Last week, in the northwoods of Wisconsin, my nineteen-year-old daughter squared off against her much older uncle. He voted for Trump in 2016; she won’t let him forget it.
“Are you voting for Trump this time?” she asked accusatorily as we all sat together on my mother-in-law’s back patio in rural Bayfield County. We were there for a brief family reunion, as a break from our daily lives in Minneapolis.
It can be tough to be caught in the spotlight of a nineteen year old whose insights are often unrelenting.
Her uncle played coy, claiming repeatedly that he would be writing in Richard M. Nixon’s name for President this time around. “Nixon is tan, rested, and ready—perfect candidate,” he insisted under persistent questioning, in a nod to a 1988 election cycle joke about the disgraced former President.
My daughter was not willing to play along. “This isn’t a joke,” she told him, before launching into an impassioned speech on all that is wrong with America, as seen through the eyes of someone who will be voting in a presidential election, for the first time in her life.
Her uncle is a private contractor, living in northern Virginia and working in intelligence operations on behalf of the United States government. He proudly owns guns and during our recent days together in Wisconsin, he made a reference to “colored people,” causing shock and outrage to ripple across my daughter’s face.
“I’m old-fashioned,” he told her, when she expressed her extreme displeasure over his use of this suspect term.
The conversation ended in tears of frustration for my daughter.
My daughter’s uncle is my brother-in-law by marriage, and a tough nut to crack. He grew up in a military family in rural Ohio and spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan, as a soldier and a private contractor.
He takes pleasure in dismissing her ideas as nothing more than the underbaked musings of an easily influenced kid from South Minneapolis. She, in turn, can’t imagine his life, and can’t fathom how someone could hold the views he does.
He is not a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, while she has spent her summer in Minneapolis, being radicalized not only by the murder of George Floyd, but also by the violence and displacement that has followed.
We have people living in tents in parks just blocks away from our home. On August 14, as we were heading to our vacation in northern Wisconsin, Minneapolis park police officers were using a bulldozer to haul away the belongings of people who’ve been living in Powderhorn Park since late May. The park is near the memorial marking where George Floyd was killed.
This news was a blow to my daughter. She’s participated in food and supply drives all summer, sending money to those who are doing the purchasing and delivering of resources. As we watched a Facebook live stream of the clearing of Powderhorn Park, she reacted with anger and disbelief.
“How can they just take people’s things and destroy them?” she asked with distress.
I had no good answer for her. My instinct, perhaps not too unlike that of her uncle, was to tamp her down. I wanted to find a way to show her that there is a system and a logic in place that the park police were following.
I cited a Minneapolis Star Tribune article that pointed out that the folks living in the park had been given two weeks’ notice before the bulldozing began. Besides, I told her, some people who live in the area surrounding Powderhorn Park, who had once been supportive of the encampment there, now felt unsafe and wanted the park cleared.
My attempt at pragmatism left both of us feeling unsatisfied. It doesn’t exactly feel good to be the cynical parent, dousing my kid’s burgeoning activism with the practical concerns of middle age.
On our way home, we drove through Bayfield County toward the Minnesota border. My daughter counted the Trump and Pence campaign signs that appeared from time to time along the grassy, mostly empty highway while I listened to an episode of Democracy Now.
On the radio, Amy Goodman was interviewing former NAACP president Ben Jealous and Cornel West, to get their thoughts on the Democratic National Convention that had just ended. While Jealous was fairly accepting of Biden and the Democrats, West was more exacting in his critique of the party and its nominating convention.
Jealous said he empathized with Biden because he too has had to overcome a stutter, and he feels that it makes sense to support him and Kamala Harris because they can be “moved” in a more progressive direction.
West wouldn’t budge on this point. A vote for the Biden-Harris ticket is a necessary vote against fascism, he conceded, but insisted that this doesn’t mean we can “lie” about who they are, as representatives of a militarized United States mired in deep economic inequality.
When I relayed this exchange to my daughter, she swiftly agreed with West. Biden is no hero in her eyes; she is inclined to believe the stories about the discomfort his behavior has reportedly caused for some women.
It can be tough to be caught in the spotlight of a nineteen year old whose insights are often unrelenting. She hardly ever lets her father and me off the hook, especially when we try to moderate her blistering focus on the injustices we have too often learned to live with. But here, she quickly grasped West’s argument that voting for Biden was a practical necessity.
This week, she’s headed off to her first year of college (all online, so far). We will miss her—and her daily reminder that “our other pandemic is racism and inequality”—terribly.