A confessional about living with someone who shares frighteningly opposite views.
I used to believe, and still do to an extent, that where there is passion there is something good.
Engagement and will of belief are good, as opposed to non-autonomy. With Brexit, I was old enough to vote. And admittedly, I got a buzz from seeing the country so divided in opinion because there was this sense of passion that I hadn’t previously felt within my home nation.
But in the home, it is ugly.
A sickness that creeps into political discourse with my Gen X-er/Boomer ‘housemate’. It is no longer passion in such conversations or productive enthusiasm in opinion, it is a frank divide in the judgment of one another. When I am confronted with their obtrusive view on vaccination, for example, I get sad. As much as there is always a generational and characteristic divide between us, there is now an irrefutable sadness. A disappointment of character by feeling let down by the other person as they have just – unbeknownst to them – set fire to the remaining bridge of connection.
And I definitely hold accountable this age of ignorance and polarisation that is the political monkey born from social media. It’s the idea in ‘The Social Dilemma’ that the system is confused, that parallel to the sick dystopia of fake news and rising conspiracy theories against scientific knowledge there is a utopia. I can feel high and mighty and self-assured in my palace of political opinion but so can the other person, at the price of being blatantly ignorant to the other person’s feelings and unselfish motivations for holding such views.
I have enough faith in the knowledge that there are stronger forces than the intelligence of biased social media. And that will have to work. You don’t come home for this disconnect. You do the journey to return to what is comfortable and familiar, what is unchallenging and allows for you to switch your brain off.
Increasingly, what’s left to be greeted at the dinner table with is a new-found, fractured respect of opinion.
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