LW, you wrote: "Getting to 50 years is no small feat in our world today. But I also want her to understand that it is important to me to not be expected to spend time with my brother."

After re-reading your letter, I got the sense that you lean very heavily towards not going. So don't go. One other reader already noted that your own children need your emotional stability more than your mother needs this anniversary party. Your mother, who is probably in her 70s now, is trying to create some sort of a legacy. You've partially given in to it, by admitting that "getting to 50 years is no small feat." Maybe the majority of married couples do not make it to their 50th anniversary, but they also don't let their children get sexually abused by another sibling. This whole "oh we're such a great couple because we're celebrating our 50th anniversary" is utter bullshit. Your parents failed you. I know it's painful to acknowledge, but it's true.

I'm wondering how you feel as you are reading these letters. It must be very emotional for you. Consider this: dozens of people have shared their own thoughts and stories with you expressing sympathy and varying degrees of outrage. But your own mother is insensitive to your traumatic experience. Your own mother, who is supposed to love you unconditionally, cannot express the sympathy and understanding that strangers have expressed. So you must accept that your mother does not love you the way a mother should. If you can accept this, you will realize you owe absolutely nothing to your mother, you have no obligation to attend her stupid party or feel guilty about not going.

Berlet98- I'm both amused and horrified that at this point people are still so ignorant so as to believe that the prisoners at GITMO are actually treated well. Prisoners at GITMO are systematically tortured and debased, and guards are told that anything goes.

List of torture documents released to the ACLU:

http://www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/torturefoia.html

noah- I think you must be referring to the International Criminal Court at the Hague, whose jurisdiction, not surprisingly, the US doesn't recognize:

http://www.iccnow.org/?mod=usaicc

Firstly, thanks, jhudson2, for your excellent response to berlet98.

As for you, berlet98, you said that I did not counter your claim that detainees at GITMO received "medical treatment, the freedom to perform their religious observances five times daily, and the three square meals they get daily." I deemed that unnecessary as it seemed to me quite obvious to anyone that this claim would be totally falsified by the fact that these detainees were exposed to a program of systematic torture. If one has such a low regard for people so as to permit brutal torture to be enacted on them, then one certainly would not bother to give them the superior treatment you claim they receive.

Consider the case of Saudi detainee al-Qahtani:

Qahtani had been subjected to a hundred and sixty days of isolation in a pen perpetually flooded with artificial light. He was interrogated on forty-eight of fifty-four days, for eighteen to twenty hours at a stretch. He had been stripped naked; straddled by taunting female guards, in an exercise called “invasion of space by a female”; forced to wear women’s underwear on his head, and to put on a bra; threatened by dogs; placed on a leash; and told that his mother was a whore. By December, Qahtani had been subjected to a phony kidnapping, deprived of heat, given large quantities of intravenous liquids without access to a toilet, and deprived of sleep for three days.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/02/27/060227fa_fact?currentPage=all

Obviously al-Qahtani did not receive medical treatment, the right to religious observances and three square meals a day.

And before you go bashing the ACLU, without even entertaining the question of whether or not it is a legitimate and respectable institution, if you actually used the link I provided then you would see that it was to a page of documents that the CIA released to ACLU. Thus those were CIA documents, not ACLU documents.

Oh and btw, I am a woman.

Most news networks are losing viewers even as population is growing, so they are catering to smaller and smaller groups of people.

Oh yes, finding out who the Salon trolls are. An important rite of passage for all Salon readers. Welcome.

I understand that spending my time yammering on about a guy I can't even vote for is even more of a waste of time

NO! The American election is about damage control for Canadians. We can't afford to let Harper have another Republican president to follow around. On the grander scheme of things, it's also damage control for the rest of the world.