…..what troubled him the most was the fact that all the other members of his prohibitively large family treated said family as a monolith and refused to acknowledge the obvious fact that even in a pristine barrel of apples a fair number of those apples—certainly a handful, at least—will turn rotten over a period of time, and when you’re talking about this period of time stretching back some sixty plus years, the assumption becomes even more glaringly true. To believe otherwise is something which goes beyond naiveté; a belief like that tugs credulity beyond all rational limits and is utterly preposterous. To think that a person—ANY person—could survive on a highly volatile planet for sixty, seventy, or eighty years and that no changes would affect them over that long interval of time, including negative changes in certain instances, is simply not realistic. And then to deny the existence of such pejorative changes purely for the sake of naked family unity is not just being unrealistic; that type of overly deferential behavior is insulting and downright contemptuous. I strenuously reject such lazy rationalizing and encourage others of sound character to do the same…..
Fred's Soapbox 