How To Avoid A Civil War In Your Family
By: Robin Hopkins
Tags: Family, Politics, Political Divide, Republican Party, Beyourself

I can’t stop Twitter stalking my sister. I log in and tell myself, “Today I’m not going to do it.” But after a few minutes, I find myself typing her username into the search bar, then combing through her “tweets,” “tweets and media,” and finally her “likes” to see if she’s changed her mind about Trump.

A few years back, I suspected my sister was starting to lean conservative. She works in the mortgage industry, and she was angry that Clinton deregulated. She was angry about the housing crash–that she predicted. “What did you think would happen when banks approve loans that are larger than people can afford?” Then the government stepped in to regulate her company, and her day-to-day job changed. That really pissed her off.

I understood her anger, but later when I began to hear Fox News-like comments slip out, I started to worry. As a lesbian with a wife and two kids, there is a lot at stake for our family when it comes to politics. Republicans often want to abolish our right to marry, prevent us from becoming parents, and take away our protections in the workplace. But, I wasn’t overly worried because my sister was (and is still is) very supportive of me and my family.

So when it came to the 2016 election, I hoped she would see Donald Trump and all his faults, then plug her nose and vote for Hillary when it counted.

I learned that she voted for Trump in an article she wrote and posted sometime after the election. I didn’t find out right away because we’d stopped talking about politics a couple of years before due to a somewhat heated disagreement between her husband and me over the ban on smoking in bars. When she didn’t seem to agree with me, I was shocked that we were, for the first time, approaching life from different points of view.

We both knew then something needed to be done so we didn’t damage our relationship. Our solution was to implement a ban on all political talk. This would allow us to keep our relationship and not end up yelling about gun control after a few cocktails. That way if someone accidentally mentions Ted Cruz, the other person can avert their eyes, pick some lint off their shirt and say, “Oh, hey! I hear we have some real weather coming in over the next few days.”

We put our political chat ban into effect on a visit to my sister’s house, the summer of 2015. Upon arrival, we were greeted by a sign on the front door that her daughter made proclaiming, “This Is A Politics Free Zone!” We all laughed and simultaneously felt our shoulders drop.

It worked. We talked about our messed-up childhood, our kids, and had cocktails while floating in the pool like only two family members pretending there is no such thing as democrats and republicans can.

But Trump’s win changed things for me. Sure, in our day-to-day lives, we continued to text and chat on the phone, but we never talked politics. And as Trump’s presidency dragged on, my ability to pretend that he was still that guy with a comb-over firing people on “The Apprentice” instead of President of the United States could not be maintained. I worried deeply that our political divide was widening, and I began stalking her on Twitter in hopes that I would see her point of view change.

Instead of calming me, every pro-Trump tweet I saw caused the pit in my stomach to grow. And then, just as we were nearing the end of four long years, RBG lost her battle with cancer, Amy Coney Barret was about to be confirmed, and I broke. While walking down the street and talking to my sister on the phone about some nonsense, I blurted out, “We have to talk about this politics thing. I am struggling. You’re so supportive of me and my family, but I’m having a hard time understanding how you can be a part of a party that wants to change laws so that my wife would not be considered our kids’ mom.”

Before I could finish those sentences, I started crying. I didn’t realize all the feelings I’d been holding inside.

She sighed and paused for what felt like forever. Then said, “Aw Robin. I love you, but I want to be thoughtful in my answer to you because I wasn’t expecting this conversation.”

We talked a little bit, each of us gently pushing some of our points into the daylight. Each of us agreeing that both sides bear some responsibility for the state of politics today. And at the end of the call, we committed to setting up a Zoom, with wine, to hear each other out.

I hung up the phone and immediately called my wife to share my hope. Maybe my sister wasn’t lost to the dark side!

Not wanting to lose momentum, I sent an email attempting to schedule our Zoom call. A couple of weeks went by without a response. After another nudge or two, she emailed me back and said, “I’m not ignoring you. Well, maybe I am…”

So today, despite other emails, texts, jokes on the phone, even a Twitter comment or two reminding her about our plan to talk, the meeting is still not scheduled.

On some level I get it. My sister doesn’t love confrontation. Our mother’s yelling and fighting gene skipped her but landed fully in me. Growing up, a discussion between my mom and me was really nothing more than shouting and slamming doors while my sister sat in a corner, rocking, “Why do you two have to yell all the time?”

We would both look at my sister confused and say, “We’re not yelling.”

This conversation has the potential to be hard, uncomfortable, filled with anger or sadness, and a whole host of other feelings I’ve yet to identify. Even I don’t want to have “the talk.” I’m afraid I’ll yell or be stumped by one of her points and then not be able to think of a fact to counter it until hours later in the shower. I’m afraid she’ll tell me that she’s choosing lower taxes and less government over protecting my lovely gay family. Mostly, I’m afraid we’ll both say something we can’t come back from.

Maybe she’s afraid too. But the problem is that left to my own devices, I think the worst. I assume that she can’t justify her choices because she knows they are good for her family, but not for mine.

I don’t want to believe that, but I don’t know what to believe because we haven’t talked.

Here’s the thing. My sister and I are not alone. All over the country, families are fractured. I blame social media. I blame news stations that are no longer news, but rather a camera rolling on a person rambling on about their opinions. I blame the social media bots designed to be divisive. I blame us all for immersing ourselves in our own echo chambers. I recently came across (ok, stalked) a guy I went to high school with who proudly bragged on Facebook that he had purged every liberal from his feed, and now his scrolling experience is glorious.

But who will dissent, intelligently, and politely if we block those that disagree with us?

I force myself to watch both sides of the news channels, I make myself go into the comments on Twitter (and it’s not pretty) to see what the arguments are against my positions because sometimes I have no idea why the other side feels the way they do.

But isn’t that thinking part of the problem too? The fact that I called them “the other side.” As a country, we are in a permanent state of “other side mentality.” I miss the days when politicians routinely reached across the aisle and compromised.

So how do we heal our country and our fractured family relationships now?

I have a theory. I think 20 percent of both parties border on extremism. Compromise is not on the extreme left or extreme right’s agenda. But, that leaves 60 percent of us, clustered around the middle, at varying levels of closeness to the center. Our voices are being drowned out by the fringe. We 60 percenters need to look toward each other for common ground.

We 60 percenters need to acknowledge that we have stopped talking to each other. We’ve stopped listening to people who have different opinions because we no longer have to.

But we have to do better. We have to identify and engage in conversation with people who think differently than we do. We have to vote back in decorum. We have to push our representatives to work with all members of congress, not just those that are on “our” side.

There is a lot that we have to do.

But what can I do as one person? Well, today I can start by giving up my Twitter stalking. Let’s be honest, no good comes from hiding in the shadows and making assumptions. And I can double down on getting my sister to set up that zoom call. I can talk to her and I can listen. I can try to find common ground.

It’s time.