Tag Archives: politics

Age Can Help Us Resist Tribal Thinking

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“I’ve learned how to say ‘no.’”

“I no longer spend time with people who drain my energy or don’t interest me.”

“I’ve quit over-filling my calendar.”

“I am trying to focus on what matters in the time I have left.”

Declarations like these are common among young-old women like me, who built careers in an era with few social supports, who have raised children or seen their parents to their graves, who once viewed multi-tasking as a virtue and wore their stress on their sleeves. Women who led purposeful lives for decades.

Photo by Mehdi Merzaie on Unsplash

Now, many of us achievers in our 60s are seeking how best to spend our golden years — how to make a difference and live a life of meaning while our health still holds. For me, that means becoming more discerning about where I choose to volunteer and when to stand up for my point of view.

Since retiring, finally, in September, I’ve been digging deeper into the causes I already support — reproductive rights and food insecurity — and investigating where else I want to spend my time. That has brought me up against a different sort of challenge: Where to turn and what to say when my views run counter to the ethics of my chosen community and the causes and political leaders I support. Where can I safely speak my truth?

Case in point: I was delighted to volunteer for Planned Parenthood North Central States’ first booth at the Minnesota State Fair on Labor Day earlier this year. But I was mortified when I picked up my light-blue T-shirt in advance and saw the list down the front of what the organization — and supposedly the wearer — stands for. “I’m for birth control, sex education and gender-affirming care” all ring true for me. I can wear that across my chest in public.

But “I’m for abortion”? No, I don’t promote it. What I have marched, volunteered and donated money for since the days when we thought Roe v. Wade would never fall is the protection and expansion of abortion rights. That’s the language I wanted on the T-shirt. When I proposed that to the young staff member in charge of our booth, she said the movement wants to remove any stigma or sense of shame from the practice of abortion. I see her point, but I also saw the quickly averted glances while I walked around the fairgrounds. And Planned Parenthood needs supporters these days, not skeptics.

More significant than what others thought of me is how the T-shirt made me feel. I wore it home, forgot to change and let my husband take a photo of me holding our infant grandson beneath the words “I’m for abortion.” After that, I just gave the shirt away.

A woman in a Planned Parenthood T-shirt holds her infant grandson.
Amy and Arthur
The Planned Parenthood booth at the Minnesota State Fair.
Minnesota State Fair

An agnostic seeking answers

Binary thinking dominates our yes-or-no, right-or-wrong, polarized society. Am I willing to lurk in the shadows between the black and white, or can I dare to lead a life in living color? By speaking up about my nuanced views on, say, trans women in sports — or countering a local activist whom I believe is unfairly maligning a mayoral candidate in our upcoming election — might I be banished from my tribe, the network of colleagues and left-leaning friends that I have cultivated since my 20s?

I am trying to find the line between honesty and provocation, between truth telling and egocentric mansplaining (yes, women do it, too). Recently, I had a chance to test this out.

“Dear Neighbors,” began the note, delivered quietly to my mailbox on a sunny fall day. “I belong to a community organizing group called Isaiah. Your yard signs have encouraged me to think that you might be interested in one or both of these community events.”

The yard signs that I had out on my corner lot included:

  • “All Are Welcome Here” by my well-tended Little Free Library;
  • A “Vote Yes” sign for the public-school referendum in St. Paul, where we homeowners already are overtaxed but feel obliged to support our underfunded schools; and
  • A “Safer Summit” sign to promote a multi-million-dollar off-road bike trail on the city’s signature street, which many who live on Summit Avenue ardently oppose.

My neighbor, whom I don’t know well, had the courtesy to sign her pitch. She is among a handful of people who have pointed me toward the good work Isaiah does in our community, including its calls for a transition to clean energy and “dignified wages” for childcare professionals. Still, as an unchurched agnostic — one who believes in a higher power but doesn’t claim to know its shape or origin — I resist Isaiah’s religious orientation.

I emailed my neighbor a week or so later. No liberal can rightly argue with racial and economic equality, I told her, and Isaiah’s call for a “collective voice” is a smart strategy that conservatives have long employed — but I can’t move past the organization’s faith-based roots. I signed off by urging the woman to “keep up the good fight.”

As of this writing, she has not responded, and that’s unfortunate, because it shuts down any opportunity for mutual understanding.

No Kings rally, Minneapolis
October 18, 2025

Tribal thinking discourages dialogue

“Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes,” goes a famous quote by Gray Panthers founder Maggie Kuhn. I didn’t think about my personal safety when I took the light-rail train to Minneapolis on a sunny Saturday morning in October to join 100,000 people in a No Kings rally. Opposing the policies of Donald Trump felt that important.

