During your childhood, you had great times with your parents and extended family members at Thanksgiving. They were fun and memorable times, but you haven’t had Thanksgiving or talked to your parents with those affections in many years.
Your relationship changed when you went away to college and decided to make the country and the world a better place. You wanted to be more enlightened than your parents and solve big problems. During college and grad school, you learned how narrow-minded your parents were. They still attend the same conservative, Christian church and drive the same big SUV. You’ve told them about the climate crisis since high school but they haven’t switched to EV or a hybrid. Your generation was going to save the planet and no longer tolerate “toxic masculinity.”
However, things haven’t turned out as you and your friends thought they would. Not even close.
You began to re-evaluate your positions on Oct. 7 when Hamas invaded Israel and brutalized women, children, and even decapitated infants. The brutality of it all seemed like warring marauders from the 12th Century.
Tragically, a large percentage of administrators, professors, and students from your alma mater condone and align with Hamas against the Jewish people.
Even your progressive “allied” organizations are calling for the elimination of the Jewish people and supporting the idea to clear the land of Palestine from the “river to the sea.” Really? Are they really chanting for a Holocaust 2.0?
Unlike your friends, your parents taught you about the horrors of WWII Europe and what happened to the Jewish people. You know the real history of the Jewish nation. They are not occupiers or colonizers. Charles Krauthammer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, once said, “Israel is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago.”
As you re-evaluate your position and how dogmatic you were with family and friends who disagreed with you, you begin to harbor feelings of guilt and shame. You actively isolated yourself from your parents and your children from their grandparents. You begin to question how you let important relationships deteriorate so badly.
Perhaps this Thanksgiving can be an opportunity for healing and restoring.
The attack on Israel was not the first time you began to question your beliefs. Two months ago, you listened to NPR regarding a new book by economics professor Melissa Kearney, Ph.D., “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind.”
Professor Kearney talked about two-parent privilege and how children benefit from a stable home environment in comparison to fatherless homes. My parents had lectured me about this issue around the dinner table ad nauseam while growing up. They could have written the same book titled, “I Told you So.”
You begin to realize you have been blinded by leftist ideology disguised as righteous liberal thought. For Pete’s sake, you had a Black Lives Matter (BLM) sign in your yard. Now BLM openly supports the baby killers, Hamas. Before that announcement, they had bilked millions of dollars from the American people. As they extorted money, crime continued to run rampant in nearly every major city in the country and black leaders did nothing about flash mobs or underperforming public schools in poor black neighborhoods.
It seems your parents might have been right about BLM all along. You thought your parents were against BLM because … well, you thought they were racists. That’s what your professors used to tell you and your friends about the baby boomer generation, and you bought it hook, line, and sinker.
What took you so long to get here? Perhaps it was your hatred of Trump.
You can’t believe you agree with him about that damn wall on the southern border. You recently discovered that nearly 200,000 people a month are streaming through the southern border. The vast majority of them are single men of military age, not families.
You decide to give your parents a call to ask about Thanksgiving and apologize for being so narrow-minded. You look fondly on the idea of returning home and having your kids rekindle relationships with their grandparents. You vow never to let politics get in between family relationships ever again.
Kendall Qualls
Kendall Qualls is the President of TakeCharge, Minnesota which is an organization committed to supporting the notion that the promise of America works for everyone regardless of race or station in life. Mr. Qualls was a Republican candidate for Governor of Minnesota. Prior to his candidacy, he was a health care executive and served in the U.S. Army as an Artillery officer. Mr. Qualls has been married for 36 years and has five children.
