Aren’t You Happy For Us?

Someone I know very well has gone and done a stupid thing.

It’s the latest in a long line of stupid things this person has done, stretching like a sticky taffy of wrongness across the last twenty years, picking up the dirt and lint of consequences.

Now, as a professed libertarian, I generally don’t care about other people’s stupid decisions. Smoke ’em if you got ’em. You know the probable consequences. Gamble your money away–if you can’t afford something else, I guess that’d be your deal.

But this person’s stupid decisions never affect just her. They affect her very ill mother, her very ill children and her (now) very ill husband. But she still, for whatever reason, keeps making these decisions over and over again. And then asking for help when it goes bad.

When the first stupid decision came up 20 years ago, we said what we thought. And were ostracised for years. Now we’ve been gradually trying to make peace and smooth over the openness that fractured the relationship all those decades back. We’ve said nothing about the subsequent stupid decisions, even as we were approached repeatedly to help smooth over the consequences.

Now here we are again. Another stupid decision has been made. And we haven’t said anything. And we’re being asked why we haven’t said anything. And It’s taking everything I have to not come completely uncorked.