"I never thought of it that way"

How to talk to people even if you disagree

- By Mónica Guzmán

IF THERE'S ONE thing most people can agree on, it's that the way we treat and talk to people with opposing views is broken. We can't stomach the ideas from across the political divide, let alone the people who hold them. This goes for other polarizing topics, too, not just politics. In one 2021 poll, most Americans thought the biggest threat to our country's way of life was “other people in America.” By June 2021, U.S. voters rated “division in the country as the number one issue facing them personally.

Whether you consider yourself conservative, liberal, something in between, or something off that spectrum altogether, I bet you've wondered, as I have, how long we can hold it together while our differences threaten to wreck our relationships, our country, and our ability to share our lives, really, at all.

Take poor Barbara in Knoxville, Tennessee, a mother of five grown men whose families got so fired up clashing over politics at her 2017 Thanksgiving dinner, she told me, it was like a bomb went off. One of her sons is very conservative, another very liberal, a third and fourth moderately conservative and liberal, respectively, and a fifth son is more centrist. Yes, really.

“I think my family is a microcosm of the country,” said Barbara, who describes herself as a conservative-libertarian Christian. She tried to keep the peace that holiday, begging, “Can't we just have a nice family dinner?” Instead, some family members wound up leaving early, while at least one daughter-in-law ended up in tears.