Watching my (just turned) 28-year-old daughter go through this election has really been something.  She’s had quite a rude shock. Nearly everyone in her peer group believed the hype about Trump taking away their “reproductive rights.” Fortunately, my girl found the whole thing too hysterical by half and starting looking into things.  She described the propaganda as  “extremely POWERFUL.” (And gave me permission to use her texts and write about her experience.)

She’s married, with one child and another on the way, and has never particularly cared about politics, being, as she was, extremely and understandably consumed with finishing school and starting her two careers. (She has a good career job related to her college major but also a really thriving side hustle which she may jump into with both feet now that Trump’s back in the White House.).

Anyway, the point is, we raised her to think for herself. We did not indoctrinate her at all. We merely asked common sense questions of her and her sisters as they were growing up which made them think and reason. For instance, when they were doing middle school homework on the Second Amendment, I asked them, “If you knew, to a certainty, that everyone around you was lawfully armed, would you be more or less likely to misbehave?” (An obvious corollary to “an armed society is a polite society.”) Their answers were what you’d expect of anyone with reasoning skills and a functioning survival instinct. “Less likely to misbehave.” Duh.  They did their reasoning on their own and reached their own conclusions. We didn’t need to talk much more about the meaning and intent of the Second Amendment after that.  We did, a bit, to round out Original Intent, but once they’d arrived at the answer to the “misbehave” question, everything flowed quite seamlessly and logically.  And once you have logic operating in harmony with one’s survival instinct, the matter is pretty well settled in stone.  They are all, to this day, ardent believers in Second Amendment rights. Thank God.

The series of texts which inspired this article are of a piece that’s been going for weeks now, but this morning’s started this way: “I LOVE that Hamas called an immediate end to the war because of the election results but all these liberals who have been crying about Palestine all this time are SILENT about it lol.”  She went on:  “They are also SILENT about the fact that there’s a female as a chief of staff for the first time.”

She mentions a very dear friend here. “(Name withheld) said the other day Trump and his followers divide the crap outta the country. But I only see one side telling the other to do everything from simply unfriending them to wishing ectopic pregnancies upon them. In my feed lately, I have seen LGBTQ people coming to our side and being welcomed with open arms and as hurt as we are that the other side is spewing such hatred.”

It hurts my heart to see her having to navigate all this from her peers, but here we are.  For my part, I’ve tried to simply affirm her reasoning without rancor because she’s upset enough, I don’t want to increase her stress (since she is, after all, pregnant with our second grandchild!).

She’s already identified one to two among them she thinks might be persuadable to which she may “come out” and then try to gently nudge away from the crazy but she’s reticent to try at all and honestly, who could blame her?

We can only hope. 

Image: AT via Magic Studio