I Take This Personally

We have four wonderful adult children, and the youngest was a teenager before my wife and I tripped over our own assumptions. Like all good elephants, we got most of our news from the elephant news station. We knew that the donkey news station couldn’t be trusted, because we were looking for fair and balanced, and that’s what the elephant station claimed to be. Many evenings the elephant news’ views would trumpet away for hours whether we were in the room or not.

War brings with it many casualties, and one of the worst is the collateral damage, shrapnel wounds that injure unsuspecting bystanders. One evening our oldest daughter came walking into the living room with great conviction and pain. I remember the scene, but for my wife it’s seared into her memory. She said,

Whhhyyyy are you watching this?

Our elephant viewing habits had probably been questioned before, more subtly perhaps. For sure we weren’t paying attention to the majority component of communication, the non-verbal kind, that could have cued us in to trouble brewing. Let me be clear: the trouble I’m referring to is that the war was taking place in our living room, we invited it in, and alienated our own kids in the process. We didn’t talk politics; we allowed the television to scream politics, muzzling questions or alternative perspectives before they were ever uttered.

We’re still dressing wounds, cleaning up messes, and learning how to navigate the mine fields with fewer injuries. Thank God we’ve learned a lot in recent years, but as you can plainly see: the donkey elephant war is personal for me.