Family Ties

I just hit send on an email to my family, which was kind of a first. I shared the Unamerican flash movie with them, even though it’s been almost a month exactly since I released it. I’d been percolating on sending that email, and it finally popped tonight. I don’t know what brought it about, but it was time.

I’ve been hesitant about sharing it with them – they are for the most part, a fundamentalist evangelical, conservative family. When I told my mom I was going to the DNC, she stressed, “Well, I hope you don’t get any pictures taken with Kerry and Edwards. Those two are just terrible.” or something like that. My brother started a blog, which actually, I’m quite proud of, even though I think he’s barking up the wrong tree.

Not to get off on too much of a tangent, but the whole “Liberal media telling me how to live my life” thing misses a much larger concern – “corporations (which care about one thing only – profit) are running the entire show”. I started to try to share my opinion on the site, but found it was really time consuming and I’ve got things that feel much more pressing to me. even though I wanted to support him by engaging him on his site.

Anyway (saving that tangent for later), it felt good to share myself with my family and to stop hiding out. It’s not that I consider myself a liberal and them a conservative. I just use different language to describe the same experiences, and I think that gets to be troublesome for my family and thus for me. It also felt really great to acknowledge my love for them, and the constant, deep and abiding love I feel from each of them whenever we’re together or talking on the phone or whatever.

the keyword for me lately is paradox. On the one hand, that email felt like a release. And at the same time, it felt like a huge deepening to be sharing myself with them.

And another really important factor is that I really want people to send the film to their conservative families. How can that REALLY happen when I haven’t cleared the way in my own family? I’m already seeing people sharing it in their classrooms and churches all around the world. But as of a few minutes ago, my family’s going to hear it from me.