Time, Family, Polarization and Risk Assessment

It has become routine that every major publication runs columns, op-eds, even "hard news" pieces focusing on how political polarization has been effecting social bonds in the United States. The tenor these columns and op-eds have taken is one of either trying to cajole or guilt people the writer characterizes as liberal either not cut off contact with or to re-establish contact with people in their families who are right wing.

At this point, if one desired, I have no doubt a few hours of research would reveal one of these every month, if not one per week, going at least as far back as 2016, if not to 2015. It's become one of the news industries favorite genre of column.

The latest of these was published in The New York Times on July 13, 2025, written by David Litt. This one is in the form of a personal anecdote, about the initial shunning of a the writers brother-in-law, followed by the hesitant establishment of friendship, based on a shared interest in surfing. I am somehow not shocked Litt has written an entire book about how surfing has helped him find common ground with people. The essential point his piece is trying to make is that shunning as a form of accountability isn't working, in part due to social media. If you shun a family member, and they can just find other people to replace you, what's the point?

I have a different perspective, a different theory, that I haven't seen splashed across the pages of major publications on a regular basis.

Family, as a concept, is a potent political symbol. Conservatism has tried to portray itself as the sole, righteous protector and supporter of the nuclear family (which it uses as interchangeable with the phrase "traditional" family), as long as there has been a United States. In fact, every political movement has claimed its desire to support and protect "family," in one way or another. Conservatives describe it as sacred, and they're not alone in this. A more recent development in conservatism is the mainstreaming of referring to the "traditional" family as the centerpiece of Western civilization. Where that had long been a claim they made amongst themselves, they're now making in a declarative sense, to everyone, as if it were indisputable fact, and ignoring that they have a specific, and not universal definition of "traditional." This has been accompanied by the proliferation of these pieces castigating anyone who sees fit to shun family or other members of their community to haven't defected from the conservative movement. At this point, I'm not going to argue about whether the conservative movement in the United States is fascist, because I have five working senses, a conscious mind, and a grasp on the history of authoritarianism which isn't superficially based only in its use as a rhetorical device. Dear Reader, I imagine you are not a seven year old.

It's the proliferation of these pieces I'm interested in, in contrast with another piece of US history, and its social reality. Just about every city in the nation has a long established, entrenched, functioning and vibrant queer community. One of the reasons these penetrate the environment of urban America, you could in fact call it a pillar of these communities, is the history of conservative American families disowning their children or actively making their lives hell, because they are queer. To this day, you can find in these communities businesses and other organizations who devote time, space, and labor to collecting resources to care for homeless queer youths. Bars, nightclubs, bookstores, coffee shops, thrift stores... they all find ways to contribute to collecting and using the resources to take care of homeless queer youths.

On top of this, the degree of time, resources and energy private citizens put into this effort would be shocking to those unfamiliar, up to and including, taking in homeless queer youths and giving them a place to live. The people engaged in these efforts know (often from hard experience) they are attempting to provide aid to a population that has been traumatized by shunning and every other form of social censure, and the degree of patience and informal organization they develop in trying to deal with the way this trauma presents itself would seem miraculous, if it weren't so prevalent, in so many places.

These communities are entrenched, they have roots, they have traditions, they have histories passed down... Those who were youths exiled from their families and/or reached the end of their willingness to be terrorized and shamed by their communities, based solely on the fact that they are queer, teach the next generation it is their responsibility to do the same when they are the adults and elders, through both word and example. This reality exists because it has been (and still is) considered "normal" for families and communities to exile and punish their children, for being queer, especially under the auspices of religious beliefs, and increasingly along the lines of political beliefs, as those queers are all part of the dreaded "left." And let's face it, the religious and the political are inseparable in US history.

This isn't a secret. It takes only the most cursory interest in queer life in the United States to be confronted with it. Whether or not one is queer, they are our fellow Americans.

So, I can't help but wonder, where have all these columnists, these pundits, politicians and talking heads been all this time? Why is it suddenly unacceptable for the sacred nature of family to be violated, based on beliefs about who deserves our time, love and energy? How is it now so terrible a threat to the cohesion of social fabric, when it hasn't been, for hundreds of years? And if you want to be apply the kind of cold, mathematical logic conservatives love to apply so often, we are all paying to care for and restore to health, the children they discard. We pay in social services, we pay in law enforcement used to criminalize homeless, we pay in lost productivity of people who've been exposed to such traumatic experiences and their instability... we all pay.

It carries further than this, doesn't it? Even among those who consider themselves allies, and truly are well meaning, often have some pushback when queer people or straight, cis people like myself try to remind the greater world that organizations like the Salvation Army discriminate against queer people in a multitude of ways. "They do so much good though..." When I hear this, I can't help think of the raw, hard fact that when compared to the percentage of queer people in the total population of the United States, queer youth are exponentially over represented among homeless youth. We extend this excuse for persecution, based on claims of religious belief, even to what we understand to be legitimate charities.

It doesn't escape me that one of the favorite arguments levied as an attempt to convince people to end the shunning of their conservative family members is that we all need to listen more. If we'd just develop the some tolerance, get out of our bubbles (bubbles this latest Times column references as reason to re-engage), we'd all understand each other a little better.

