Nobody needs advice from me today
Last week in my extended family group chat, one of my uncles texted a link to a podcast he cryptically described as, "a good panel discussion of what just happened."
In 2018 another close family member who has no direct ties to the military, or sports, or any prior record of flamboyant patriotism, began posting to Facebook relentlessly in reaction to Colin Kaepernick's peaceful act of protest when he took a knee during the national anthem. Suddenly every time I opened up the 'book she had some new diatribe about guns and the flag and the sanctity of astroturf during our country's funeral dirge. There'd just been a huge exposé elucidating Zuckerberg's direct ties to Russia and I was already on my way out, but the real nail in the coffin was the physical reaction I experienced in dreadful anticipation of being greeted with this family member's vitriol that I very much didn't want to engage with, but which would invariably send me into a days-long intrusive thought spiral wherein I'd mentally draft comments, or envision pointedly crafted posts of my own that would counter hers without addressing her directly, knowing she'd see and understand my passive aggressive intent. My vitals went off the charts, I could feel my pulse trying to punch through my skull. I hate this, I'm too old for this, I understand human nature better than this. I resolved to spend as long as it took (roughly two months, while binging The Good Place) to go all the way back to 2009 and un-heart every heart, delete every comment, every post, every vacation and party photo album, screenshotting my best quips and snaps for posterity, until there was nothing. I set the permanent account deletion process in motion, and then I was free.
Until the group chat. You see, I am an Android user and I will never relent in this act of cultural technological defiance. My penance for subversion is that once added to a group of chatting iPhones, I cannot remove myself. Please don't suggest muting the thread, you know I did that but still saw when there were 38 new messages and you know I couldn't not open the goddamn thing. Instead, my tactic for the last couple years has been mostly disengagement with occasional happy birthday wishes.
My folks and I have our own separate chat that we often retreat to when we need to vent about whatever the extended family is on about, and scream that we're never the ones sending an incendiary blog post or podcast episode and why don't we feel free to do that!? So when, in the middle of a busy workday right after the election, the family chat began lighting up about this podcast that I saw was hosted by Bari Weiss, it triggered my old Facebook physiological response, except there was no practical escape.
Bari and I are bizarro versions of each other, two geriatric millennial brunette Jewish lesbians. As a TERF she's committed to reductive binary thinking, so by her logic I'm good and she's evil. I've been aware of her exploits since we were in college in the early aughts when she made a name for herself by campaigning to get Arab professors fired at Columbia. If you only vaguely know who she is and assume she's probably good because of the general demographic boxes she ticks, here's all you need to know: she is a self-serving billionaire-backed faux "independent thinker" who brilliantly uses her image to launder right wing propaganda and ideology to the unwitting and/or uncritical center left. You know what, just read this and then be done with it.
But not with me! I'm just getting started!
When someone in my immediate orbit references Bari, or any of her ilk, it's a demonstration of how insidious and pervasive those unchecked influences are in society, media, and civic life, which is why it makes me spin out. I'd love to imagine that these awful characters are ultimately still siloed in niche corners of the internet, but my little family group chat is proof that they aren't, and that they have in fact taken precedence over legacy media for a broad swath of people. The fam has articulated as much - proudly by the way - sending the chat a Rogan episode and crowing about how it's so much better than MSM interviews because he lets the conversation flow for three hours and there's virtually no editing and fact checking. They are saying that this is good.
So I'm at work and the texts are vibrating my left buttcheek every few minutes, and I'm fuming and vacillating wildly between whether I should commit to my usual silent background act, or finally haul off and boldly reply with my own articles and podcasts and trusted sources, but I'm restrained by my unfortunate understanding of human nature and psychology. It's such a buzzkill. The members of my family who most frequently contribute political content to the chat are impervious, immovable. Oh but if they just read this Rebecca Traister profile of RFK Jr. they'll GET IT!! No bish they will not. Wait but if they read Sarah Kendzior's newsletters they'll get on board with your worldview because she exposes corruption everywhere in government which includes Democrats! No ding dong they aren't impressed cause she's not on Real Time with Bill Maher.
Here's the theory of democracy: to a popularly elected government we willingly relinquish some necessary freedoms and pay taxes, in exchange for which we have our fundamental needs met. The critical failure of that equation is at the heart of America's steady rightward shift. As a country we have more than enough resources to meet everyone's basic needs, our government simply decides to expend the vast majority of those resources on the military. And then when our war machine creates international crises sending immigrants and refugees to us for care, it's devastatingly easy for electeds and candidates to capitalize upon and weaponize Americans' fears about an uncertain, unstable future by pointing to foreign human beings receiving help from our government with our money that they themselves aren't getting enough of to feel safe. When you meet people's basic needs, they are far less fearful and angry and far more inclined toward generosity because they are fundamentally OK. Too bad nobody in charge asked me!
This man who was the Cool Uncle my whole life until shifting into Perpetually Aggrieved Old Guy in the last 10-15 years did not consider that anyone on the group chat might not yet/ever be game for a panel discussion about this particular election outcome that he described as "civil with a range of viewpoints." The most generous interpretation I choose to grant him is that he doesn't know Bari's villain origin story and is effectively duped by her demeanor and demographics, and so he figured sharing her podcast would be well-received by those of us in the family who are queer, or Jewish, or women, or millennials, or some combo of those things, and also would signal to us that he definitely didn't vote for trump. Great, thanks. Unfortunately all it did was send me and my parents into apoplexy because Cool-->Aggrieved Uncle's brain represents everything that allowed "what just happened" to happen; from the leveling of the news media landscape owned by a few billionaires, to the deterioration of critical analysis and media literacy, to the reduction of whole people to their individual demographic points.
In 2016 I might have replied with a pedantic essay-length text about why the mere mention of Bari Weiss raises my blood pressure, but now with many years of therapy under my belt I'm drawing the connection between getting what you want from people on a global scale by meeting their needs, to getting what you want from people by meeting their needs interpersonally. What did I need from my family? Certainly not substantive engagement about Bari fucking Weiss!! I needed them to consider me enough to steer clear of politics with the understanding that where some of them have landed is a place that's deeply hurtful and impactful and scary. So after running a text draft past my folks and Wendy and allowing them to edit it down a skosh, I sent this: "I'd like to politely ask you all to start a group chat without me for political commentary please and thank you🥰 I'm happily here for family/garden/animals/life stuff."
Phone tenuously back in my pants pocket, I worked for a couple hours before having a chance to look again, at which point there was something about planting garlic, a video of snow falling, and a photo of a king size Mounds bar, and I absolutely laughed my head off and replied, "hahahahaha I'm loving this," because I was! And I wanted to reward them for hearing me and giving me what I asked for. Essentially, I met their needs (being seen as empathetic, loving people who don't actually want to upset their niece) by meeting my own first, in the form of vulnerably expressing a boundary and giving them a chance to respect it, and by extension, me.
The pandemic exacerbated some preexisting rifts with my aunts and uncles and created new ones that have only deepened with time and distance, leaving us currently in a state where we don't share an understanding of reality and therefore are not going to change each other's minds with an article, or podcast, or even open discussion. For potentially mind-changing dialogue in extremely polarized, entrenched times to be fruitful, there needs to be as close a relationship as possible so you can build a shared reality from the emotional connection.
I hope what I did with that text was get us connecting as caring human beings again, which is an ongoing project obviously, but at this point I think it's our only hope for survival in whatever's coming around the corner next year. Apparently Matt Gaetz is going to be AG, do we know whatever happened to that fully adult man he said was his adopted son??
I'm here for you, about big things and trivial things.
Love, Caroline
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