I don't "consider a personal quest" to deflate anyone's ego. I don't say anything to anybody. But they pretty soon sense I don't care about the same things they do, if only from the lack of genuine perkiness and interest (I'm a poor actress), and so they pathologize me. I take offense to that. That is my right, you know, since the pathologizing is a damaging behavior.

And since children do not drive Porsches, I fail to see what you are getting at there.

Get yourself a job actually doing something useful or making something concrete, instead of dreaming up ways to enrich yourself through usury payments. If you're this great salt of the earth guy you claim to be, you deserve a job you can actually be proud of.

But in fact, you talk like a lot of other loan officer or used car salesman religious fundie types I know, and they are real assholes; they screw everybody over at the slightest opportunity and then talk about what hard working self-made men they are. I don't know you, but your letter leads me to think this may be your type.

Forget the money grubbing game. Make things with wood, drive nails into the roofs of the houses you've been pushing the paperwork on, get a job in an old age home for a few months. See another side and get a new perspective. Maybe you'll come up with some ideas about what will really fulfil you. Losing everything may be a great opportunity for you. Quit letting the envy and the greed (which you mention several times in your letter, without using those exact words) run your life.

Mr. K doesn't know much about how livestock are sold, but it has little to do with trust. They are weighed down at the sale yard and the price isn't determined until the auction. Then the cheque is mailed out based on the weight and the price per pound bid on the twenty head or what have you. What's trust got to do with it? The semi trailer driver has nothing to do with the transaction, so it's difficult to see why the rancher would negotiate with him.

Actually, rural Texans are deeply mistrustful of anything and anybody not exactly like them. Allie got it exactly right.

And they are successfully changing the world to suit their vision. They have enough money and resources to do that. Those fundamentalist "mission projects" all over the world, funded and often staffed by yokels like these, are conducted without any regard for the destruction to local languages, cultures, etc. which they cause. In fragile, impoversihed areas such as Liberia, Guatemala and Mongolia they have made great inroads, and protestant Evangelical fundamentalism is starting to really shape those places--not for the better I may add. 1 out of every 100 Guatemalan babies is torn from their native country and raised by U.S. fundies. Liberia had a crazed Baptist pastor on a "mission from Jesus" nearly take the last presidential election there. Real missionaries are appalled by these people.

Texas and heartland fundies help their neighbors as long as it doesn't take too much out of them personally, and are very selfish as regards the rest of humans on the planet. I've lived with them my whole life and I don't find them nice at all.

I've met Muslim fundies who have refused to look at me or touch my hand because I'm a woman, and don't believe I have the right to drive, speak in public, or leave the house unaccompanied by my husband, who appear to be very nice, soft-spoken people who love their kids and take pride in their work. Evil isn't a pure essence; it comes as part of some kind of psychological limitation on the part of the practitioners who may have other apparently redeeming qualities, such as folksiness or bringing over a nice casserole. But I'll still call it evil when I see it.

Nice try, Mr. K, but I'm not biting.

Wow. Just wow.

That has to be the most heartbreaking "I remember where I was when JFK got shot" story I have ever heard.

Shudder.....

look just like Nate the Neoconservative in overalls to anyone else?

Surprised nobody has focused on the pot smoking she mentions, which is probably the bigger problem. After all, her kid's father could end up being hauled off to jail for that (whether you think it's right or wrong, he could be). Not to mention, potheads are not the most incredibly productive human beings or aware parents. Her dad smokes pot too, so this is sort of part and parcel of "smoking" to the LW.

Is it all right to leave a smoker? How about, is it all right to leave someone who abuses an illegal drug?

I would also add that by staying with a pothead and smoker, she is increasing by a hundrefold the likelihood that her children will become both potheads and smokers themselves. I think maybe it's time for some lifestyle changes, and that may involve divorce, unfortunately. I'm sorry for all you fearful people who think that relationships are so hard to find that women should just have to put up with whatever. But kids are involved, and it sounds like the LW has grown up in ways hubby hasn't--so that may be the route, I'm sorry to say.