Last year I had been spending some time with my parents. They are conservative and consume conservative media, and I have not had much of a relationship at all with them ever since they kicked me out of the house at eighteen years of age for being gay, after which I attempted suicide and afterward struggled with depression and alcoholism for many years (the main story of my book, Fuck Portion Control). But I had been wanting to move out of Los Angeles and be around my family, especially my darling nieces and nephews who were growing up so fast, so I relocated back home right before the pandemic started.

Though politics only came up once during the six months I spent with my parents there was an enormous, invisible wall which separated us at every occasion, and no matter how many board games we played or great meals we cooked I always left their home feeling empty, sad, and stressed, and I could not figure out why since there was never any outright conflict or animosity. One weekend when some of my siblings were visiting with their abundant children we made homemade doughnuts and played Mexican train and had a wonderful time, but I still couldn’t break through this unspoken barrier between them and myself (not including my nieces and nephews, who insisted on including me in everything).

At the same time the 2020 Presidential campaign was raging, and the vitriol swirling in communities was reaching a fevered pitch. One of my dear cousins who is also gay was working as a waiter and a group of diners left him a tip on which they wrote “Faggot.” It’s always amazed me how people who supposedly believe in God can make enemies out of everyone, especially gay, lesbian, and transgender kids and adults when all we want is to belong to our own families and communities. I also have several nieces and nephews who are clearly also gay or other gender minority, and their parents are in varying degrees more supportive of them than mine were of me, but the growing contempt from the right toward us brought me to a point of being unable to leave it unaddressed, because this same bigotry and resentment is the heart of the disconnect in my family. I confronted my mother about her support for people who characterized us, especially her grandchildren, as these people did my cousin. Didn’t she know that these precious children were going to experience the same pain, the same violence as had been done to me because of her and her supposedly Christian values which support the persecution and harassment of others?

She gave me a half-hearted answer, something about all of us getting along which entirely refused to take responsibility for her own behavior. Incensed, I declined an invitation to see her (also because they were not taking any precautions to avoid catching COVID). Instead of reacting with understanding she sent me one of the most horrific things she has ever said or done, and referred to me in a text as “you people” and accused me of destroying her country, and swore that I would never “get her family,” and after characterizing her own son as a geopolitical adversary who has only ever wanted to belong to my own family had the gall to say she loved me.

The insanity of her words finally betrayed the source of that nearly imperceptible, cold, heartless treatment with which I was regarded. It didn’t matter how much fun we had, how many times I cooked them food or cleaned up their house, or played with my nieces or nephews or saved my mother from losing her hair which she cried about when finally revealing the extent of the problem, which was significant, or treated them for COVID while it was spreading in the community. Beneath it all was a simmering resentment for me, for the frustrations of her own life which she chose to make me the embodiment. The superficial niceties had never been enough to hide the truth of how my own mother viewed and treated me, her own son who had never done anything except support and care for them and their needs.

The core of contemporary American political turmoil was started by the Regan Administration, but it has been sustained by both sides such as what culminated in the 2020 Presidential election ever since, and just like my mother’s behavior the superficial themes and ideology are not the real reasons for the current political divide and strenuous conflict. The pinnacle of Baby Boomer politics and an Us versus Them ideology, Democratic voters often act and feel self-righteous witnessing the unabashed bigotry and racism wielded nakedly by Republicans and then delude themselves into thinking we are morally right. We accept people on the content of their character, we think, and eschew social injustice. Republicans view themselves as the opposition, even when they dominate American politics and culture, keeping traditions and stability and safety, and view Democrats and gays and lesbians and transgender people and black and brown and foreigners as agents of destabilization.

It is all a lie.

Trump supporters are not vast forces of racism and bigotry. Although many republicans are racist and bigoted, such ideology is not explicitly about racism or bigotry, but fear and an inability to feel secure and safe in their own country. The tools of bigotry and prejudice are what happen when people with limited resources do not know how to get what they need without resorting to that kind of conflict. Whether manufactured or genuine, and much of it is genuine, the concept of Us versus Them is a saga of human conflict as old as our species, one which pits those who have against those who have not. Trump gained as much support as he did because he promised to bring prosperity to those who have seen their welfare decline over the last four or five decades, populations of Americans who once benefited from successful industries, their jobs and communities now gutted by globalization and corporate greed and malfeasance. Given the choice of poverty, drug addiction, high taxes or relief from these problems even though the candidate is a racist, rapist how can Democrats expect people who vote republican to chose morals over rent, food, and medicine? It’s completely absurd, especially adding the laughably named Affordable Healthcare Act (which was a Republican plan, by the way, first designed and implemented by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts) on top of the high financial stress experienced by most Americans. My parents’ health care costs went from a few hundred dollars a month to $1600! And all Democrats did was pretend like it wasn’t happening and as a result lost the government during and after the Obama administration because of this refusal to see people other than ideological adversaries.

