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I got a political forward from my cousin last week, the first of its kind this election cycle. It was surprising to me because the last time we talked about the candidates, I was shocked by her switch to someone I never dreamed she'd support. It was just coincidentally, also, to a candidate more in line with my own personal views, something that had never happened before.
During the 2004 election cycle, e-mail forwards poured into my inbox, and a number of them were from her. I tried to ignore them for the most part, knowing that they detailed things I didn't support and asked me to switch to a point of view that I never would. That trend seems to have largely dwindled this time around- I don't get the number of forwards I used to, which is probably because so much communication has gone mobile, and it's hard to text a political screed (at least one of more than 20 words or so.)
Last week's e-mail indicated that we were once again on opposite sides of the aisle. Curious about what had caused the shift, I read this one all the way through. Blood pressure rising. Speaking aloud and progressively louder at the computer screen.
The message was full of inaccuracies. It contained ideas presented as facts that I knew were wrong, because my professional life now has me immersed in fact-finding resources about just about anything, so if I don't know something off the top of my head (which is most things, trust me) I know where to find them out.
What to do? To engage or not to engage? It didn't take long to conclude that I could only go halfway, enough to acknowledge, state a tiny percentage of my truth of the matter and move on.
This election has gone on for so long. I had a conversation this weekend with a friend who also covers the news, and we realized that we were covering primary debates when we first started our graduate programs, and we'll graduate in less than three months.Barack Obama said in some speech somewhere in the past month or so (see, this is how much I'm capable of retaining at this point) that babies not yet born when this all kicked off were walking now, and that alone made me want to lie down on the floor.
"I"m tired," my friend said. And this is a serious political junkie.
I love my family members without respect to political views which is a good thing because I disagree with more of them than I agree with, it seems. My father and I go back and forth all the time on issues, and since the Clinton loss he's moved from sending me snarky forwards about that to stuff from a friend of his - a man of the same age - who he's reconnected with and who appears to be helping him see that it's not all 30-something women who feel the way I do about certain issues. I walked into the computer room last week to find him writing a long e-mail about the election to his own first cousin. I have no idea what it said and that's okay, but the point is, the dialogue is normal in my family, across generations.
I just can't handle it when it gets unpleasant. I think it's important that we know and hear what others think, especially the people closest to us. I genuinely want to know why people feel the way they do, why they think one individual over the other will improve our country and ostensibly our lives, especially when it's a person I look at and want to run the other way.
So I took a deep breath and hit "reply." I wrote to my cousin and told her that I didnt have the energy or the time left for a debate, more distinctly this time because of the work I'm doing that requires me to stick to hte surface, pretty much, in a situation as I am that doesn't really allow for the full disclosure of my every (constant, deeply-felt) feeling about what I'm seeing unfold before me. I also told her that I disagreed with what she had sent and in fact could show her to some very reliable resources that showed what she had sent along to be untrue (and really, this one wasn't subjective: this involved actual numbers that have been
