Bernie, Elizabeth, My Dad, and Me — or How To Not Kill Your Family This Christmas

My father is voting for Bernie Sanders. I am voting for Elizabeth Warren. He’s a 75 year-old, brilliant man, who pioneered early software for the railroad and never went to college, who was a police chaplain and still isn’t quite retired from being a deeply liberal Catholic Deacon. I’m a 38 year-old filmmaker who has a medical crisis at least once a month. The apple fell far, bounced, and bruised.

But my father has showed me a lot of things in my life, often through his own acquired bruises. He’s showed me it’s fine to disagree, as long as you’re thinking smart. I remember coming to him, confused by the line in the Catholic credo, about “We believe in One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.” How can we believe in only one, I asked, when lots of people believe in lots of different churches. They can’t possibly be suggesting everyone else is WRONG (this was before twitter.)

My dad said, as far as he was concerned, spirituality is a mountain, and anyone that’s climbing it, by any route, deserves respect. And also, the mountain is so big, there’s no way to tell who is in the lead, or even if there’s anything at the top. “Sometimes, you fall off,” he’d add, mysteriously.

I spent a lot of my childhood watching Dad climb mountains, and sometimes, he fell off. I watched him start out the 1990s saying that while of course gay people deserved rights, they made him somewhat uncomfortable. I watched him struggle as a friend came out as trans. I bristled when he responded to raging teenage me asking why he supports a church that hates gay people by saying “but everyone sins, no one should be hated.” Being gay is NOT a SIN, I screeched, turning to ice inside with the growing knowledge that my own sexuality hovered somewhere west of the straight path.

By the time I finally came out as bisexual to my family in my mid-twenties, he didn’t bat an eye. And he apologized for the hurt he had caused me with his earlier — even though fairly mild on the spectrum of homophobia — views.

Dad doesn’t mind being proved wrong.

But how in this toxic time of Democratic cat fighting, where every positive tweet is cannon fodder for a thousand angry partisans waving a different flag, are we not ripping each other’s faces off? He thinks Bernie is better. I think Elizabeth is better. On social media, I’ve seen people called sexist, racist, Communist, radicalist, stupid, and dumb bitches for expressing a preference for one over the other.

Dad and I are quietly trying something novel instead. We call it: acting like goddamn adults.

When my dad and I talk politics, we have a basic respect for each other’s opinions and intelligence. He doesn’t call me hopelessly naive for supporting Warren, nor does he suggest I’m voting with my vagina. I don’t call him an angry old man for voting for Sanders, or hint at undertones of misogyny.

We don’t bring up stupid conspiracy theories about either candidate, because WE refuse to be that stupid. I don’t believe Bernie Sanders is secretly anti-Semitic. He doesn’t believe Warren is a secret Republican.

We don’t pretend anyone is perfect, because we know we are not perfect. I don’t defend Warren’s DNA test gaffe, even though I stress her efforts to apologize and make amends. He raptures over Bernie’s message, but bemoans his debating style. “All he does is yell the same thing over and over,” he says. “You can’t convince people that way.” (This was after Twitter.)

He worries about the inborn vulnerability of a female candidate. I worry about a guy who had a heart attack this year. We sigh at these problems we can’t fix, and say “yeah, that’s an issue.”

We don’t dismiss each other’s intelligence, because we have ample evidence that it exists. When my dad said on the phone tonight, “I’m beginning to think Bernie can pull this off, his ground game is getting overwhelming,” I worried. Because my dad is a smart person, and an insightful analyst. He might be right. I won’t be changing my liberty green shirt anytime soon, however, as I countered with favorability polls and the Blue New Deal.

There is a horrible thing happening among Democrats in the primaries, and for good reason: we are all living in shared terror that whoever we choose, whoever we vote for, it will be the wrong one. We know the country cannot survive another Day After The Election 2016. So we are insecure, and that panic turns to viciousness, as we tear down anyone who isn’t our pick for the fight, and if we continue to do so, we will walk into the biggest battle of our lives already bled out from friendly fire.

My dad and I are voting for different people, for different reasons, but we are united in what we know: trump’s cultism is a swiftly-spreading poison in our country’s veins. The divide between people who see this and people who don’t is a chasm I feel like I can barely see across anymore.

The people who can’t bear to spend the holidays with their trump-loving relatives, I can’t disagree. Not since Vietnam has there been a crisis that so thoroughly split our ideologies, and, as always, the bodies of the poor, the vulnerable, and the discriminated against are lining that divide. Anyone who can’t stomach that cost to share a turkey, I more than understand.

But if you’re dreading the winter festivities with your Biden or Buttigieg or Beto loving families, your diehard Bernie-ites or cardigan-draped Warrenistas, take pause. We don’t have to agree. We don’t even have to stop arguing. But we don’t have to set fires, either. We don’t have to be assholes.

We, on the side that’s not for unrestricted gun access, $600 insulin, acidifying oceans, or babies spending Christmas in a cage, are all we’ve got against a blindly hateful rhinoceros of an enemy.

When my dad and I finish arguing about politics, with neither one of us having convinced the other to change the color of their lawn sign, he always says to me “and I will, of course, be happy to vote for Elizabeth.” And I say “I will happily vote for Bernie if it comes down to it.” It’s our newest way of saying I love you.

But it’s more than that. It is a promise to have each other’s backs, born out of respect for other people who at least still have some precious ability to tell right from wrong. And it’s a powerful reminder of what waits on the other side of the chasm, whichever leader we choose.