We Zoom most Tuesday afternoons with my brother and his wife, something we started during Covid and which has become a regular thing. We get caught up on the goings-on of the intervening week, and we always close with sharing what each household is prepping for supper. Often mundane stuff.
Every now and then, tensions rise because someone lets slip something that can be taken as political commentary. My wife and I are in one camp, my brother and his wife are in another. There is an intentional effort to avoid such discussions because they bear no fruit and become tension-filled very quickly.
This was close to happening toward the end of our time yesterday, and it really bothered me, for some reason. No voices were raised, but it became fairly obvious that the session was hastened to its completion, finished until next week.
And I began thinking about this dynamic.
It was good that we didn’t keep talking– for one thing, they had plans for supper they needed to tend to– but the dis-ease left me pondering the massive divide that exists between family members. Our situation is a microcosm, indicative of so many households across the country. Feelings and opinions are kept at bay so as to keep the peace, but everyone realizes that we’re only one stinging comment away from verbal fisticuffs.
It all feels dishonest, in a way, though I’m convinced that silence and avoidance are the best way to go, since the likelihood of a breakthrough, without a moderator present, or a significant change of heart, is low. There’d be a lot of shooting from the hip, red faces, raised voices and blood pressure, both sides armed to the teeth with purported facts and opinions, along with quips and quotes from their favorite news sources.
And then it would be necessary to calm down, back away from those heightened emotions and find a way to return to some sense of equilibrium and peace, for the sake of the relationships.
I think it’s the tenacity with which we hold onto our opinions, as if we’re always right and the others are always wrong. Yet the possibility of sharing some middle ground, besides feeling remote most of the time, also seems somehow unsatisfying, less a compromise and more a surrender. Until that changes, we’ll be dealing with at least two camps.
And I will go on believing that Donald Trump and Fox News have been intentionally poisoning the water and pushing a cockamamie agenda that many are still buying. Lock, stock, and barrel.
3 Cents' 