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Just learned the hard way not to bring up politics at Thanksgiving
Last year at my aunt's house in Cleveland, I tried the 'let's all calmly discuss our differences' approach during dessert. Within 10 minutes my cousin Mark was standing up and my grandma was crying into her pecan pie. What I learned is that some tables just need a hard rule of no topics beyond food and weather. Has anyone else found a way to steer conversations away from landmines without being obvious about it?
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drew69016d ago
Three years ago my uncle Dave tried the "structured debate" method with a literal talking stick he carved himself. Stick got thrown through a window within twenty minutes. I feel you on the hard rule thing, it's honestly the only thing that keeps some families from imploding. The whiskey trick sounds funny but I've seen too many people get sloppy and mean after a few drinks to ever try it myself.
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Kinda disagree with the hard rule approach. My family has a rule that you can talk politics but you have to take a shot of cheap whiskey before you respond. Sounds stupid but it actually works. Everyone's too busy laughing at how red their face is getting to actually get mad. The key is making it ridiculous enough that nobody takes themselves seriously.
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elizabethtaylor16d ago
@uma685 brings up an interesting point, but I wonder if the whiskey trick just delays the explosion until everyone's too drunk to remember who started it. How do you handle the moment when someone's had enough shots that they forget the rule and start getting genuinely heated anyway? I've seen my own family try similar gimmicks with wine and it always backfires once the bottle gets low. The real question is whether any system can actually make people listen instead of just waiting for their turn to talk.
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