We are all family.
That means we are related. We are connected. But we are not the same and we have to remember that is okay.
And that’s going to be hard for some of us on Thursday.
I remember the first time I realized that I could love someone who disagreed with me. My uncle had been a huge figure in my life. I knew he was a good man, and I knew he loved his family fiercely. I knew he was smart and I knew he was engaged in what was happening in the world.
And the summer that I graduated from high school, I realized that our perceptions about those things that were happening could not have been more different.
At first, it shut me down like a burnt-out light bulb. I knew that I was right, with self-righteous 18-year-old certainty. But I never knew my uncle to be wrong.
It wasn’t much later that my grandmother told me who she was voting for in an upcoming election. It didn’t surprise me. But then she said “Don’t tell anyone. They wouldn’t understand.”
My grandmother — the most honest woman I’d ever known — had actually lied to my grandfather about her votes to avoid conflict with someone she loved.
Later, my friends were often confused about my own marriage. I fell in love with my husband, not his politics. It made for sparkling conversation, and some interesting toasts at the wedding.
“I couldn’t be married to someone I didn’t respect,” I’ve been told.
Neither could I.
The difference is that years of a job that demands I listen to both sides and years of sharing my aunt’s peach pie with my uncle have reinforced one simple but all-too-frequently disbelieved truth.
We don’t have to agree with the people we respect.
What is important is that we are honest about it.
It startled my uncle as much as it did me when I stopped letting his opinion flow around me like water and responded with facts and conviction but always with respect. It then became a challenge we both enjoyed, not looking to see the other side lose but hoping to score a point by making an argument powerful enough to cause a concession. I remember the first time I made him bend. I remember the first time he made me think.
On the night I met my husband, we sat in a restaurant eating pie and debating the broad strokes and finer lines of capital punishment and constitutional law until they put up the chairs around us. He proposed four months later.
As we draw closer to Thanksgiving, fast on the heels of yet another contentious election, some people are filled with dread. Some people are prepared to draw boundaries: “Don’t talk about politics with (insert opinionated relative here.)” Some might avoid a family gathering altogether.
We don’t learn anything and we don’t share anything when we stick to the weather, the Steelers and “Who made the stuffing? It’s fantastic!”
We grow more when our ideas and beliefs are challenged. We just have to do it with love and respect.
Family doesn’t have to agree. But a little pie and honest conversation makes for a good Thanksgiving menu.
Lori Flace is the Triburne-Review Community Engagement Editor. You can reach Lori at lfalce@tribweb.com.
