Yesterday, I began teaching Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone in an introductory literature course. If you’re expecting Thanksgiving dinner at your house will be war, I told my students, consider Antigone’s family. As the play opens, her brothers have killed each other fighting on opposite sides of a war for the throne. 

Oh, and her dad is Oedipus. 

I don’t mean to make light of what promises to be another holiday season of family drama, not in these times. The current trend of political violence in the US smacks more of a Greek tragedy or the Hatfields and the McCoys than a silly SNL sketch.

Looking back, I myself didn’t navigate political distance with my own parents very well. In fact, I didn’t address it at all. I buried it. Blame my Midwestern aversion to conflict.

In all honesty, I stopped writing for the Reformed Journal for three years because I found the gaps growing between so many of us too hard to cross, especially the gap between urban and rural, between advanced degrees and high school diplomas. Actually, I only stopped writing essays. I began writing about my own relationship that seemed unbridgeable, with my father. 

A story to illustrate: Once, in my house, in front of my wife who came to the U.S. in 1980 as a refugee from Laos, Dad said to a guest of ours, “You know what I think we should do with foreigners? Ship ‘em back.”

To say that my wife feels strongly about such topics is an understatement. She once flipped off an entire basketball crowd for a racial slur slung at her while she was at the free throw line. I braced myself for an electromagnetic pulse.

What she said on this night, however, was, “Well, Milt, then they’d have to ship you back too.”

I thought her statement a masterstroke.  

I’m not sure Dad got her point. 

I’m also not sure I understand why he said what he did in the first place.

The next day, before church, I confronted him. I said something like, “You can’t say things like that.” He mumbled something and that was that. 

The thing is, it felt too hard to ask, “So what did you mean by that?” Why? Because I don’t know that I could have asked it without an accusatory tone. Because it would have been embarrassing for him to have to explain himself to his own son, a sort of unnamed honor barrier between us. So I just assumed his motive came from a desire to flex in front of our guest, to play the shock-jock, which I think it partly did. I scolded him and left it at that. Talk about transgressing the honor barrier without result.

But what was underlying his statement? What were his concerns or fears and where did they come from?

I have long characterized the gap between Dad and me as historical in nature, a Red Skelton-loving 1955 high school graduate and a Nirvana-listening 1994 graduate. Silent Gen and Gen X. But is that simple? At the time, I admit I was too righteous and too scared to really engage him on the point. As far as I was concerned, it was an example of his pre-Civil Rights thinking. Case closed.

The thing is, my dad knew scripture, thought highly of missions and of bringing all people into the church. It may have taken multiple, difficult conversations, about topics like immigration waves, the gospel relative to identity politics, skin color and United States immigration law, what our democracy is based on, what our church is based on—all topics that have potential conflict to them. But in talking about them, there’s almost no way we wouldn’t have somewhat closed the gap.

Maybe more to the point, we could not have closed any sort of gap quick-a-minute before church. We had lost the kind of forum where we could address these issues in an open, low-stakes discussion. Not a winner-take-all duel, but weekly dinner conversations. Not a work-everything-out cage match, but regular coffee times for weeks, months, years. In other words, the types of conversations almost no one seems to have now—at least across the boundaries that divide us—week to week, picking up where we left off and circling back, with an abiding trust between the different viewpoints. 

So I didn’t address it. Time passed. Donald Trump rose to power. The gap between us widened.

And I began to explore the gap—in a book, because that’s what it took to approach it.

While writing, I came across Catherine Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. It turns out a famous local settler to where I live, Charles Ingalls, also turned to populism as he got older. Reading about the problems Ingalls faced and thinking about those my dad faced brought me to a wider understanding of populism and especially its appeal to rural people. I could read his life on the backdrop Fraser describes and understand his move farther right. 

It’s too late to talk to him about it; Dad passed away in 2020. Still, thinking deeply into the chasm between us has been helpful, maybe even healing. 

To this day, I wonder about my inability to talk to him. He was unapproachable, I told myself. That’s just the way it is between parents and children, I wanted to believe. 

But I come back to my own intransigence. I didn’t have the will, or the imagination, to look into the gap, to try to understand it, or to see the assumptions in my own positions and how they looked to him. Today, I think the gap that remained between us as somewhat tragic.

Tragedies like Antigone are so maddening to read because they always seem so avoidable. Just one apology, just one person who steps back and realizes things don’t have to be a certain way. 

In times like these, though, I understand tragedy better. It’s not so simple as one apology. Avoiding tragedy takes a lot of mental work, a lot of reading, a lot of imagining, a lot of difficult conversations, which means creating the context in which we can have those conversations. Over and over again.

One of my sisters has taken up the gauntlet of political conversation in our family. She addresses us directly with topics of concern, seeking our input and stance. I admit, I find that old intransigence rising. I don’t want to engage. I want to dig in my heels and close my mouth.

But I also see what she’s doing. Digging us out of our silos by dragging things into the light. Not solving anything—nothing can be solved at one Thanksgiving dinner—but setting the table for better conversation. So that one day, after much talking and many forgettable or memorable meals and much struggling, we might understand each other again. 

It may just be the work of avoiding tragedy.