Nor did I hesitate recently to display a yard sign calling on the City of Saint Paul to reinstitute its common-sense restrictions on student housing in our neighborhood, even though people with whom I often politically align oppose it. The state’s largest private university is five blocks away. Having served as that institution’s director of neighborhood relations for eight years, I know firsthand that the Student Housing Overlay District — since undone by a pro-density City Council — saved this area from being overrun by noise, trash, property crimes and ill-kept rentals.

Age has granted me more freedom to speak my truth. I’m less fearful about what other people think, or at least I can dial back my anxiety more quickly. I no longer have employers to please or any fear about my causes blowing back on them (which volunteering with Planned Parenthood did when I worked for a Catholic institution).

But I still can’t shake the niggling insecurity that speaking out on hot topics may alienate some members of my tribe or get me pilloried on social media.

Part of that fear relates to the reality that my views are moderating with age, even as my party moves farther left. Thirty days into the government shutdown — and in full support of keeping healthcare costs within reach for all Americans — I think the Democrats, my party, have played their hand and lost. Congress needs to do the people’s business again or give up their own paychecks in solidarity with sidelined workers.

Must I blast that out on social media and then fervently check my feeds to see who “likes” me and who doesn’t? As courageous as I like to think I am, that isn’t how I want to expend my energy.

“Humans, like animals, are pack animals,” says a January 2025 article in Psychology Today called “Tribalism: How to Be Part of the Solution, Not the Problem.” People naturally want to align with a group, to feel less alone, which is why demonstrations like No Kings are momentarily empowering — even if no lasting change takes place.

The article challenges us, however, not to let the emotional exhilaration of tribalist belonging overtake research and rational thought. Among the “difficult questions” that author John G. Cottone, Ph.D., asks readers to explore are these:

  • “Do I know how to recognize the propaganda of my own tribe, and resist it when I see it?”
  • “Do I pursue multiple perspectives on important issues with intellectual honesty — or do I only solicit my own tribe’s political perspective?”
  • “Do I have compassion for everyone on the road of truth, even those who are walking today where I walked yesterday?”
Fabricio Severo, Unsplash
Parker Johnson, Unsplash

As I prepare to vote in my city’s off-year election — casting a ballot for mayor and the school funding initiative, as well as monitoring the contentious Minneapolis mayoral race across the river — I won’t be in full alignment with the bike-riding, urbanist activists, my tribal pack, who are posting lengthy arguments on Bluesky and Facebook about how they plan to vote and why.

Disagreeing with people with whom you normally align is uncomfortable, uneasy. But in this case, speaking out will mean casting a secret ballot and having the confidence to recognize where and how to use my voice.

The Morning After . . . and What Comes Next

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None of us saw this coming.

The morning after a presidential election that will go down in history for its sweeping affirmation of a “me first” brand of nationalist politics, I was doing what I do every morning: walking my two dogs. After crossing a busy street, the dogs were straining at their expandable leashes as we approached a person in a black trench coat.

“Two dogs behind you!” I yelled. As we passed the individual, I turned and explained, “We didn’t want to scare you.” And then, exhausted from a 15-hour shift as a poll worker the previous day and after a night when, again, I got too little sleep, I said: “It’s a dark morning today.”

The person, a young adult of indeterminate gender, looked over and apparently judged me to be safe. “I’m trans,” they said, “and I’m terrified.”

My eyes filled with tears as I put a gloved hand to my heart. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I am so, so sorry.” As they moved on, I called out, “Be well,” and we exchanged a look of compassion and understanding that has been replicated many times in my liberal urban neighborhood during this awful, incomprehensible week.

“I wouldn’t want this man for my neighbor, let alone my president,” said the owner of an antiques store two blocks from my house as he unlocked his front door. He told me he had read the Gettysburg Address right before the election and lamented that the days of a president with the intellect, humanity and foresight of Abraham Lincoln were clearly long past.

“Government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Indeed. We liberals and progressives misjudged what the people wanted.

At my husband’s request, I returned the “No Project 2025” sign to my next-door neighbor, who had handmade a number of them for people’s yards. “I don’t want us to be a target,” my husband said, and I understood immediately. The Harris/Walz sign in our dining room window, however, remains. My virtue signaling, yes; my small rebellion.

On PBS NewsHour last night, which I watch every Friday for the analysis of journalists David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart, former anchor and sometime reporter Judy Woodruff checked in again with voters whom she had interviewed throughout the fall.

The economy and immigration were key themes, as they were among the majority of Americans who voted for Donald Trump, but identity politics and fear came up as well:

  • A middle-aged Black man said when he woke up the day after the election, “it was a feeling of, ‘Here we go again.’ We’re moving back in time.”
  • A young white man said he supported Trump because he is tired of being blamed. “Being male and white in recent years, we’ve been told that we’re the problem in society. . . . Everyone who’s oppressed, quote-unquote, is being oppressed by white men.” He said Trump ran against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives “meant to lower the amount of white men in any sphere.”
  • A person who identifies as nonbinary, gave birth to a child and is married to a woman said they are “very concerned that legally my marriage may be dissolved” and that their wife ultimately could lose “legal rights to our son.”
  • Reflecting my own identity, one woman described herself as “an older, post-menopausal, white, retired woman.” She may not personally feel the effects of changing social policies, she explained, but her friends’ transgender children and her married lesbian niece likely will.

