1/ So my cousin texted my husband to inquire about Thanksgiving, wondering if “your intolerant liberal progressive wife is going to be so fragile as to mess up Thanksgiving this year because everything triggers her.” This is MY cousin, not my husband’s cousin. The answer is YES.
2/ In fact, I’d already decided to disinvite - for the first time in decades - that part of the family. We always host Thanksgiving at our house. The past two Thanksgivings were tough.
3/ Right after Trump was elected, that cousin's mother - my mother’s sister - passed around a phone with a vile racist meme on it, happily exclaiming “Trump won. We don’t have to be politically correct anymore.”
4/ She seemed to believe the rest of us would be just as thrilled as her little family unit to discover we suddenly had the freedom to be racist assholes. I left the gathering, retiring upstairs in protest. She came up an hour later to apologize.
5/ The following Thanksgiving, everyone was given strict instructions not to talk politics, but, of course, it happened anyway. There was a brief shouting match over whether Fox “News” was lying or every other media outlet in the world was.
6/ Both times, we all calmed down and left on “good terms.”
7/ My husband thinks it would be wrong to disinvite them, leaving them out and on their own when everyone else in the family will still come here (my mother, my sister and her family, sometimes another aunt or cousin or friend).
8/ Prior two years, I agreed with him and even hoped we might change their minds, open their minds up a bit. I thought, “We can't let Russia win by dividing us like this. We have to maintain our relationships. It’s the only way we’ll heal, the only way we’ll change things.”
9/ This year I just can’t. I'm too exhausted, too sad, too angry, too scared. I refuse to clamp my mouth shut, avert my eyes and pretend it’s all normal any longer. I feel that anyone who supports Trump NOW is knowingly supporting hatred, racism, anti-Semitism, cruelty, lies.
10/ Trump and his supporters are modern-day Nazis and if you support Nazis, you are a Nazi. That's how I feel. I’m sorry, I plan to tell them, but he’s dragging children away from their mothers and locking them up, deporting the parents without their precious children.
11/ He and GOP don’t see harm in that, don’t understand the pain of those parents and children, either because they’re sociopaths who don’t feel or because they don’t think those people are human like them. It’s reprehensible.
12/ I don’t want to hear your bullshit about those refugees breaking the law when any sane person would know - or research to find out - that it’s not against the damn law to claim asylum.
13/ You want to blindly follow the Russian propaganda transmitted through Fox “News” without questioning it, then please stay away. You think it’s okay for Trump to lie to the American people blatantly and shamelessly and every time he opens his mouth, then please stay away.
14/ You think the violence that is happening all over the country against minorities, Jews, immigrants isn't fueled by Trump’s dangerous and distorted rhetoric, then please stay away.
15/ You think a caravan of desperate families looking for better lives is dangerous and should be shot at, then please, please stay away. I don’t hate you, but I do hate what you support. I do hate that you’re racist and uncaring and unwilling to think. I hate your intolerance.
16/ If you think I’m intolerant for rejecting your intolerance, than so be it. Hatred and racism should NEVER be tolerated. That’s the kind of thing that leads to horror. Also - I love this country and yet there are days now I seriously consider leaving it.
17/ I’m not patriotic in the swaggering GOP way, the kind that says America is the only country that counts. I’m patriotic in the way I break down crying as my ferry circles the Statue of Liberty because I am so damn proud to be part of the great “nation of immigrants.”
18/ I honestly thought we all were. It’s been pretty upsetting to discover you and a whole lot of others aren’t. Trump and GOP are destroying America. They’re destroying democracy. They’re destroying people and will destroy many more.
19/ Whether they’re doing to for Putin, for profit, or just because they’re all hateful sons-of-bitches is irrelevant to me. What IS relevant to me is that you support it. Please stay away because this year… I just can’t.
