The media has given us an alternative name for the upcoming holiday by inventing “Friendsgiving”. More and more you see people forgoing family time to have their own private holiday excursions. Holidays have become uncomfortable because we are forced to hang out and have conversations with folks from differing opinions. I believe this is a symptom of becoming a selfish society. We want our favorite food and our favorite opinions blaring from our favorite source of news. It is all about what we want. We have our rabbit hole and we don’t want to go into someone else’s. So we have become escape artists for family get-togethers.

Spending time with family members that we don’t enjoy doesn’t sound like an appealing way to spend precious vacation time. But if we don’t start building bridges now, our children will suffer the consequences. We must put aside our entitlement, learn to love the unloveable and show our children how this is done by example.

“But Uncle Fred is an intolerable bigot,” you say? Maybe we need to take the first step with Uncle Fred by letting him rant without our input. Maybe we shouldn’t try to fix Uncle Fred’s opinions and give him time to speak his mind in a safe environment. Oh, and did I mention that we need to look Uncle Fred in the eye and not stare at our phone or the TV? We need to engage with him. We need to pull some stories from his life and maybe we will discover a gold mine under his bravado. Or maybe we won’t.

Maybe we will only find our own personal gold mine of kindness. Maybe it is time to man-up and calmly sit and listen in a non-judgmental way to those with opposing values. Maybe this is where unity begins. If families can’t even sit down to a meal together in peace, how can we expect world leaders to fix this mess?