Don't Talk About Politics

The older I get and the more I examine my family the more I see the things that are unsaid, the ways we never communicated, and the ways we won’t communicate. I was grown in an environment of not talking about big important things. Not to say that my childhood was dishonest, there was just a lot that my family didn’t talk about. When things are not talked about they are allowed to fester and grow cancerous in the dark. As a queer person who grew up in a conservative family in an even more conservative area I speak from experience. The years of secret keeping I did from my parents, and even from myself in regards to my sexuality, have left scars that will never fully heal, both on my soul and my relationship with my family. When I zoom out and look at the broader culture and climate in the United States right now I see echoes of that same sort of damage, the same wounds created by silence.          

My dad is one of those people who doesn’t like to talk about politics. He’s also one of those people who would frequently say that all politicians are corrupt and that nothing changes. I have rarely called him out on it, in fact for many years I believed it. The time I clearly remember pushing back on the latter argument with him I said that I didn’t think that all politicians were corrupt, and that some people did get into it for good reasons. The problem is that the system itself is so corrupt that even people with the best of intentions are going to get spattered with metaphorical mud. The reasons for how and why the system is corrupt are vast, nuanced, and debatable, and not talking about them is part of the problem.

The 2016 presidential election changed a lot. The ramifications of that election on the country will be felt for decades given how it swung the Supreme Court. Personally it was such a shock to my system that it forced a massive wakeup. I began to pay much closer attention than I ever had before. In the eight years between my arrival at voting age and that election I kept in touch with politics in the way that many Americans have and do; I voted in the presidential elections, often leaving lots of down ballot offices blank, and barely even acknowledged that midterms existed. I didn’t know much about the machinations of the two houses of Congress or who my local officials were until then. I was rudely pulled out of that stupor that so many people are in regarding politics. That awakening forced me to examine those statements of my dad’s, and try to get to the bottom of why so many people believe them.

This may sound like it’s going to be a critique of the current parties in our country and the chaos that has consuming them the past several years, but that would require much more examination and space than I am willing to give right now. My thoughts are more about the people the members of those parties are supposed to be representing; the people like my father. In the run-up to the 2022 midterms I saw something on social media that said something to the effect of “oh you don’t care about politics? Your boss does, your landlord does, the companies you buy things from do.” The point being that there are many people who have a vested interest in the majority of people not paying attention to politics. The idea of not talking about politics is part of the problem with our politics.

An old feminist statement is that the personal is political. There are decisions made every day that affect all of us on some level. For me personally the Supreme Court has ruled on dozens of cases in just the last decade that directly affect me, just as a queer person, not to mention all the rulings they’ve made that affect everybody. Many of these decisions were for the better, but with the recent installation of the conservative supermajority, that has changed, and we are seeing a growing number of alarming decisions made by that court, rolling back years of precedent and reshaping the way our government works, and who it works for. All of that is a direct result of politics. The stakes of these decisions are incredibly high, and not talking about them is difficult, if only because it allows any fears we have about them to fester.  When I discuss such situations with my mother, she will often say things like “I don’t think you have to worry, I think it will be okay.” She doesn’t realize the same thing that every husband in every 90s sitcom didn’t realize; I don’t need her to fix the problem, I just need her to acknowledge my fear of it. In many instances like these, there will be nothing we can do on an individual level about these gigantic decisions made by those in power. But to not talk about them is dangerous. It is a silence that can quickly turn deadly, a silence that is designed to keep power concentrated with a few people.

This was the sort of toxic silence I existed in during my late teens, when I was coming to terms with my sexuality, while living in fear of how my parents would react to this truth being voiced. That teenaged hesitation to talk about my sexuality and my father’s hesitation to talk about politics are incredibly similar. They are both born out of larger forces that neither of us were aware of, forces that attempt to maintain the status quo, regardless of how harmful that could be. For me it was a desire to not rock the boat and expose myself as other, because as a queer person I have been taught that to be other makes me wrong. For people like my father it’s the systems behind everything I’ve talked about so far, which say that nothing will change, so we shouldn’t even bother talking about them, let alone try to change them. Two different, but related processes, with the same goal; to ensure power stays concentrated in the old guard of rich, white, heterosexual masculinity the country was founded on.

