Why I feel sympathy for Conservatives, not hatred
Letter #33
Hey Dad,
I wanted to respond to 4 different things you said in your last letter, but I ended up writing 1,400 words on just one of them. In the spirit of keeping this brief, I’ll just focus on that today. I think you’ll like it.
In your last letter, you said, “Now the problem is both sides want to look at the other side as evil or immoral and all that is going to do is divide us more.”
Let me tell you a story.
I came back home to Bel Air, Maryland after a 4-month road trip in 2016 and started coaching wrestling at my old high school. It was a great experience, and it reminded me just how great people like Coach Reddish and Coach Michaels are—and all teachers, really.
Anyway, I remember being on a bus with one of my old coaches from junior league, who was a man I loved and respected a lot as a kid. Anyway, at one point he made a completely unnecessary joke about gay people in front of a bunch of teenage boys. It wasn’t super obscene, but it also wasn’t harmless either.
During the bus ride I started wondering a few things:
Was my coach making jokes like this when I was a kid?
I don’t remember, but then again I was just 11-12 when I was being coached by him. A lot of that stuff probably flew over my head.
If so, what effect does this have on the boys?
The behavior of the men in our lives shows us, as boys, how to behave. So if we see somebody making a joke about a particular group of people, we’ll think it’s okay and emulate that behavior.
On that bus ride I became suddenly aware of the “hidden” messages I may have received as a kid, and started questioning damn near everything.
One time I remember being in a car with another coach of mine. He saw a black man walk out of a Wal-Mart and went off on a racist tirade, calling him the N word multiple times. He didn’t say anything to the man, but he said it to us in the car.
Looking back it’s so confusing to me because these men—these coaches—were like family to me. I know they had beautiful, generous parts of their soul that they never failed to show me. But there was also some clear prejudice they had—and that’s putting it lightly.
Some people on the Left might call these men every “ist” in the book, and that’s fine, but I’ll choose to call them something else instead: ignorant. I think they’re just ignorant.
If they actually knew that you could have a wonderful friendship with a gay man, or a black man, then they might’ve changed their behavior. It’s even harder when we realize that their fathers/authority figures probably made the same jokes, and modeled that behavior, too.
I have more sympathy for right-leaning folks because I grew up with Conservatives. They were my coaches, and family, and even teachers. I know that their bark is worse than their bite, and I can separate the good from the bad.
I can see the human behind the belief.
I've heard family members—not you or Mom, so don’t worry—tell me the most ridiculous conspiracy theories known to man. Like, stuff that can be debunked with a single Google Search. I’ve heard them tell it to me with all the seriousness of a heart attack.
I hear Conservatives going nuts about the craziness of trans men in women’s sports—which by the way, I think is a problem—then in the next breath talk about how immigrants are eating their cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio.
It’s like, yes, I understand that Liberals can jump off the deep end sometimes, but Conservatives have just as much experience in the pool, too.
I don’t have any hatred for Conservatives, though, because I don’t blame them for what they believe—I blame the media, and their family, and their community for giving them these wild beliefs. I kind of have sympathy for them. I see a group of people who are so damn scared of “others,” whether that’s trans people, gay people, black people, or immigrants from other countries. I see Conservatives as absolutely racked with fear, and that makes me feel bad for them.
Many of them think all of Mexico is a warzone, or something, and that there’s large pedophilia rings run by global elites. Yes, some parts of Mexico are dangerous, and yes, there’s definitely child trafficking going on, but it’s not anywhere near as bad as they think.
Again: I. Feel. Bad. For. Them.
Now, me feeling bad for Conservatives doesn’t mean I see them as babies or something. I think there’s lots of things Conservatives get right, actually, so let’s get that clear.
But a lot of their fear is self-inflicted, and they could be losing out on wonderful friendships with a diverse range of people or enriching experiences in other countries because of that fear.
There’s a quote from a movie called The Lost City of Z that I really love, “So much of life is a mystery, my boy. We know so little of this world. But you and I have made a journey that other men cannot even imagine. And this has given understanding to our hearts.”
The main character says this to his son after being captured by a local tribe in the Amazon during the early 1900’s.
The quote is so true. In 2018 I traveled to a remote village in the Mountain Province of the Philippines. It took us 24 hours via van to get there through winding mountain roads, which made me incredibly dizzy. We then had to climb up a staircase carved into the mountain for an hour before reaching a misty village in the clouds. I stopped every 10 minutes to rest on the stairs while watching local women balancing large baskets on their heads “lap” me.
