Discussing politics in public: if you start something, be prepared to finish it.

Make sure that if you start a discussion about politics that you’re ready to hear others’ viewpoints on what you’re saying..

Today, while I was sitting down to breakfast with my adoptive mom, Linda, at a coffee shop in Marina, California (near Monterey), two ostensibly hyper-conservative couples who were apparently in their sixties, were at a neighboring table, waxing vocally on various conservative tropes and about “the Greatest Generation” and so on and so forth. Linda, or “Ma,” as I call her, had begun to be dragged into their conversation because of small talk about housing in the local area.

Now, Ma is a Bioethics professor. And she has spent a considerable amount of time as a Vermonter — and has previously been a Bernie Sanders constituent as a resident and homeowner in Burlington, Vermont.

So these folks at the table near us begin shifting to querying her teaching style and they begin talking about how they hope that she teaches her courses from a “balanced” perspective. Balanced, in their case, could only mean one thing: abortion is wrong, women’s bodies aren’t their own, sexual orientation and gender identity are “nurture” and not “nature” issues. We knew what they really meant.

So then they shifted to the topic of the recent presidential debates, and as I recall, I think they were getting onto the issue of climate change and such. It went on for a bit, and I could see that they were pressing Linda to respond to them in a manner that would indicate her agreement with her values. But unbeknownst to them, Linda is a true-blooded progressive. And I am like her daughter in no small part because we share nearly all the same values. I know Ma well, and I knew that she was starting to feel uncomfortable by being pressed over how she operates and what she thinks.

At this point I interjected (but not rudely) with something like, “[…], and that’s why we’re voting for Bernie Sanders in 2016.”

I shut them down in one sentence. They hemmed and hawed for a second, then realized they had nowhere left to take the convo.

This all made me realize that America’s Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation, many (!!) of whom are deeply conservative, can surely dish it but can’t take it. And this made me realize that a dissonance exists in American society between what we’re told about civic discourse and manners. On one hand we’re told that civic discourse is important. On the other hand we are discouraged from discussing politics. How nutty is that? Why should a 60 year old progressive woman like my wonderful mom be made to feel as if she shouldn’t express her true values, based on a paradigm of prudence? We need civic discourse because we need to share ideas. We need to connect. But when we do so I think we should do respectfully, and we should not expect all whom are around us to rubber stamp everything we’re saying as if we’ve got it right.

To me, the issue seems to be particularly ripe today with America’s conservative Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation, who have time on their hands since their retirement age has come. Too many of them believe that their age has afforded them infallible wisdom, too. Look, if someone is set in their ways and wants to become a hateful bigot … if they could collectively rack up all this national debt in America, and if all of their collective apathy and indulgence placed our planet in a situation where the climate is intractably shifting ... if aging and degenerative disease are still issues that they failed to direct adequate resources and attention toward solving and are now poised to wreck our economy … then where’s their right to so vocally influence the direction of where out country is headed? This isn’t a matter of constitutional rights to express oneself, which I fully agree that everyone has in a “civilized” society such as ours. This is a matter of lacking the high ground to so vocally express such destructive opinions by bullying their way into conversation control in public spaces and then using the concept that we should be deferent to our elders as a shield from criticism or pushback.

Here’s my points:

Vocal socio-political discourse among America’s Baby Boomer and Silent Generations is not only for conservatives and Tea Partiers. It saddens me to see that too many progressives of those generations have been repeatedly pressed into submission because they’ve repeatedly been out-yelled by their conservative counterparts. I believe the cliché that it is impolite to discuss politics or religion in public settings is a trope devised to control conscientious people into being quiet.
When someone of a certain age takes it upon themselves to share their political views to a left-leaning mom and daughter, in public, without being prompted, expect some pushback. DON’T expect us to sit there and abide pig-headed tirades for the sake of social decorum.
Anyone who denies that it is fully the prerogative of Generation X and the Millennials to now figure out the direction of our nation — on all fronts — is also wrong, because we need that power. Why? Because it’s now become OUR responsibility to clean up the unprecedented messes our progenitors left us with. A Baby Boomer or the like should no longer expect someone 20–30 years young to hold their tongues under any circumstance, sheerly out of respect for seniority. One generation can’t place another in a horrible economic, social, and environmental fix, and then not expect the following generations to have something to say about it.
All of these lessons apply to Gen X’ers and the Millennials of today as we get older. We must always remember that the decisions we make today have the potential to affect outcomes for generations to come.