Don’t Choose Between Family and Your Beliefs
How to have peaceful, productive political conversations around the holiday table.
Be a powerful advocate for causes you care about while strengthening ties to those you love.
A recent Facebook post asked, if you won the lottery, would you hire a housekeeper or a personal chef? I pondered this for far too long — debating the relative merits of a healthier diet or a cleaner home — before alighting on the obvious answer: How about a housekeeper who also cooked?
I’ll never win the lottery, but this silly (privileged) example illustrates our tendency to get stuck in false dilemmas. We think we must choose between two opposing paths, when in reality a third path can give us everything we want.
It’s especially true in politics where the two-party voting system often forces a choice between Democrats and Republicans. Unfortunately, that infects everything we think and do: Our view of the entire political sphere becomes polarized, we lose sight of nuances, and see everything as a battlefield between US and THEM.
This obsessive, binary view of politics doesn’t just ruin our politics; it also changes how we see others, damaging relationships with people we love…
