Summary
With Donald Trump’s 2024 election win, young Gen Z voters like Kate, Holly, and Rachel are grappling with deepening divides with their Trump-supporting parents.
For many, these conflicts go beyond policy disagreements, touching on core values and morality. Parents once focused on fiscal conservatism have, in some cases, embraced conspiracy theories, creating painful rifts.
Studies suggest political divisions are increasingly seen as moral judgments, fostering a “mega-identity” where political views signify personal decency.
For these young adults, maintaining family connections amidst such ideological fractures has become challenging.
The path of least resistance.
We often walk it without even realizing it.
The drunk uncle. Alcohol is called liquid courage for a reason. Has anyone tried since Reagan to teach him throughout the year he’s got nothing to fear or was he left to stew with only a propaganda channel as company and then only rebuked at Thanksgiving?
In-laws. Nosy relatives are a staple of large family gatherings. They usually don’t really care about your “gay lifestyle”, they just want to nag, nitpick and compare. “Look at me and my kids! We’re all proper and shit! Nyeh nyeh nyeh!” Even if you shut them down on one thing, they just move on to something else. The cunts. But that’s just how some social contracts work.
Parents. The biological urge to reproduce is often times a contest of wills that the urge tends to win. Parents want biological grandchildren. When the possibility of getting one drops to zero, it’s a shock to the system. Does not compute. “Feminine gay man” is a fucking win in the face of that.
You want people to make difficult decisions because they’re the right thing to do, but you don’t care to understand how or why these type of decisions are difficult to them. Because it harms you, it harms others. Well guess what, harm comes in different shapes and forms, often unnoticed and unchallenged.
If you’re unwilling to understand the difficulty in changing who you are, who you’ve been for a large part of your life without a constant impetus to push forward that change, then do you really deserve that type of understanding from others? To clarify further, you’re the impetus. Without you there to push them towards acceptance, who exactly are you expecting to do that for them? Fox news?
It’s hard, very hard, so hard that many just pack up and run. And that’s fine. It’s completely fine. But it ain’t the right thing to do, it’s the left one.
Now you’re just justifying the actions of abusers. Your speculated scenarios are as likely to be accurate as they are to be completely off the mark. Just like your assumption that the people cutting extremists out of their lives never put any effort into changing their beliefs.
The same exact words apply to your own argument. You might as well be saying, “Abusive parents deserve to be in their grandchildrens’ lives because it’s harmful to them to not be allowed to see their grandkids.”
Your problem is that you believe their actions aren’t supposed to be justified. But that’s the wrong approach. “Every action has consequences” is just bullshit on its own. The web of reaction is as old as the universe and us picking which action deserve a certain reaction is nothing more than personal whim.
We’re flawed beings, all of us. I can’t be right for every situation, but neither can you. And the difference between us is that I want to try and treat each individual as an individual. You may see this as excusing an abuser, I see it as fighting against abuse.
I won’t protect everyone and i can’t protect everyone, but just like any other kind of death row decision, it has to be earned. Each degree of punishment has to be fair. The chance for redemption has to be given. Punishment should be for the purpose of rehabilitation. And if we can’t do it at an individual level, how can we expect it to be done for a better society.
Being just is hard work. And if you can’t do it, why expect it of others?