Questioning

A few days ago I wrote about Christmas with my family.  I rushed the ending of it in order to get it posted on Christmas Eve, thinking that nobody would want to read about Christmas at any point past Boxing Day, but since then I’ve had a lot more on the same topic to mull over.  To be honest, it’s not really about Christmas so much as it is about having to spend an extended amount of time with people whose views are so different to my own, so I’m going to keep going and you can read it now or in the future, during whichever season takes your fancy. It’s a timeless issue, after all.

I’ve written just there about my relatives having “different” views to me, but I think it’s more complicated than that.  There are overlaps between what I and they want from a fair society, but exactly what that looks like, and the causes of the unfairness in the world, are perhaps where we differ.  I’ve made a list of things that my parents seem to believe, based on conversations that we have had over the course of the last couple of years.

• That the Royal family are good for the country;
• A belief in trickle-down economics and a low-tax society – that the world’s problems can be solved through acts of philanthropy from those who have been allowed to accrue large amounts of money, like Bill Gates;
• The Conservative Party as the party of fiscal responsibility – that when in power they did a good job in difficult circumstances;
• The Covid lockdown “Partygate” scandals were overblown and pursued for political rather than legal reasons;
• The Labour party, in its current form, as being radically left-wing / foolish / untrustworthy;
• The raising of National Insurance contributions for employers is anti-growth and will lead to recession – and that this is a bigger issue for industry than Brexit;
• The NHS is inefficient due to excessive bureaucracy, as opposed to insufficient funding;
• The pursuit of cleaner forms of energy is putting us at a disadvantage against other nations who are not pursuing environmental policies – that we do so due to pressure from “eco-warriors” (implication that climate change is not an existential threat);
• Union leaders being self-serving and unnecessarily disruptive;
• That issues like slavery have been over-simplified; that concepts like reparations are wrong as all the people involved in slavery and segregation are long dead;
• JK Rowling has been unfairly condemned for speaking sense on trans issues;
• Today’s university students are overly protected from difficult topics and that political correctness has taken the place of clear-sighted critical thinking.

That’s a longer list than I expected when I started to type them out.  I wonder which of these beliefs arise from their natural conservative tendencies, and which are ideas that which come straight from the pages of the Mail and the Telegraph.  Some, such as the last two, are clearly talking points from the right-wing press; others are beliefs I know they’ve held for a long time.  A lot of them are probably long-held views that have been bolstered, or at the very least left unchallenged, by the media that my parents have chosen to expose themselves to.

There was only one real flashpoint over the course of the Christmas break, and it ended with me stepping back, apologising for snapping and then avoiding bringing up political topics again.  On the other hand, my parents didn’t try to avoid these topics after that; they carried on putting their views forward, leaving me to bite my tongue in order to keep the peace.  There are two possibilities here; firstly, that they wanted to continue showing me why they were “right”; or, alternatively, that they didn’t see what they were saying as being controversial.  I think the latter explanation is probably the more likely; I don’t think they wanted to argue any more than I did.  I genuinely think that their view of the world has been so distorted that what to me are extreme talking points are to them quite ordinary.  On the flip side, when they discussed the Labour party, they actually used the words “extremists” to describe them – at which point one has to assume that the Overton window has not only shifted but has been smashed up and refitted with distorting lenses and mirrors and kaleidoscopes and smeared with unicorn diarrhoea.

I’m starting to feel now that it’s a battle I’m not going to win.  I should probably accept that.  I should stress that I don’t think my parents are bad people: they’ve had their own struggles and setbacks, and their intentions towards me have always been good.  Despite my moaning here and elsewhere on this blog, I still see myself as having had a good start in life.  They’re happy in their own way, complaining about the world and all the madness they perceive in it, and I’m not sure it’s worth a rift or even a row to try to change their minds.  I’m sad, though, that this is what hangs over the time I have left with them.  To some extent, this is probably the people that they always were; they’ve always been royalist Conservative Party voters, and I think they’re still seeing me as their little boy who just hasn’t grown up enough to see things their way.  On the other hand, I can’t help but be mad at the newspapers that foster their views, that have allowed them to pass complacently through life without ever feeling the need to question their outlooks.  Perhaps my anger is at the fact that I don’t feel able to talk to them about the way it felt to grow up gay with parents that saw the world through such a lens, and who – unintentionally, I’m sure – caused me to see myself as inferior, even less deserving of happiness than others.

So, although I might be capitulating on that particular front, I’ve no intention of surrendering altogether, and given that at the time of writing it’s now less than 30 hours until 2025 – a year when it feels like we’re going to need to put up a struggle – I’d like to resolve to be kinder to myself, to try to be more accepting of who I am and then do what I can to help the LGBTQ+ kids in my school to do the same.  If I can’t change minds, then at least I can try to bring support and positivity to the people around me.  As I’ve said before, despite all the shittiness, there are surely still reasons to be cheerful.  So let’s do what we can to make this a Happy New Year, ok?