A Thanksgiving Plea

Obviously, there’s going to be a lot of filler during the holiday season, but I’m almost done with the next Deep Ice article. It will almost certainly go up next week.

This Thanksgiving season, many of us will be spending time with our families. I’m personally lucky that we’re not going to be sharing a table with the cliche racist uncle (Most of my uncles have passed on), but this is the time of year when you’re probably seeing a lot of respectable thinkpieces advising us, as we sit around poultry, that we should try to All Just Get Along and not let politics divide us, and if your uncle decides it would be a good time to remind us that “All lives matter” or that Antifa are the “real fascists”, you should just smile and pass the gravy and not ruin anyone’s dinner by being all uppity about it.

You know what you’ll never see in one of those thinkpieces? A byline belonging to someone who isn’t white and straight and male. It’s always, “Come on, liberals, let grandpa have a couple of free N-bombs on Turkey Day for the sake of family unity.” It’s never, “Come on, Uncle Rick. Maybe just let it go when her boyfriend tells a joke about Trump wanting to bone his daughter.”

So here’s my unpopular take about civility and the holidays: Fuck that noise. Maybe the reason we’re so divided isn’t because of our inability to be civil and put politics aside. Maybe it’s exactly the opposite. Maybe the problem is actually that the dominant culture — straight, white, cis, hetero, Christian, male culture — overwhelmingly wants to treat politics like sports. To frame it as, “Oh, you’ve got your team and I’ve got my team, and we both get passionate about it, but in the end, we both know that it’s just a game, after all. We can just talk about something else.”

Because it’s not sports. Okay, sure, maybe if you’re in a time and place where politics is mostly about tax codes and land use regulations, we should all live and let live and have civil differences of opinion. But in the time and place where we actually live? If you start talking about poor people fleeing from Honduras to protect your children from gang violence as though they were vermin? I should not be expected to respond civilly to that. If you start defending the systematic murder of black children because they spooked white cops? I should not be expected to respond civilly to that. If you try to tell me that my trans friends should be presumed to be sexual predators? I should not be expected to respond civilly to that.

The problem isn’t that we’ve got too little civility. It’s that we’ve got too much. It’s that you can advocate the most vile, hateful, despicable things, but as long as you use the approved “polite” phrasings, you’re allowed to treat the civil rights, the health, the happiness, the very lives of actual people like a sport, and it’s the height of rudeness for you to face any sort of social penalty for advocating it.

So this Thanksgiving, as you gather around pie and poultry and watch football and inflatable cartoon characters, I call on you to be civil, not to your family, but to the victims. To the trans folk who stand to lose their jobs, their homes, the ability to use a restroom. To the immigrants who walked halfway across a continent for a chance of a better life. To the sick who can’t afford healthcare. To people of color who would just like to walk down a public street without having the cops called on them. To the women who are mocked and doubted and threatened for being the victims of sexual violence. Treat them with the respect and sympathy that a hundred thinkpieces by straight white men want you to show your racist uncle. Do not treat those people so cruelly, so disposably, as to let someone enjoy your hospitality while attacking them. Do not choose a peaceful meal over the rights of the oppressed.

If a dinner guest at my house called my mother a whore, I’d tell him to get the fuck out. Why, then, should I be “civil” if he calls for my black friends to be shot by police, or my trans friends to be murdered by hateful mobs, or my Jewish friends to be shot by white supremacists?

Be the jerk, this thanksgiving. If your racist uncle mentions Making America White Great Again, tell him to shut up or leave. Not under my roof. If you happen to be under his roof, leave. No one’s sweet potato casserole is worth being the sort of person who turns a blind eye to hate.

Happy Thanksgiving. Death to fascism.