generations

"I’ve never seen anything like this.” My dad has said this to me multiple times in my life. At the start of the pandemic, when Donald Trump was elected president, impeached and then elected president again, and when Roe versus Wade was overturned.

My generation has grown up in a quickly developing world, specifically on the internet. From a young age, we can access information about humanitarian crises and parts of the world set on fire. We’re exposed to our tragic and twisted world, and are told that we are the ones who will need to fix it.

Yet, my generation remains divided. Some of my cousins lean toward their conservative parents, the rest of us lean toward our liberal parents. Some of us lean the opposite of our parents. Some of us are deeply involved in political movements and organizing, while the rest of us are complicit and ambivalent to it.

When I asked my 17-year-old brother which way he was leaning, he said “I couldn’t care less.” On the other hand, I toured universities with a political science major in mind and am actively discussing policy with friends and family. We both grew up under the same roof.

Through this project, I have found that political beliefs aren’t linear, and sometimes they’re passed down while sometimes they aren’t. Although my parents didn’t force their beliefs onto me, I was always curiously asking about what they thought about the news. Maybe if I hadn’t asked, I wouldn’t have similar beliefs to them today.

But I firmly believe that a family can hold shared values while differing in political ones. I do see that my family holds the values of love and kindness toward one another, even if it is displayed in different ways. We all live our separate lives, and our differing experiences can cause the family tree to branch into a plethora of different directions.