Navigating a Politically Divided Family
I come from a lake house family. By this, I mean that every summer my cousins (and those who I call my cousins, but are not really my cousins) all reconvene for one week at a middle-of-nowhere lake. The week reliably consists of eating a few big pans of lasagna, fighting over card games, and remedying at least one bad sunburn. We do all of this at a lake that is cradled by hills of Ponderosa Pine, Douglas Fir and my favorite – the intoxicatingly sweet-smelling Jeffrey Pines. Growing up, it was heaven on Earth.
I always found it funny how, even after a year apart in different cities and states, we quickly fall back into the same habits and mannerisms, until we morph into a cohesive unit again. Once when I pointed out to my mother how she mirrors her sister’s rounded speaking when they are together, she replied (rather frankly) that it must be their “hick roots”. This was the first moment I truly understood that, while I grew up in Seattle’s liberal bubble, my extended family largely exists outside of this bubble. And it has for generations.
As I have gotten older, my family’s differences have become more apparent to me. As the country has become more polarized, so have we. A once well-regarded rule that we don’t talk about politics at the family reunion has been increasingly broken. If you walk into one house at 5 p.m. you will be met with CNN, but at another you will be met with FOX News. The tension mainly lies between the generation of aunts and uncles who consume this media. They seem to feel a deep sense of anger and disappointment towards those who favor “the other side”. They cannot fathom how we got here, and blame each other’s political choices on lunacy, rather than a political system that was broken to begin with.
My generation of the family does not often fall into these same patterns, but we are affected in a quieter manner, and are more prone to despondency. Many of us are not convinced that the victory of a single presidential candidate will remedy our country’s deeply rooted issues, and so the impacts mainly do not manifest in angry jabs towards “the other side”. This is the world we know, and while it is still a crazy world to live in, we are not stuck in the mindset of trying to return to how things used to be. Instead, we are questioning the habitability of our environment and the security of our rights to family planning, and may feel a sense of mourning for our dreams of certain futures. We are forced to think about how to grow our lives on a bedrock that is unstable and crumbly.
For me, nothing strikes a chord as much as our political disconnect on climate change, particularly because of how I have watched our beloved lake change more and more each year. The lake feels warmer than it used to – aunts and uncles now bask half-submerged in floaties for hours on end, which is not a sight I used to see. Every year, we hope that we won’t experience another layer of smoke and ash sweep over the lake from a nearby wildfire. Almost every year it does. A few years ago was the worst instance yet: a fire burned nearly a million acres of forest in the area, leaving our once-green cradle of pine trees scarred silver. The fire would have almost certainly demolished the peninsula on which our houses lay, if not for fast-acting firefighters who quickly established containment lines at the peninsula’s base.
This past year, as I watched the sky inevitably tarnish with orange-purple smoke, I could not help but feel a sense of bitterness towards some of my family. My own family would ultimately vote for someone that not only denies the realities of climate change, but actively makes policies which contribute to it. I wondered: Do they even care about the future of this place? How do I navigate our polarizing political views when they seem to impact our understanding of reality?
But, of course they do care about the lake. Their experience of the world, like mine, is based on the information they receive about how to deal with life’s difficulties. They experience a very different form of media and a very different reality than I do.
I haven’t come up with a right or wrong way to navigate my politically divided family. All I know is that we just keep doing it, through the discomforts and messiness. We come back to the lake house, year after year. We keep sharing a big pan of lasagna, arguing over the inconsequential things like card games, and slathering aloe on one another’s backs. We still pick up one another’s mannerisms. We continue to give a big hug hello and goodbye.
For better or for worse, family time at the lake has become a space for reflection on how we can all keep coexisting in a politically divided country. Whether or not anyone admits it, it is a space for accepting the nuances of our loving relationships, and reconnecting in small but important ways to those we do not understand.
To those who also live amid a politically divided family: You are not wrong for choosing family togetherness over winning every political argument. You need not feel guilty for hiding parts of yourself at home in order to feel safe (but may you find community outside of the house that allows all parts of your identity to be visible). It is okay to enjoy spending time with those whose beliefs you cannot understand or agree with. Families are what manage to bind us together even when our worldviews do not.