At this time of year, we’re bombarded with articles about “How to talk to your family about politics at Thanksgiving” and this year it seems like there have been more than usual. I guess we can chalk that up to it being such a hard fought election.
Most of these articles focus on ways to diffuse tense situations and get along but Helen Ubiñas of the Philadelphia Inquirer has a different suggestion. She wants people to fight with their Trump supporting relatives.
From her column:
This Thanksgiving, don’t play nice with the racist, sexist, misogynist Trump votersIt’s been a little over a week since President-Elect Donald Trump’s victory, and I’m going to ask us to stop doing something that we are hardwired to do, to reject what is arguably the human race’s best trait.Adapt. We shouldn’t.This won’t be easy because we’re good at adapting. It helps us move on. It gives us hope. It has, in the past, even kept us united. No matter what we’ve faced – wars, 9/11, mass shootings, the election of a man who built his campaign on bigotry and fear – we have always found a way to adapt, to find our “new normal.”Even as people protest Trump’s win, I can feel it happening now – the inevitable lean into our instinct to rally, to hope, to bury bigotry under euphemisms, to have faith that no matter how bleak things seem, everything will work out, because well, that’s what we do – we desire nothing more than to get back to normal.A note to my fellow journalists: Do not buy into the normalization. Words matter. They matter now more than ever. It is not alt-right, it is not racially insensitive or racially tinged. It is racism, sexism, misogyny. It’s flat-out bigotry.I get it. There are bills to pay, kids to pick up from school. Birthdays to celebrate, deaths to mourn. Thanksgiving dinners to plan for. Sanity to keep.And so, we adapt by playing nice.Usually playing nice means you’re accommodating someone’s bad behavior, trying not to make bad things worse.That’s exactly what many people are doing since electing a man fundamentally unfit to lead, who was cheered to victory by the KKK and has named a white supremacist as his top adviser.I understand that instinct at the workplace, on the train, at the Thanksgiving table…Actually, scratch that. Playing nice at our dinner tables helped get us here.
Read the rest here.
Here’s my recommendation. Don’t discuss politics at the dinner table at all. And if someone tries to, just play this song really loudly until everyone chills out:
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
The featured image of this post is a screen cap of the photo which accompanies Ms. Ubiñas’ column.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY