My mother had three brothers. They came up in the Richmond Hill area of Queens, near the Jamaica rail yard. The brothers all married women from the neighborhood, and they were a very lively crew. Here they are in my grandparent’s living room, probably late 1940’s.
They could make a game out of anything, and would make a party out of nothing at the drop of a hat. They all had big-ish families – 4 or 5 kids – and at family outings me and my tribe of a dozen-and-a-half cousins would run around like a bunch of wild monkeys.
It was a lot of fun.
Charlie, my mother’s youngest brother and my godfather, passed on Friday at age 90. That’s Charlie on the right, kneeling in the sweater. He was the last of them to go. It’s the end of an era, the closing of a generational door.
All of this has me reflecting, oddly enough, on the dilemma of people and politics.
Charlie, along with my uncle Tucky, were NYC firemen. They risked their own lives on a regular basis, and saved a number of other lives. Not in the abstract, but truly and concretely, hands on. Charlie had a very interesting mind, and was curious about any and everything – world history, family history, heirloom apples, Tin Pan Alley songs from the 20’s, old cars, whatever.
He and my aunt Pat – herself the daughter of honest-to-god Fenians, and whose own mother used to smuggle ammunition in the baby carriage – took their kids on a family trip to the Southwest. They were disturbed by the condition of indigenous people on the rez, and so adopted my Apache cousin Peter and my Hopi cousin Tara. When the US left Vietnam, triggering the “boat people” crisis, they adopted my Vietnamese cousin PJ.
They had a friend who ran a shelter for abandoned kids in Nicaragua and they made many trips there with money and goods, at a time when it was not all that safe to go there. In the early days of the AIDs crisis, Pat used to go to Manhattan to care for women with AIDs at a time when nobody would go near them.
Good people.
Charlie was also very much an arch-conservative, politically. Loved Reagan, loved the Bushes, especially W. I never really discussed it with him, but I’m sure from comments and FB posts that he supported Trump. Back in the day, he was a Bircher. And when I say he was a Bircher, I mean he was the head of his local chapter of the John Birch Society. He tried to recruit my dad, but for various reasons dad steered clear.
I was talking with my wife about all of this last night, and she asked “How could you be that kind of person, and have that kind of politics?”. How can you be the kind of person who responds to people in need by, literally, taking them into your family and/or traveling to dangerous places to help them, but not see the tangible harm done by the people and policies you support?
I can’t really get my head around it, TBH. And I’m sure we all know people like my aunt and uncle. Lovely people with bizarre and harmful politics.
We’re living in a remarkably hateful moment. “Polarization” doesn’t really capture the flavor of it – it’s not just differences of opinion, it’s all that plus anger and distrust and animosity. I’m as prone to it as anyone else – I see a Trump bumper sticker or the famous red hat and my hackles go up, immediately. I assume that this is a person I cannot trust or respect.
And not without reason.
Some of those people really do seem to be going out of their way to be counted as belligerent assholes. And some of them are probably someone like my uncle and aunt. Some of them are probably both.
I’m not quite sure what I’m trying to say in this post. Mostly, I’m just trying to think through how best to live in this moment. For a variety of reasons, I feel personally committed to not hating anyone, even if some folks make me really angry. People are complex and multi-faceted, and I try to be mindful of that when I see the latest outrage. That doesn’t excuse the things they do, but it does make me feel obliged to try to see the whole person. Or, at least, not just the worst aspects of them. But without excusing those worst aspects, or surrendering my own understanding of right and wrong in the process.
I feel like I’m walking a tightrope a lot of the time.
Perhaps it’s A Conflict of Visions.
if you felt like giving an idea of the discussions, that would be very interesting indeed
so, not really an idea of the discussion, but just some thoughts.
Some of this is, I think, generational. Charlie was born in 1935, and was the youngest of my mom’s siblings. The family had come through the Depression, somehow, and were basically, not blue collar exactly, but working class Queens folks. Not desparately poor, but… of limited means.
Folks like that can basically see serious poverty in the rear view mirror. And too far back, either. It’s tangible to them in ways that it is not to people like, for instance, me. People who are more solidly and securely middle class.
For my grandparents especially, and for my mom and her siblings, there was serious shame around being “on relief”. Around receiving welfare of any kind. It meant that you had failed to maintain your toehold in the respectable world.
There is also a sort of patriotic dimension to it. We had overcome the Depression, we were to go on to prevail in WWII. We would follow that up with the Marshall Plan, and then later with the international aid and “soft power” politics of the Eisenhower and Kennedy years.
All of which covers my uncle’s youth and young manhood.
My grandparents and mom’s siblings really did think of the US as the greatest country on earth, maybe (probably) in history. Because it arguably was, mostly, for a minute.
So there is that.
And there is a cultural dimension.
My uncle was a NY City fireman, retiring as a lieutanant. In NYC, first responders – cops, firemen – tend to be conservative. Uncle was probably more so than most – not that many FDNY folks are Birch Society chapter heads – but that was likely the common direction – the prevailing winds, if you will – of his social context.
He was also a founder and elder in a relatively conservative church. Which was a chosen social context, of course, but also one that would be likely to reinforce his own conservative instincts.
And I would add, perhaps somewhat oddly, Charlie was a New Yorker. New Yorkers tend to be chauvinistic – tend to think in “we are the best” terms.
That’s all I got. Make of it what you will.
I guess this is the closest thing we have to an open thread at the moment? I find it hard to know for sure.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that on the Epstein emails release, I think the most interesting thing so far is the correspondence between Bannon and Epstein. It’s an astonishing illustration of moral bankruptcy on Bannon’s part, and to the extent that he is such an integral part of MAGA world I do think it really keeps the heat on.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/15/steve-bannon-jeffrey-epstein-text-messages-publicity
Unintended post.