Deprogram your relatives this Thanksgiving

Her short article:

Some people (like my friend Tom Nichols) think that you should spend your Thanksgiving playing nice, pretending that your cousin doesn’t follow QAnon and that your uncle doesn’t believe the election was stolen and also that the Cyber Ninjas are a bunch of cucks for not uncovering voter fraud. Tom believes that Thanksgiving is a time for harmony and niceties and gratitude. I love Tom, but he’s completely wrong.

Spending a holiday sitting around, pretending your crazy relatives aren’t crazy, is one of America’s time-honored traditions. In normal times, you could be the dog in the house-fire meme declaring, “This is fine” while taking a sip of doggy coffee, but we are not in normal times.

Last Thanksgiving, many of us didn’t see our families, because the pandemic was raging. Now, 773,000 dead Americans later, we have vaccines and boosters. And while the unvaccinated are still dying at a pretty rapid clip, we are finally able to more safely get together with our parents and grandparents and weird cousins and uncles.

This is your chance to deprogram them. Facebook knows its algorithm radicalizes users. This is your chance to tell your aunt that maybe the news she gets from it isn’t all that reliable. And that maybe the MAGA news network is not giving her unbiased news, either.

Especially when it comes to vaccines, family members can actually win each other’s hearts and minds. A professor who has studied coronavirus-vaccine promotion at North Carolina State University, Stacy Wood, told The Washington Post that “the effort is worthwhile … A lot of people are convinced over time from small bits of information that trickle in.” According to a Time/Harris poll, 59 percent of people got vaccinated after a friend or family member did. You could literally save your creepy uncle’s life.

If you actually can lead by example when it comes to vaccines, what about the other stuff?

In May, The New York Times cited a poll in which “15 percent of Americans [said] they think that the levers of power are controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles.” I’m no statistician—in fact I’m barely able to add and subtract; I got a D in tenth-grade math—but to me that says there’s a decent chance someone at your Thanksgiving table will be QAnon-curious or believe the Big Lie. Should you let this person rant and rave about how there were voting “irregularities” even though there weren’t irregularities? If they’re keeping up with current events through Facebook and Fox News, they’re in such an information silo that they might never hear the truth of what really happened during the 2020 election. (For the record: Nothing happened; it was a completely normal election where Joe Biden won by almost the same margin that Donald Trump won in 2016.)

You might be the only person your uncle talks to all year who could explain to him that the Cyber Ninjas themselves found zero evidence of voter fraud. You might be the only person in the world who can sit down with your anti-vax cousin and explain to her that the vaccine won’t make her infertile and that Alex Berenson is a fraud.

You may also be the one person who unreservedly loves Thanksgiving, but let’s be honest, for most of us a five-hour meal with relatives you see once a year is no one’s idea of a great time. Have you ever thought, This is the gauzy Hallmark-movie fantasy I’ve always longed for?

I’ve done 43 Thanksgivings, and the best one was probably in 1997, when I was 19 and getting sober at Hazelden in Center City, Minnesota. I’m here to tell you Thanksgiving is terrible, and if you at least spend the time trying to deprogram your niece, you won’t be bored or depressed (though you might be enraged that Fox News or Infowars has convinced her Trump can “save America” from Joe Biden’s radical agenda of giving people hearing aids and free pre-K).

Maybe it won’t work. Maybe you’ll leave Thanksgiving dinner as divided as you were when you sat down at the table five hours and 4,000 calories ago. Or maybe you’ll plant the seed, sow just a little doubt about whatever Tucker Carlson is saying now. Maybe you’ll even change a heart or a mind. Maybe you’ll bring the temperature down just a tiny bit. Or maybe you’ll need to report a relative to the FBI! Either way, it’s something to do besides just eat.

 

The other viewpoint. No drama thxg

https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/peacefield/619b32150b037b002073403e/the-no-drama-thanksgiving/


It’s almost Thanksgiving, so I’m not going to go on this week about our unserious politics and how unprepared we are for the dangers of the new year ahead. We’re somehow depressed about a recovering economy and the arrival of an infrastructure bill that will improve our lives, while ignoring that the Russians are massing troops on the border with Ukraine, a situation that could lead us to the brink of World War III.

Well, okay. I did just go on about it a bit. But enough of that. I want to talk instead about gratitude, and about how to have a more thankful and drama-free Thanksgiving. (And then I’ll share some of my mail and your comments, as I promise to do regularly in this newsletter.)