These thoughts echo the conversations and text exchanges I have had throughout this week. When I told my friend David, a retired attorney, that the three liberal justices on the U.S. Supreme Court “better hang on by their toes,” he took a different view. Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, the two oldest conservative members of the high court’s six-person super majority, will retire “within two years,” he said, “while they still have a strong [U.S.] Senate.” Trump will appoint replacements “who are 40 years old,” cementing that super majority for decades.

Mary, a friend and former colleague whose family background mirrors mine, right down to our Republican attorney fathers, called the afternoon after the election while I was soothing myself in a bubble bath. “I’m white, straight, a legal citizen, non-trans, educated and in a good financial situation,” she told me. “I’m aware that others will suffer far more.”

My spiritual advisor, a socially liberal and politically active minister, put the same thought into stark historic terms: “This will be bad for others before it’s bad for us,” she said. “We have to be the good Germans now.”

It was such a hopeful 107 days. As a proud Minnesota DFLer, I reveled in Vice President Kamala Harris’ choice of Governor Tim Walz as her running mate in early August. The spirit of joy in the early days of their all-too-brief campaign (see my previous thoughts on President Joe Biden) was infectious and electrifying — and the prospect that Walz could introduce my state’s progressive agenda to the nation had me more optimistic than I have been since the Dobbs decision shut down women’s fundamental right to bodily autonomy in June 2022.

I am struggling to regain that optimism now. Some 53% of white women voted for Donald Trump, a convicted rapist whose political career should have ended when he bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy” back in 2016. His blatantly sexist (and racist and xenophobic) comments have only gotten more pronounced since then.

One conservative female columnist pushed back against those of us who would castigate white women for not caring enough about abortion rights or the significance of electing the country’s first female president, when, in fact, she said, Trump “spoke directly to voters’ top concerns.”

My top concern is short-term thinking. That the cost of a gallon of milk or a gallon of gas ultimately matters more than the loss of climate protections and democratic freedoms — including Trump’s promised mass deportations of “illegal aliens” and retribution against his “enemies,” and the threat of violence from conservative extremists when elections don’t go their way — is stunning to me. None of them has shouted the words “election fraud” this week!

On rising prices: I’d take the hit from any Trump supporter who called me privileged and middle-class, which both are true, if it weren’t for the photo of a jubilant, bejeweled blonde in West Palm Beach adorning that conservative writer’s column to illustrate the president-elect’s female support.

‘I don’t recognize the America I live in,” I wrote on Facebook on Wednesday, November 6. But here we are. He got elected, his coattails extending to Republican candidates across the country. My job now is to step out of the blue bubble that I live in, where 70 percent of voters in Ramsey County supported Harris/Walz, and start talking with — and listening to — people from the other side.

Among the folks who reached out to me that morning, after Wisconsin tipped the balance for a second Trump presidency, was my oldest friend, a woman I have known for 65 years. Janey was with me in the delivery room for the birth of each of my two sons. She held my mother’s hand and stroked her forehead in a memory-care center days before Mom died. Janey is as much a sister to me as my two older sisters.

Janey also is a Republican who voted for Trump, and we still love each other. “My hopes and prayers are we can come together as one nation that wants the best for our country,” she texted the morning after the election. “We can move on from this. We can be gracious to one another no matter which side of the aisle one belongs. We need to love and respect each other, and to understand we all come from different backgrounds and experiences.”

I do resolve to listen and learn, rather than blaming or pointing fingers. And I resolve to keep working for equity and human rights, just as I did this election cycle: door-knocking, phone banking, writing postcards. I owe that to my younger son, who yearns to have a child. I owe it to my older son, who has left the country. And I owe it to that trans neighbor walking down the street, facing a terror I cannot know.

We are here with you.

Boomers Can Help Biden By Speaking Up About the Realities of Aging

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My then–eight-day illness coincided with President Joe Biden’s stricken performance at the first presidential debate on June 27; and so, I have been thinking about age and the limits it imposes on our energies; and how long it takes some of us to acknowledge its real impacts, as though we might have prevented our physical decline and mental slowdown. As though we are at fault.