Isn't it possible what's happening, in terms of polarization, is in fact, exactly the opposite, and this issue of queer youth is just the most blatant example? There's good reason I'm not the first one to bring up the contradiction, but I don't think, beyond the baseline moral argument about hypocrisy, there's been much explanation for why this is the result of the fact that we have been listening to each other, and it is listening that drove the polarization. I also think this is why reducing so much of today's conflict to identity politics as some new fangled invention mucking up the gears of democracy, as if identity hasn't been central to the concept of politics since the dawn of civilization, is patently stupid.

Interestingly enough, David Litt, in his recent piece in the Times, touches on a bit of my theory of what's happening. Litt says that the reason he decided to stop avoiding his brother in law, was an interest in surfing and a move to a new location. He didn't know anyone else interested in surfing, and decided he'd try to get over his objections, because he needed a surfing partner. Additionally, it hadn't cost his brother-in-law anything to be shunned. He still had friends, he still had all the things it takes to make a life, basically.

This touches on my perspective, because what I think is happening, both in terms of polarization and the shunning resulting from it, is related to risk assessment.

Risk assessment is built into human consciousness, to the degree that it's happening whether we are conscious of it or not. It is so fundamental to our way of interacting with the world, it is built into our nervous systems. No matter where you are in the world, a rubber snake in an unexpected place, makes people jump. It does not matter how prevalent snakes may or may not be in their environment. Life experience, in the form of having spent time handling and learning about snakes may dull it, out of familiarity, but even then, it's 50/50 as to whether a rubber snake makes someone jump out of their skin. Why does a sudden loud noise startle us? Risk assessment.

The way we are all more likely to here discussions about risk assessment are related to financial investments. "The greater the risk, the greater the reward," is a kind of folk wisdom related to the concept of risk generally, but is generally accepted as a truism in finances too. We tend to think of the concept of investment in financial and hard material terms and resources, things you can buy, sell, measure.

In this way, time is a material resource. It can be measured, we buy and sell it, all the time. For most of us, our lives are built around how we negotiate the sale of our time and time is the resource relationships are built on, isn't it? They are an investment of time. The more time you invest in them, the more stable they're supposed to be, the less risk of losing them, the more fulfilling they are.

What does it say to the rest of us about investing in relationships with them, that this population of people who have very clearly, very loudly, made one of the centers of their public image a belief in the sanctity of family, that so many of them would so easily discard or terrorize their own children? Take into consideration, that whether or not you like the "f" word, they are also fully in support of or don't mind their leadership and public facing representatives targeting a wide range of people based on immutable traits, how does that affect the decision to invest time in that relationship? There is no realistic argument that today's right/conservative movement, is not targeting the rights of people of color, queer people, the disabled and women with fervor and a scope of ferocity that can only be mustered by the normalization of these ideas at the level of the administrative structures of the state.

What do you think the assessment is, for anyone looking at the cost/benefit and risk of investing time in a relationship with people who have consciously chosen to continue their self identification as a member of that in group as a population? Does that seem like a good investment of this resource that human existence is centered on? How stable does that investment seem, if you find these reasons to discard other human beings either arbitrary or a threat to you, personally? If you're the child, sibling, cousin of one of these people, and your child is queer or disabled, their other parent is of a different race, or you happen to begin a meaningful relationship with someone who fits any of those descriptions, what does that equation look like? If you're just perfectly open to any of those things, even if they haven't happened yet, how does that change the way you weigh the risk of investing in a relationship with someone who has demonstrated the willingness to discard or demonize people who fit these descriptions? How many of us want these to be limiting factors in the way we approach the openness of our own lives? How much is it worth to endure the scorn, the regular comments, the undermining of the fact that you decided to live a life which doesn't find people worth discarding on the arbitrary and/or immutable lines they do? If I witness this behavior toward others, am I not going to wonder how quickly it can be turned on me, and how does that affect the way I measure how worthy an investment a relationship is?

Let's not forget that for a large portion of the population, time is becoming an even more scarce resource. We are working more hours, often to bring home the same amount or less, and the cost of goods has risen faster than wages. That makes the investment of time even more risk laden, doesn't it?

What's being called polarization, is the result of a minority of the population declaring it must have power over the ability of the majority to decide how to live their lives, and the strain that is putting on every kind of bond, including social bonds like family. It is, the attempt to undo the efforts the United States has already invested in being a free society. To put this in terms of simply being politics which are not a part of people's lived experience is to put it in terms which make clear you experience a level of privilege at which you have the choice to see them in those terms. If you are disabled, the caretaker to someone who is disabled, if you are queer or love someone who is queer, if you are a person of color or find nothing lacking in the humanity of a person or people of color and want them to be part of your life and the life of the culture and nation as they would freely choose, the cost of investing in relationships with people who are either actively in favor of or don't find it troubling this is all in jeopardy, is high. There is nothing unreasonable about people assessing their sense of risk this way, unless you take at face value what the same movement undermining an open society states as the sacred nature of family, and are willing to overlook the clear contradictions to that sentiment in their own behavior.