Thanksgiving and politics: they go together like Diet Coke and Mentos.
Rather than bracing yourself for family feuds around the dinner table, wouldn’t the holiday be more tolerable if you just…didn’t show up?
That’s what Andrea Tate is planning to do. Her HuffPost essay "My Husband And His Family Voted For Trump — So I'm Canceling Thanksgiving And Christmas" went viral this month, garnering over a million views within a few days.
She joined KNX News’ daily political show Countdown 2024 to talk about her decision.
Listen here:
“The article really is about like, hey, we can stay together, we can get through this. Let’s not let this blow up our whole family relationship, marriage,” Tate said. “But when you're the only person in a room of, let's say a dozen or more people that have voted for the other candidate, who wants to be around that?”
How do you manage a relationship with someone whose views differ so drastically from your own? Tate said she and her husband came to the decision to avoid talking about politics entirely.
“That's not an easy thing to do, but I don't see any other way around it,” she said. “I'm not going to change my beliefs, and from where I can see, he's not going to change his. So let's move away from that topic.”
But clinical psychologist Dr. Kenneth Barish, author of the book "Bridging Our Political Divide,” told Countdown 2024 that avoiding the topic isn’t the only solution.
“I do think that we can try and approach it a little bit differently,” he said. “If we are going to have a better form of conversation, we have to move away from opinions and we have to wait, move away from actual debates and move instead towards a dialogue.”
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Barish said that rather than trying to convince the other person that you’re right and they’re wrong, it can be more productive to go into the conversation “with an attitude of listening” and try to understand where they’re coming from.
“If we move away from opinions towards the underlying concerns, we're much more likely to find a little bit of common ground,” he said. “I'm not saying that this is an easy solution, but if we can do it even part of the time, we've softened the argument, and that can make a very big difference.”
Listen to the full episode above, and catch new episodes of Countdown 2024 every weekday at 2:30 p.m.
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