Post election we still have to live with each other

Not long ago, I drove to Colorado and Wyoming to visit family members I hadn’t seen in a few years. It was mostly a social visit, although I’ve been working on the family history and genealogy and wanted to gather more information. 

I figured politics might come up. We may share genes, but we don’t share political beliefs. Still, I was curious about what they were thinking and why.

My cousins and I are pretty different people. I was the first on both sides to go to college. Some cousins are high school dropouts, and others graduated from high school. They’ve all done well because they’re smart, they work hard, and they’re good humored and outgoing.

Two days into my visit I had a small health scare. Cousin Randy called his brother Dean, who had been an EMT and knew what to do. Dean took my pulse and looked at my eyes and asked me questions. Yes, I knew where I was. Yes, I knew what day it was. They watched me carefully, and Dean chatted reassuringly. When my equilibrium returned they got me up off the floor and walked me to the bathroom. 

At that point, I didn’t care who they were voting for.

Besides the gene pool, we are bound together by the lives of our mothers, the two youngest of five sisters. They were the last ones living at home when my grandfather shot himself on the front porch in 1934. Their mother was 15; mine was 12. Our families have struggled with the fallout from that tragedy without really understanding it. One purpose of the trip was to share information from my family research to help explain our mothers’ behavior and mental state over the years so we could all understand that a suicide isn’t just an isolated event – it radiates pain and trauma for generations.

So elections will come and go. These relationships and our shared histories are more important than our political differences.

As I write this, it’s a couple of days ahead of Election Day. Whichever way this election goes, we still have to live with each other. That’s the thing I’m really worried about.

We know we’re polarized. We hear about relationships shattered over political beliefs. It’s all personal, and maybe some of those relationships were problematic for other reasons. I made a decision that I am not going to banish a friend or relative from my life over politics.

That’s because we still need each other, we need to talk to each other, and it’s easier to talk to people we know.

Bonnie Kristian, an editor at Christianity Today, recently wrote that polarization won’t just go away, but that’s not cause for despair. Our differences matter, but they’re not all that matters, she writes, “and they do not determine how we treat each other.”

How we treat each other. The political dialogue has been brutal, but we don’t have to talk this way to each other. 

On Halloween hundreds of people come through the neighborhood. Our neighbors were welcoming to them. The kids were polite, thanked us and wished us a Happy Halloween. It was a welcome little vacation from politics and a reminder that kindness is a word away. 

We have many opportunities to interact with each other in positive ways. And as we interact, there will be opportunities for serious conversations, not as political adversaries but as people shaped by life experience. 

Tania Israel, author and psychology professor, has said liberals and conservatives “tend to view (each) other as being more extreme than they actually are.” She proposes more listening, less trying to convince, and a dose of intellectual humility. Do this in person, she says, not on the internet.

Campaigns like those we’ve just endured diminish everyone’s humanity. We need to reclaim our humanity, conversation by conversation.