How to Talk to Your Cousins About Politics

So I came up with this idea- "How to talk to your cousins about politics" and i thought, "Oh that's a good title!"

But...yeah.

I rarely talk to my cousins about politics. On either side of the family.

I wish I could.

With relatives spread out from northern Alberta to the B.C. coast to the Maritimes to the U.S., and with the older generation all gone, I rarely see my cousins face to face. But we are connected through social media and I love seeing that this little cousin is an amazing skier, this one won a figure skating medal, this one just got a driver's licence and this one has a new horse and the other one is a fantastic baker and this bunch ran an impressive cross-country race and this one just moved to another province. It keeps me connected with people I almost never see. It keeps my ties with our shared history alive.

But as far as politics goes? That is more complicated.

There are a handful that I see eye-to-eye with. Ironically or perhaps not, the ones closest to me in age who were also closest to me growing up are the ones I tend to agree with the most. But then there are the others.

I know some of them stopped following me on Facebook after an election campaign a few years ago. If they didn't ditch me then, they for sure did after the following election.  Or maybe I stopped following them. Let's just say things were seen that cannot be unseen. Things were said that cannot be taken back. Like the cousin who threatened to go to a neighbour's house and burn an offending lawn sign to the ground. How can I not help but wonder-had we lived in the same town- would he have come to my house and burned the same sign on my lawn?

So- even if we didn't stop following each other, for the most part we have an unstated agreement that we won't talk about these differences of opinion. We'll just go on pretending they don't exist. Which is hard for me as someone who cares about facts and truth and whose whole work life has been dedicated to teaching.

So when one cousin said, "What does our elected leader know, he was just a teacher?" That's a tough one to ignore. My grandmother was a teacher and so were aunts, great aunts, uncles, other cousins, my husband, my son-in-law...and me. I know teachers are highly organized, hardworking, compassionate, and intelligent. They have worked with people of all ages and in all walks of life. How can anyone say a teacher couldn't have the skills to lead? 

And there's the rub. That grandmother. Those and aunts and uncles. That DNA that makes me loathe to cut off my own flesh and blood. No matter what I believe to be true.

No, I don't agree with my cousins on a lot of things. But we are still family. I care about my relatives even when I don't agree with them. The relationship I have with my cousins, no matter how infrequently I see them, matters to me. 

Is there a way to talk to them, and to other people with whom I disagree without it causing a permanent rift in our connection? Is there a way to share what I know to be true? 

I listened to a musician a little while ago who said that in today's society we do not have a place where the young and the old come together. He asked "How can we think about the future if we don't know the past and how do we talk about the past without an eye to the future?" The wise elders in my family are gone. I'm now part of the oldest generation in my family but I'm not sure what wisdom I have to share except to say that my cousins and I have a connection to a shared past and- as Canadians and global citizens- a shared future. How can we move forward if we can't talk about what we believe? How do we work together to map out the best possible future for our descendants to share?  

I don't talk to my cousins about politics but I hope that conversation can begin. That we can come to a place where we can talk about our truths with love and understanding. Because it is only at the intersection of love and truth that there will be hope.