Ken was my mother's sister's husband. Now long gone, in my youth and early adulthood he was a constant presence -- whose chief form of amusement around the holidays was to get belligerently drunk and talk through his hat. He railed against lawyers, politicians, Jews, Catholics, grocery clerks who put the eggs on the bottom of the bag, and various other social groups he had no use for. At his drunkest and most furious, he would say "They ought to be stood up against the wall and shot."
Then it happened. A squirrel got into his birdfeeder and he tried to frighten it off with an air rifle, but he killed it instead and was sick for a week. That was my first inkling that Ken was a paper tiger. How many times had he said the god damned squirrels should be wiped from the face of the earth? And those were squirrels, not people.
Ken was an outspoken racialist as well as a bigot about almost everything else he gave a moment's thought to. This was not all that uncommon in the fifties and early sixties, but it scandalized my deeply humane and sensitive mother and my intellectually superior, enlightened young self. When a few "cullert fellas" came to work in his division at the plant, however, they were suddenly the best of friends. By that time I knew him for the harmless blathering good hearted drunk that he was, but still it was hard to hide my contempt for his mind. Now I wish I had been more tolerant, because I like Uncle Ken in retrospect a good deal more than I like some of the people I've encountered on the internet -- people who know how to profess humane ideals but not how to be charitable or kind or fair to the real human beings they deal with every day.