How do I talk to my adult grandchildren who have different political views and dismiss mine as fuzzy thinking because I'm old?
They are conservative and believe they “pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.” They didn't. They had parents and family and helped with university. They are nice people and kind to me, but I can't talk to them about the issues of the day.
They had failures, but nothing that made them realize how difficult life could be. I want to tell them that they can't always control life and that I don't agree with them. What can I say?
Eleanor says: You said you wanted to tell them you disagree, so I join you in seeing this as a starting point, although many people you talk to about this may consciously say, “Don't try” or “Keep politics out of the dinner table.” You had a strategic question; given you want to tell them you don't agree, what can you say?
While reading your letter, I kept thinking about the aphorisms that teachers sometimes use: “I can explain it to you, but I cannot understand it for you.”
Our politics depend on our understanding of what certain things are.. It’s not whether we know they happen, but whether we understand what they are. like test them; being seriously ill, poor, scared, facing changes we cannot control, at war, without money, working manually, on a long strike, ambitious, safe, well-fed, well-fed. We spend a lot of time analyzing politics in terms of beliefs – What — but I think one of our political disagreements that gets neglected is whether we know what these things feel like.
It sounds like this is part of what you think they don't understand; What is this like really being down or out, or both. And the problem with this kind of knowledge is that you can't get it from someone telling you. Having someone describe these things to you is not the same as actually experiencing them yourself. “I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.”
As far as we know, this is not necessarily an obstacle to mutual respect. What we don't know. But maybe that's the problem: they don't know how much knowledge they lack.
Another thing that teachers sometimes do is that you need to experience your own incompetence in order to be motivated to correct it. You must be unable to solve a math problem; unable to construct a box that will keep the egg safe. You will have to face the fact that you cannot give an answer. Is there anything you can do to show them the depth of what they don't know? any question that they cannot answer any answer, not even wrong? Could you show more of “what it's like” – the knowledge that you have and they don't? Tell them what you saw, what people you know saw? I thought about this during the recent HIV/AIDS celebrations: how many of us know what it is? like go to 40 funerals in a year, or how to convince the hospital to let you in if same-sex partners are not allowed? What might be the equivalent of “what does it look like” for the vulnerabilities you want them to understand?
At a minimum, these explanations Why Seeing things the way you do can help them view your experiences as evidence rather than as vague thinking.
I don’t want to interact with each other like generational stereotypes: “You children haven’t seen anything,” “You old people live in memory.” And you cannot convey to them your experience or the experience of others. But you can help them stop viewing their lives as complete political theories.
