I've Spent Years Educating You

In Which I Watch An Awful TikTok

File: The modern devil, his play between the false and the good; (1903) (14779320921).jpg - Wikimedia Commons

I am super late today because whatever I wrote yesterday didn’t make any sense to me this morning. Also, I watched something in the wee small hours that made me feel very sad and appalled. I managed to find it on TikTok, and so it should be watchable without you having to go to some other place, also saving me the trouble of transcribing it:

@majoreyerollThe entire interview ended up being an hour long. I was absoutely frazzled the entire interview because he tried leaving when I pulled out the questions and camera. The last time we spoke I told him that before I’d ever even consider ending no contact with him, would be this interview. Once I threatened to block him and go right back to no contact, he told me I had fifteen minutes before he would leave. With over an hour long worth of questions in front of me I started to panic. I had to argue with him to do the interview and get this documentation. I felt like the majority of the interview he was telling me what I wanted to hear. He was consistently excusing himself. I haven’t fully processed it yet and it’s been almost two weeks since the interview. Of course with my luck right after this I was bombed with major news. I don’t feel real, this video doesn’t feel real. I can’t believe this was the family I was born into. If I ever end up editing and posting the full video it’ll have to be on YouTube since it’s so long. I don’t know even know if I can, I had to offload all my apps to edit and post this 10 minute video. If the video didn’t make it clear, I’m so embarrassed that I’m related to him. Right after I shut the camera off he told me “I need to get over my fear of being sick”. I’ve been masking and social distancing since 2020, to my knowledge I have not had Covid. I’ve been sick once since then and it was because I was living with my anti masker aunt, she got me sick. Masking and social distancing works, Ive been making it clear for years that I can never have a relationship with with him if he doesn’t face mask. He hasn’t unlearned anything I’ve educated him on. He’s still clearly a misogynistic,eugenicist, racist, fascist. I’ll be continuing no contact because change starts at home, what we allow in our own lives. #interview #documentation #capitalism #capitalismsucks #queer #maskup #disabled #humanrights #anticapitalism #communism #nocontact #triggerwarnning #republicans #democrats #fascist #brainwashed #toxicfamily

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If you don't want to watch it, it is an angry and confused ten minutes of a young person berating her 82-year-old grandfather over his political affiliation—he had always been a republican—and for voting for Mr. Trump. He ought to have loved her enough to change his politics and to understand that he was wrong. And yet he would not. She acknowledged that he was doing something, but it was not enough.

The line that struck me as most unhinged was: “I’ve spent years educating you.” It comes kind of out of the blue and seems unconnected to anything else she says. The long description she has with this video concludes with this:

He hasn’t unlearned anything I’ve educated him on. He’s still clearly a misogynistic, eugenicist, racist, fascist. I’ll be continuing no contact because change starts at home, what we allow in our own lives.

If you try to boil down everything she says, it would be that he must change everything about himself to suit her, otherwise he doesn’t “love her unconditionally.” It seems, from the tone of voice, that the grandfather has already gone a long distance to try to mollify his granddaughter, to understand her point of view, and has agreed that our whole political system is broken. But it is insufficient. He must “change”—that nebulous and ill-defined ideal of this age. She set about to “educate” him about his need to change, and yet he continued not to bend all the way to her preferred vision of the good.

I wondered to myself, as I listened, if I might be too hard on the young. Do I learn from people at different stages of life? I am fixed in some kind of sclerotic space where the young are always dumb, and I am always right? I spent about thirty seconds on that thought and then discarded it, for three times this week I have been surprised and delighted by what other people have said—a young child, a young adult, and a person older than me. In each case, though my mind wasn’t blown apart, because that would actually be weird, yet I gained new insight about the world. If, on the other hand, someone such as the young person in the TikTok had come at me in such a fashion, I would have cut that person off at the pass. I might say something like, ‘I love you very much, but you’re not being serious. When you are serious, then we can talk. But no, I’m not going to let you berate me for an hour about capitalism, which is the least of your problems.’ I might then also go on to apologize for being a bad grandparent for ever having given her the impression that she could have ever spoken to me that way.