Let’s begin with the obvious: The debate’s 9 p.m. start time in the president’s time zone is when most old people (including me) get ready for bed. He was tired! I’ve since heard that Biden had a cold that Thursday night, which explains the weak, scratchy voice. (Or was that the excuse the campaign invented?) Regardless, if Biden felt half as compromised as I have with my upper respiratory infection — when I have misspelled “horseradish” on the grocery list, run over a curb on a day when I had no business driving, repeatedly emailed “Christy” at work when I meant to send messages to “Crystal,” and committed any number of verbal gaffes with my antibiotics-addled brain — then I’d be willing to give the president a pass on his poor performance.

But I don’t think physical exhaustion explains it, unless you acknowledge it as a natural consequence of his age. That’s the conversation that anxious Democrats seem reluctant to have. Joe Biden is old. We don’t have to hide it, mock it or try to explain it away. When performing without the benefit of a teleprompter, or the psychological comfort of his team of aides, Biden acted like what he is — an 81-year-old man who is decades past his prime. And who should not be running for the most rigorous, visible and consequential job in the world.

I doubt whether Biden can be convinced to pass the baton less than two months before the Democratic convention, though the next-day New York Times column by his friend Tom Friedman made an eloquent and compassionate case for why that decision would serve the country. “[T]ime has finally caught up with him,” Friedman wrote. “And that was painfully and inescapably obvious on Thursday.”

Asked to bet today, I’d predict we are careening toward a second Trump presidency, which will be a disaster for the environment, for women’s reproductive rights, for immigrant protections, for an independent judiciary, for public-school funding and so much more. Perhaps, in the meantime, we can salvage a graceful exit for Joe Biden by ceasing to slap our foreheads and exclaim about his perfectly normal signs of aging: the shuffling gait, the search for words, the raspy voice, the stooped posture. All of which I remember from my own father’s decline, a man who, like Biden himself, had once been a sharp-minded attorney and politician, too.

As I stare down turning 67 on July 4, I am mindful that we can best locate empathy when we have experienced another person’s plight ourselves. It’s no surprise that I felt nothing but sadness for Joe Biden, who is nearly 15 years my senior, as he lumbered and stumbled onstage. I saw in him a quality that, until recently, I’ve been unwilling to see within myself — a refusal to concede to age, to recognize when it is time to step back and clear the path for younger people.

My upper respiratory infection hung on for 10 days and took two different prescriptions to kick because I had spent weeks performing like I was 20 years younger than I am. Having assured my retired husband I would scale back my work commitments this year, I instead stubbornly hung on to my two part-time jobs while taking on freelance assignments and contract work that I was afraid to turn down — all at a pace I once readily sustained. Mix too little sleep and too much multitasking with generalized stress, and you eventually get sick.

And if you’re old, you take a long time to get well.

I’ve since quit one of the part-time jobs and am scheduling my freelance work more carefully. But more than once during this extended illness, I have remarked to my husband that I tire more easily, that I must start prioritizing rest. “If that’s aging in a healthy 67-year-old,” I’d say, “how does an 81-year-old president do it?” Those comments now seem prescient, post-debate.

Neither my husband nor I is a huge Biden fan, but we are staunch Democrats and we’re afraid of Donald Trump. We’ll vote for Biden if he stays in the race and are trying to convince our Socialist older son that he should care enough to vote at all. The broader realization, however, is that we aging Boomers lack humility. We’ve been in charge for so long, during such a pivotal time in U.S. history — a period that I now recognize to be an anomaly of liberalism in a self-interested, deeply conservative country — that we can’t see our limitations and step off the stage.

We wouldn’t be in this position now if the Democratic National Committee had built a bench back when Biden was billing himself as a “transition” president, the only one who could defeat Trump in 2020. We wouldn’t be here if he had made more use of a Black female vice president whom, it appears now, he picked for show and to appease a constituency he couldn’t afford to alienate.

But here we are. The commentators who call for this clearly exhausted president to get on his feet again, prizefighter-style, to schedule interviews “in unfriendly places” and to forcefully compete are themselves still in denial. They’re asking him to summon a level of energy that most 81-year-olds cannot muster, let alone keep up between now and November.

Being this sick for this long, I have been forced to cancel appointments, to read and nap, to recognize that my body no longer will allow me to push at the edges of my energy. I can still contribute, but it’s going to have to be in different ways. Biden’s greatest gift to the country, to his family and to himself would be to make way for a successor and offer himself as the advisor and elder statesman that he deserves to be.

Some question whether the president, from his seat at the pinnacle of power, is capable of that level of self-awareness. “What was the combination of moral conviction, personal confidence and selfishness that propelled Biden, despite the risks, toward his decision to seek another term?” asked columnist David Ignatius in a Washington Post commentary that my sister shared with me the day after the debate.

To say that Biden no longer is up to the job is neither to blame him nor to deny the achievements of his administration. In fact, it is ageism — a perverse sort of shame — to avoid citing his diminishing capabilities. We aging Boomers must speak publicly about the realities we are experiencing as we grow old. Only then can we demystify and make peace with this most natural, and inevitable, of life’s progressions.