It was nuts. They had pigs and chickens roaming around, and kids fetched their family’s water from a local waterfall. I slept on a bed made of a thin piece of plywood, shivering in the beautiful night. In the distance the moon illuminated large mountains, and I felt so far away from civilization.
You know, you live these experiences and realize that the world is so much bigger than you ever imagined. You think back to your old Coach in Junior League making ignorant remarks, and realize that his life is just as “foreign” to these villagers as their life would be to him.
Such different worlds. You couldn’t imagine it until you’ve been there. That’s why I give grace to people. It’s hard to imagine another person’s life until you see it with your own eyes. It’s hard to know the extent of someone’s suffering until you see it up close.
People have reasons for believing what they believe. The more I travel, the more I realize that the wrong conclusion can be drawn for the right reasons, and that two “opposing” views can be right at the same time.
Maybe, just maybe, progress doesn’t look like shaming someone into submission. Maybe it looks like small, gradual steps encouraged by patience and respect towards a middle ground that nobody believes is attainable.
Dad, I don’t expect to make a Liberal out of you. I don’t really want to, either. I just want you to give this side a little more of a chance. I want to break the outrageous image of the Left being this out-of-touch, “woke,” corrupt side who runs underground sex trafficking rings.
There’s a lot of good people on this side who want to legitimately help those in need.
I don’t think this country needs all the Conservatives to “flip” Liberal. We just need a little more understanding. I look at it as a game of dominos in reverse, where the first domino is the biggest one, and knocking that over is a gargantuan undertaking. The dominos don’t represent flipping your political affiliation, but actually giving people on the other side some legitimate empathy. I find when we give empathy, we’re more likely to receive it. Maybe, therefore, the real first step isn’t to change anyone else’s mind, but to first change your own. To open yourself up to empathy. Then, maybe, you’ll find it way easier to make progress with the other side.
Tom, again - you and I are more alike than I realize. My father is very conservative, and I am what he would call a "lib". I love these letters because they are very much like many of the conversations I imagine having with my dad...I say imagine because I am often afraid to broach these subjects with Dad as we might disagree so much that it causes a problem in our extremely amazing relationship.
That said, let me tell you a little story. When my mother was in college in the early 1960s, she traveled from Minneapolis MN to Tuskegee AL to teach. All her friends were black. At the height of the civil rights movement, she was in the thick of it, a privileged white college student getting kicked out of restaurants and called not-nice names because she was with her black friends.
Fast forward 30 years, and I chose the most liberal of liberal arts colleges I could find. I joined the Black Student Union. My first serious boyfriend was a black man. My part time job was as a program assistant for an after school program serving low income minority elementary school students. When I got my first teaching job, I advised the Gay/Straight Alliance. Years later, I studied African shamanism with a man from an indigenous tribe in Burkina Faso.
My father never understood any of these choices of mine. But he let me be me and live my life the way I wanted to live my life and have the experiences I wanted to have even though he didn't understand them.
My dad still chooses to vote Republican, and listen to conservative pundits, and believe some of the wacky conspiracy theories. And I let him live his life, the way he wants to live, and have the experiences he wants to have even though I don't understand them.
And occasionally, we disagree. Like the time he told my mother, after the Sandy Hook school shooting tragedy, that the teachers should be armed. At the time, I was a teacher for juvenile delinquents, working more with parole officers than parents. My mom gave Dad the silent treatment for several weeks after that comment, until I sat him down and explained to him that if I were armed as a teacher, I would be dead because my kids who were bigger, stronger, and street-smarter than me would take my gun in a fit of rage and turn it on me before they knew what their hormones were doing to them.
I'll admit, I am ignorant to many of the conservative beliefs as much as my dad is ignorant to many of the liberal beliefs. Yet, we can have a loving relationship by believing in love.
"It’s hard to imagine another person’s life until you see it with your own eyes."
This line reminded me of a recent podcast guest I'm going to interview, she wrote her memoir called, "The Dirt Road." She shares about her upbringing in a farm in South Brazil where she lived in a small two room shack with her parents and 10 siblings. They didn't have beds to sleep in, electricity, or running water. They depended on the rain to shower. And unless we listen to peoples stories and learn where they came from, we have no idea what they've been through to get to where they are today.