Difficult conversations

Yesterday at a conference of grassroots progressive activists, I was listening to a panel of data experts discuss the preliminary analysis of who voted in the 2018 midterm elections. One of the guys presented an interesting data slice. He reported that (in a traditionally conservative area of California) among “independents” (meaning mostly conservatives who reject party affiliation), if they lived in a household with a Democratic voter, there were a significant number who voted for the Democratic Congressional candidate. There was less of a noticeable difference in the voting choices of “independents” who lived with a Republican. I turned to my friend and said, wow, there must have been some hellish family dynamics going on in 2017 and 2018! And she agreed. (Obviously this is of interest to me, personally, since I wrote my most widely shared essay about something along these lines.)

But it makes me think about another dynamic that I can’t stop wondering about. A while back I re-tweeted a thread from a person who posited that a lot of this whole fascist shitshow we are living through is the result of thousands of Americans unable or unwilling to confront their family members and loved ones about their support for this regime, for their support of white supremacy, and for their support of misogyny and anti-LGBTQ policies (and basically their lack of support for other people’s civil rights in general, including the intertwined problems of income inequality and the destruction of the natural world). I got a lot of twitter agreement, but two women turned with anger on me, saying I had no idea what I was talking about and basically that I was the real asshole for holding them in any way responsible for not having difficult, unfun conversations with the people in their families or who they had history with. One woman was a stranger to me, and said that she’s tried over and over again, and she doesn’t want to spend any more of her life in this fruitless manner. That she’s busy helping people who are being harmed by all this, etc. I looked at her timeline, and they are all the tweets of someone who looks like she has a lot of time on her hands. Whatever, next. The other person is someone I used to know, who I think dislikes me because I once used the wrong word for trans people and because I once didn’t show strong enough concern about a racism issue that incensed her. (Also, you know, she probably just thinks I’m a bitch. Join the club.) This woman seemed to want to blame me for suggesting that we all bear some level of responsibility for the dismantling of democracy and human rights that we are seeing every day, when as far as I can tell, she is no longer my friend because I didn’t take enough responsibility or try hard enough in instances that mattered to her. She implied it was a waste of time and energy to try to talk others but that she was instead focusing on making herself a better person and on self care. Okey dokey. (I think that’s kind of called “being an adult.”)

And this is what I’m talking about. What I often see when I observe or get caught in primal-feeling fights between people who are essentially “on the same side” is that we (me included) want to punish the people we have access to for sins of other people, who actually are much more responsible for what is making us miserable. Because if your racist aunt is like talking to a brick wall, but you love her or feel bound to her, it’s a lot easier to yell at this uppity bitch on Twitter or Facebook than the old lady who made you cookies while she talked about how much she hates “Black Lives Matter” and gender neutral bathrooms.

Have those difficult conversations, I say. Have them with the right people, the wrong people. Have them with all the people. It’s the only way we might get out of this eternal recurrence of white supremacy and misogyny and all the other Neanderthal bullshit we should be over as a society in 2019.