When I was a kid, I grew up listening to the sounds of my aunts and uncles around a crowded dinner table. Bustling around constantly, I would wiggle myself in between my parents to grab a slice of bread, and tug on my mom’s sleeve until she would butter it for me. You see, kids weren’t allowed to sit at the “grownups table”, so we had to make plates and sit around the dusty living room tv and fight among ourselves. The conversations that carried over to us, never registering in our minds, were full of political rambling and frustration from the adults of my family.

Getting older and more tired, my family, like most families, started to drift apart. There were less Sunday dinners, smaller gatherings for holidays, and many things left unsaid between the members of my family. Any time spent together was something sacred. Despite what it may feel like, the thing we most wanted to avoid seemed to be the thing that was unavoidable.

Don’t talk politics. The three words that were announced at every family gathering. It served as both an invitation and a threat, something that was so pressing and also dreaded by almost everyone in the room. Every time we gathered for an event, it was as if I was being given a front row seat to a debate that I didn’t understand but wanted to so badly.

You see, my family talked politics out of anger. My family is middle class, but when my father and uncle were being raised, they were much worse off. My grandparents and their family worked hard their entire lives, my father and uncles have worked hard their entire lives. They have grown into a life that has exhausted all their resources. In their eyes, they have sacrificed everything for their family and it still feels like they are struggling to survive. The American dream, for them and for so many in America, seems to have failed them, and it has left them frustrated and desperate for answers. When I say they talk politics out of anger, it is the anger that they feel burning in their hearts for a better world, an American where me and my cousins can live comfortably. The problem is that they have lost hope that this America is out there, and so they have so much rage towards the people in power

I have heard the phrase “don’t talk politics” so many times I cannot count. And yet I have heard my uncles fight about politics so many times I cannot count. They feel a need to share their opinions, to fight one another, to shout the loudest. It taught me that there is fear in the phrase “don’t talk politics”. There is a fear that if we talk politics we will become so divided that any hope in remaining a family will be tore to shreds. There is a fear that our beliefs, our hopes, our morals, are so convoluted and disastrous that we cannot possibly find any common ground. Most importantly, there is a fear that talking about politics will do nothing to change the world we live in.

My family has so many opinions about politics, and yet no one is teaching their kids what politics really is. For so long, I thought politics were something dark and menacing. I worried that learning about politics, understanding what my relatives were shouting about, would turn me into someone like them. Someone that is concerned about how loud my opinions are, and not what they actually mean. I was worried that I would be pit against my family, like I have seen so many times in the past. And what I have found is that there is a lack of information. There is also a lack in apathy. As someone who has spent her entire life being told not to talk about politics, I have never been more excited to talk about politics. Not just to voice my own opinions, but to inform and educate others so they can have opinions of their own.