The personal is political; but in some instances people have the incredible advantage to not have to think about some things others do. The silence actually benefits them in some ways, because it can keep them unaware of how those around them, including those they care about, could be suffering. That is a huge component of how my father can actually not talk about politics, and the difference is illustrated perfectly in his two sons. My straight younger brother doesn’t have to think about where he can move based on discrimination laws and his relationship like I do. That is my brother’s advantage as a straight man, one I do not share. But these issues are layered and affect so many areas of identity. Yes my brother has that advantage over me, but as white me we both have the advantage of not having to worry about being the victim of policing policies in the same way that my many people of color do. That is an issue that directly affects one of the most important people in my life, and I would not have nearly the awareness of it I do if I had not spent years living my life next to hers and seen what she deals with as a black woman. If we don’t talk to the people in our lives about the political things and how they affect us, how are we supposed to know what each other is going through?

It is easy to make the argument that this is all by design. It doesn’t take much looking to see that there are forces that are dedicated to not only keeping the status quo of power concentrated with a few, but to wrenching even more of it away from the majority of people in this country. The people behind things like Project 2025 benefit immensely from the silence of the rest of us. They benefit from this system that has hollowed out the middle class, leaving so many people doing whatever they can to get by – so much so that they are unable to pay attention to politics, not out of lack of interest, but lack of time and energy. It’s difficult to get into the issues of judicial reform and corruption if you’re worried about paying rent or how much groceries are this week. Meanwhile the powerful use that lack of attention, that silence, to shore up their own wealth and power.

If we cannot bring these matters into the light of day by talking about them and the political issues behind them, they are never going to be solved. Not talking about politics is exactly what led to the environment that allowed the results of the 2016 elections to happen. Not talking about politics meant that we were not discussing the very real issues that impacted so many of us. If we had talked and discussed and fought, and most importantly, listened, we may have been able to stem the flow of the anger and vitriol that has gripped so many of us. Through the very nature of sharing and debating we would be able to come together on so many issues while also strengthening other beliefs by testing them against a different viewpoint. If more of us talked about politics, they might become more civil, even with our current polarization.

When we say that we don’t like to talk about politics we are actually dismissing the problems that affect so many people. Politics affects everything. It affected my right to marry, still affects my rights to live and work in many places while being who I am. It impacts my ability to safely walk down a street, and the actions I can take if someone takes issue with my very existence. Politics affects our drinking water. Not talking about politics allows us to pretend that incidents like the water crisis in Flint, Michigan don’t exist because they didn’t happen to us or anyone we know. Not talking about politics allows huge corporations to creep around us and work the system in their favor. By not talking about politics we not only stay silent, we actually silence ourselves by giving over so much power to faceless entities that will work in their own interests instead of ours.

We don’t want to talk about politics because it exposes places where there might be disagreement, and that makes us uncomfortable. We want to stay ignorant because we’ve been sold a lie that it is bliss. There are so many forces in society that want us to believe this, because if we stay ignorant they can claim our power. And while our intense polarization has led to disagreements about who and what these entities are I think most people would agree that some nefarious forces are out there. Maybe if we talked to each other about many things, but politics specifically, we would actually be able to come to some agreements on those sources of our frustrations, and in doing that, do something about them. If we could embrace a bit of potential discomfort in the short term by examining those disagreements, we might actually be able to come up with long term solutions. We could do so much for each other in we could realize that saying “I don’t like to talk about politics” is escapism, and that some of us, many of us, more of us than we realize, cannot afford it.

I wrote and planned to post this piece before election day 2024. I got it to a place where it felt ready, then I thought I should wait until afterward, when I was hopeful we’d be in a world where it was still relevant, but things would be moving in a positive direction. The outcome I had hoped for did not come to pass. But the ideas here are perhaps even more relevant now.

I hope that I am wrong, but I fear that the next four years will see a lot of people hurt by decisions made by those in power. I am afraid of what is going to come, what it means for the future of us as a country. And that’s why I think talking about these things is more important than ever. It can certainly be difficult, and infuriating (as the “what did the Democrats do wrong” discussions have already proven), but if we could talk about it openly, talking with each other instead of at or over each other, I think some real healing can be done. That said, I confess that I am not very hopeful of that. But I will try my best to facilitate such discussions where I think they can be productive.

There will be more to come as I continue to think and write my way through this. I’m not sure of much at the moment, but I am sure that I will continue to do that, as I always have. Time will march forward, and however reluctant I might be at the time, so will I.