Just in time for Thanksgiving, op-ed explores the wedge politics has driven through the middle of many families

Teri Carter

Thanksgiving can be a political minefield for family members who hold vastly different opinions, but this op-ed from a rural Kentucky writer offers a note of hope about love overcoming politics.

Teri Carter, a self-described liberal feminist, hadn't spoken to her Trump-loving father in Missouri since about a month after Trump's inauguration. "He posted a Ku Klux Klan meme on his Facebook page. I demanded he take it down. He refused. I insisted. He unfriended me. Then he stopped calling. I stopped visiting. And that was that," Carter writes for The Washington Post.

But Carter drove to rural southeast Missouri earlier this month because her stepmother has late-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The visit forced Carter and her father to talk, and they were able to find common ground on many topics.

"How happy I am to be with my dad after those three lost years. And lost over what? Yet I know I am not alone," Carter writes. "How many loved ones have you stopped calling, blocked, unfollowed or unfriended? How many friends and family members do you simply avoid these days, choosing to skip your niece’s wedding or make other plans for the holidays? How many of you, like me, just stopped going home?"