Thanksgiving is when Americans are supposed to think deeply on gratitude, but too often what we think of as gratitude is more like relief or satisfaction. We recount all the stuff we love having and the things we’re glad didn’t happen to us (or things we’re glad are over), but in reality, that’s little more than a pharisaical breast-beating about how glad we are to be us and not some other poor b*stard. Then it’s off to Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Yes, there are the good and wise among us who know how to be grateful. But Americans tend to corrode holidays and turn them into noisy and commercial festivals devoid of their original meaning. (Exhibit A: “President’s Day,” which used to be two days to remember the towering greatness of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and now is just a shopping day commemorating everyone, apparently, from Warren Harding to Donald Trump.)

So how can we find some meaning in this one day that should be devoted to national unity without drama and without stupid arguments with our family? I’m not sure I can help you with your family, but perhaps we can rethink our sense of gratitude.

A good start would be to read President Lincoln’s first Thanksgiving proclamation. It is not a list of achievements and wonders; rather, it is suffused with intense humility and a fair amount of existential dread. Lincoln talked about the prospering of the United States in both agriculture and industry, but then he reminded us that these were blessings from a benevolent—and angry—Creator, not a trophy for being awesome:

No human counsel hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the most high God, who while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people … And I recommend to them that, while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged …​

It says a lot about modern America that no president of the United States would dare address the American people in such terms today. All that God talk would offend millions of us; millions more would have to go look up penitence and be shocked at what it means. The whole thing would provoke a collective temper tantrum: Daddy isn’t supposed to tell us to be humble and sorry. He’s supposed to give us the car keys and shut up.

This is where a bit of classical stoicism can be a help. If you’ve never read William Irvine’s best seller A Guide to the Good Life, I can’t recommend it enough. The short version is that there was a time, not that long ago even in America, when we learned from the ancient Romans and found joy and gratitude not in materially “living our best lives” but in the daily challenge of living as the best people we can be regardless of our circumstances.

By all means, be thankful for your family, for your friends, for the food on your table, for a warm home. In the space of only 10 years, I went from broke and sick and divorced to comfortable and healthy and married, and I’m grateful every day. But the ancients would remind you that everything is temporary. Your time here is limited, they would tell you, and you should be humbled by that realization. You will never be happy if you keep raising the bar for gratitude and then insist on being a miserable person when the world, as it always will, inevitably disappoints you.

Put another way: If your gratitude is dependent upon your current state of happiness, or is constantly phrased with a but somewhere in there—“I’m grateful to live in America, but …”—then you’re already missing the point.

Now, I will grant you that the ancients took this a tad far. The philosopher Epictetus counseled us to remember, for example, that as we kiss our beloved child, we should consider the possibility that the child will die tomorrow, which in turn makes us appreciate the moment all the more.

Yeah, no. I have no idea how tough I really am, but I know I’m not that tough.

But understanding our inescapable mortality and dismissing the general pettiness of our complaints about daily life—and most days, I am the king of petty complaints—is the way back to finding and keeping a sense of gratitude and peace.

At the very least, it’s a way to avoid drama. On Thanksgiving, resolve for a day not to engage with anything as temporary as the freakish politics of our current age. This is especially difficult, as Irvine warns us, when “the world is full of politicians who tell us that if we are not happy it isn’t our fault,” and that “our unhappiness is caused by something the government did to us or is failing to do for us.”

Let that go. Instead of trying to straighten out your uncle about rigged voting machines, be cheerful and ask Uncle Ragey if he’d like more pie. Rather than arguing with your insufferable cousin who’s home from college about why Thanksgiving is a racist and genocidal festival, ask Cousin Akshully to help with the dishes and then tell her a story about her family or ask her what dorm food is like these days.

And then, with Lincolnian stoicism, remember that they are your family, that the day could be a lot worse, and that you will miss them when they are gone—because one day they will be gone, and so will you, and no one will care what any of you thought about the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict.

Be grateful not just on Thanksgiving but in every circumstance, as much as possible. For people as blessed as Americans, you’d think this would be easier to do. Unfortunately, however, humility and gratitude have not been part of the American skill set for decades. And yet, maybe this year, we can forgo the rote declarations about thankfulness and try to emulate the kind of gratitude—and quiet fortitude—President Lincoln once asked of us.