1:00PM
“We made a conscious decision to not fight in front to you children,” my mom said to me a few years ago.
This conversation came a few months or years after breaking up with a girl that I loved and somehow the topic veered towards anger in a relationship. My mom relayed how when she was a kid, she saw her parents fight and it got so bad, that at one point, her parents were fighting while her mom was frying chicken in a castiron skillet and eventually threw the whole skillet across the room at her dad. Part of me wanted to blame my mom for not fighting in front of us and the other part realized she had just been doing her best, learning from her experiences as a kid.
I think so many of us don’t see conflict resolution in the home. We see our parents (or caretakers) avoid conflict or we see them escalate conflict, and we rarely see them resolve conflict. Perhaps this is because conflicts normally get resolved in the privacy of the bedroom. I just believe that few of us have grown up seeing the full conflict process, resolution included.
I think about the political situation in the US and around the world and I’m seeing a pattern of leaders getting elected. It seems that many of the leaders we are electing are the ones who escalate conflict. They get punched and they punch back twice as hard. They’re the fighters, the people you wish to have on your team but really don’t want on the other team. They will fight and fight and fight.
In the recent past, I think many of the politicians were more of the ones who avoided conflict. The people who would dance around questions, hide issues, talk about platitudes of bringing people back together, and avoid some of the hard discussions, pushing the ball down the road a little farther.
I hope that the next generation of leaders will be the ones who resolve conflict. The ones who don’t throw fists and the ones who don’t run away, but the ones who stand there, strong, defending their humanity while defending the humanity of their opponent as well. As Lincoln or someone probably said, to get rid of one’s enemies by making them a friend.
I see the current attacks and the current dodges of politicians and I wish it were different. I admittedly have held a lot of anger and frustration at these people for being how they are, instead of pausing to recognize that we all come from our parents, and them from their parents, and them from their parents, ad infinitum.
We aren’t trying to be the way we are, we have inherited it, and most of us are trying to be different.
While I want their behaviors to be different, I also don’t blame them for how they are.
1:10PM