One major loss which has fueled the resentment and anger of the right is the gutting of education, as chronicled in this article by Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer, an assault on the education of poor Americans which began in the Regan administration and has reached a crisis, with large numbers of our fellow countrymen and their families without access to quality education, now designed by both Republicans and Democrats (like Bill Gates, whom much of the right despises) merely to fuel blue collar worker supply chain and not the improvement of their lives. This is a deficit in American society which has persisted under both Democratic and Republican administrations, with Clinton and Obama every bit as culpable for this classist and deficient system as Trump and Bush, who then spin political conflict as racists against non-racists rather than disadvantaged against advantaged which in turn amplifies the resentment and suffering which is at the heart of the political conflict. It does not matter that Republican leaders are good at making their voters believe it is only the fault of Democrats that their opportunities have been gutted. Democrats play right into that trap by failing to take care of all Americans and not just their own base, and it doesn’t help that Democratic voters are just as stupid as those who vote Republican. Most of us think that Nanci Pelosi cares about the disenfranchised instead of keeping her 30 plus million dollar fortune. Her ridiculous kente cloth stunt during the protests against police violence were a plain betrayal of her true intentions, which is to do nothing about it which is exactly what she has done as one of the longest serving House leaders in our country’s history and many, many decades to change those systems. The COVID pandemic is now worse than it was under Trump, even though Biden embraced vaccines, because he doesn’t actually know what the hell he’s doing. Being a decent human being does not translate into good policy, nor intelligence, and Biden’s primary purpose for being President never seemed to be good performance or effective governing but simply to cap his long and distinguished political career, and now we are struggling to do anything productive even though Democrats control the entire Federal Government. The slow progress on the January sixth attack on the Capitol and the absence of any real political change is not because the process is long and difficult. It’s because Democrats, governing cynically as is characteristic of the Baby Boom generation, do not want change, they want fuel for the 2022 election just to stay in power. Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer may have been working class when they were young and starry-eyed, but they are all millionaires who resist true reform and are frightened by relenting control, and the only difference between the major political parties is that Republicans blatantly and nakedly support the upper class while Democrats operate under smoke and mirrors and pretended powerlessness, using politically divisive and simplistic characterizations of others in order to fuel political turmoil and thus prevent change and keep their millions and influence at the expense of the rest of us.

Everyone in the United States wants the same things: To feel safe, to belong, to have good job opportunities and the ability to provide for ourselves and our families. The Baby Boomer politics of fear and divisiveness which currently dominates America and some other Western countries is a direct consequence of the kind of childhood trauma their generation endured because of World War II, The Cold War, The Vietnam War, The Korean War, and other extreme political conflict which is far and beyond too great a scope to cover in an article, which is instead addressed in The Perfect Child as well as strategies to overcome such childhood trauma. For any conflict to end, one side has to be the first to put down their arms. This does not happen when people like Jimmy Carter come out and say how scared they are for American Democracy. If the 2020 election proved anything, it’s how well our system actually works. The problem are those running it. Refusing to see the humanity in people, even in those who act vilely, is the fuel which sustains this fire. It’s a mirage meant to subjugate and control the populace, and by engaging in class warfare we do nothing but support the systems which we want to end. In order for this to stop we have to stop seeing the superficial actions of people who are frustrated and hurting and address the underlying causes of their behavior—declining job opportunities, high taxes and government harassment, lack of education, poor infrastructure design. If we do not do this, political conflict will only worsen. It’s also not difficult to do, all it requires is empathy.

Some of the problems our country is dealing with right now that are adding to this stress and need to be addressed in ways which are actually helpful and productive are obesity, especially in rural communities, alcoholism and addiction, climate and environmental disaster, and access to good nutrition.