First World Problems and Trump Era Conversations

My Red Hat Society chapter did their annual thrift shop crawl this week, an event where they carpool to a sting of secondhand stores with a break in the middle for lunch. I’ve been on the go so much lately that I am burning out so I just met the group for lunch at a Mediterranean grill. The service was so slow I think I grew an inch long chin hair while waiting for my chicken shawarma. (I’m quite sure it wasn’t there when I left the house.) And if I’m being entirely honest here, I’m not fond of carpooling with other drivers my age and older. Once in a carpool, the driver was running on fumes---that point where your dashboard says you only have one mile to find a gas station. I’m too old for preventable stress, I get enough of the other kind. Another time the woman driving joked that her family wanted her to stop driving and I could see their point. Still another time the carpool driver hit a cement pillar in a parking garage. Car size is an issue with carpooling too. I recently learned I can’t fit a walker in my Chev Trax unless I put the back seat down. One problem with that: The back seat won’t go down without pulling the driver’s seat too far forward for me to get in and drive.

My problems are so first world, middle class that I feel guilty writing about them, but it’s my life and I can’t write about someone else’s who may be living with incurable diseases, violence in the streets, famines, water shortages, in refugee camps, touched by natural disasters, etc., etc. I can empathize and some might say my empathy runs too deep and that’s why it seems hollow to me when we wear our colored ribbons of support and solidarity, hold candlelight vigils, maybe donate some money then we go about our middle class lives believing we did all that we could, effectively pushing our caring thoughts aside until something else happens that primes the pump and spills our empathy all over the place, muddying up our comfortable lives again. These days, we are getting fewer and shorter periods in between those pressure-cooker-blew-its-top moments around the world. And now we have the pressure cooker sitting on the stove in Washington D.C. 

Sitting with some friends recently the Trump tweet criticizing the mayor of London was brought up and one lady was quick to announce that she is firmly behind the president and all he wants to do and she saw nothing wrong with his tweet. Shocked by that, I made a joke about looking for devil’s horns on the top of her head because, I said, “I thought all Trump supporters had them.” She laughed as I knew she would, but it didn’t lessen the tension in the air as another woman made an anti-Trump remark. Since I was the one who brought up the tweet---I honestly thought the five of us were all democrats---I felt it was my responsibility to avert a heated conversation. I took out my imaginary pen and notebook and announced that we should make a list of topics we shouldn’t talk about. “Shall we put politics at the top?” I asked and several others at the table quickly agreed. “How about religion and money?” I joked, the three Victorian no-no topics of conversations in mixed company. The Victorians meant ‘mixed’ as in men and women but in this decade, in this country mixed company is quickly getting redefined as politically mixed. 

I’m beginning to wonder if politely avoiding these kinds of conversations among friends and family isn’t a mistake. Maybe by not talking it out with people we otherwise like and respect aren’t we encouraging the polarization that is driving our country off the cliff? It’s easy to visualize devil’s horns on no-name strangers but not so easy when we know and like someone. How can we ever understand where each other is coming from if we don’t listen to one another? I was brought up to find a way to lessen tensions that come up, not encourage them, so I’m a fish out of water to do anything different than what I described above. But as the British statesman, John Morley, once said, “You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.” So maybe people like me who try to avert or avoid potential confrontations are just as guilty of intolerance as the people who shout others down into submission. We each get the same results: We are silencing the voices of people who don’t have a carbon copy view of our own. The danger in that is, of course, we are eroding a fundamental building block of democracy, of civilized societies---our ability to compromise and build a consensus at all levels of human interaction---as messy, annoying, maddening, exhilarating and wonderful as that process is. ©

“Intolerance is the most socially acceptable form of egotism, 

for it permits us to assume superiority without personally boasting.”  

 Sidney J. Harris