true hugs

“That’s my dad!”
—Gus Walz at the DNC last night
 

It checks that con­ser­v­a­tives would be mak­ing fun of Tim and Gus Walz’s show of af­fec­tion for each oth­er.

It doesn’t sur­prise me one bit. 

Be­fore Aaron start­ed dat­ing me, his fam­i­ly didn’t hug. We’d say hel­lo or good­bye and there was no phys­i­cal in­ter­ac­tion. Just an awk­ward pos­tur­ing of bod­ies near the door­way and an avoid­ance of eye con­tact be­fore we shuf­fled off and went home. 

Af­ter a while I took a risk and start­ed giv­ing them hugs and they grad­u­al­ly be­gan ini­ti­at­ing them. Aaron him­self even had to get bet­ter about just be­ing hugged or me need­ing to hug and hold him. 

It’s one thing if some­one just isn’t a hug­ger and I re­spect that but this is a whole oth­er is­sue en­tire­ly. There’s a lot you can take away from a fam­i­ly that shows no phys­i­cal af­fec­tion what­so­ev­er.

I’ve heard sto­ries from my sis­ter in law about the very real mile­stones my moth­er in law ne­glect­ed to no­tice or even ask about. I won’t go into them here, but let’s just say they’re Ma­jor Fail­ings on a Ba­sic Lev­el. And they’re root­ed in ex­treme Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ism and the cru­el­ty in­her­ent in mod­ern day con­ser­v­a­tive politics. 

I’ve heard my MIL say shit about home­less peo­ple that no self-pro­fessed Chris­t­ian who ac­tu­al­ly fol­lows Je­sus would ever think, let alone say. 

My FIL at­tempt­ed to tell each of his adult chil­dren what he was proud of in them and couldn’t come up with any­thing mean­ing­ful. Not a god­damn thing. 

I think he said of Aaron, “He’s good at his job.” A fa­ther should be able to say more about his son than that, es­pe­cial­ly when his son is Aaron.

                                        “Fam­i­ly values,”
                    “Chris­t­ian values,”
“Amer­i­can val­ues,”       it’s all a fuck­ing smoke screen. 

I don’t need to tell this to any­one who reg­u­lar­ly reads what I write, but it’s all fake. The peo­ple who sell it don’t ac­tu­al­ly be­lieve it and the peo­ple who buy it don’t ac­tu­al­ly em­body it. 

Rigid fun­da­men­tal­ism and far right poli­cies cre­ate peo­ple to con­trol and those with the pow­er to control. 

Any show of gen­uine emo­tion or kind­ness or em­pa­thy or vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty is met with dis­dain be­cause it’s a threat to their pow­er and their abil­i­ty to control. 

It makes peo­ple who are be­ing con­trolled (and who in turn want to con­trol oth­ers) un­com­fort­able be­cause it forces them to con­front their mis­er­able, hate­ful realities.

 

—emi­ly duchaine

Flom­mist Emi­ly Duchaine lives in the Pa­cif­ic North­west. She likes to drink mead, learn about sharks, and lis­ten to the Talk­ing Heads. She pre­tends to be a pro­fes­sion­al busi­ness­woman most days. Copy­right © 2024 Emi­ly Duchaine.

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