which is exactly what you have asked him to do.
Again, the same could be said to America’s leftist establishment. You despise and fear ordinary Americans, so you should not “get the pleasure of receiving their money.” Your behavior is inappropriate, to say the least, and tremendously damaging to the American family.