External Challenge at the Holiday Table

Thanksgiving is coming up next week. We’re going to be stuck with a lot of family members having weird conversations that none of us want to have. So I’m going to tell you a story about my mom.
My mom is smart, college-educated, and generally a good person. We have had our issues, not gonna lie, but a lot of that is rectified by having space between us. While she’s just progressive of center in a lot of ways, there’s still a lot of Southern Baptist Conservative in her that she’s never bothered shaking.
So she’s in the situation where she’ll read something online or get fed a news story, then take it at face value and never do any additional research. Multiple times she’s describing an article she’s read, and I’m sitting here thinking “none of what you’re describing makes any sense.” But I can’t just say that. That’s not actually effective. What I have to do instead is this long chain of questions to lead to a conclusion.
“Where did you read that?”
“This particular element doesn’t feel right to me.”
“Let’s look up the article and verify what you’re talking about.”
“Did anyone else report on this? Maybe there’s another side to the story?”
And very often we find an answer at the bottom of these questions. It was actually a shared Facebook post that hadn’t been factually verified. The article reporting on the issue is from a site with an extreme bias. Additional cross-referencing sheds more light on the issue.
The biggest problem I’ve had with her is getting her to trust her own instincts. She was relaying an article to me about a principal withholding SAT scores (the details as she described them elude me, now). She’s a retired teacher. Education is an area in which she has a level of expertise. I pointed out to her that unless there had been a dramatic change in how the SAT is handled, the thing she was describing was physically impossible. She then admitted it had seemed strange at the time. So she had the suspicion that what she was reading wasn’t correct yet still passed it on as fact to me.
If she had read the article, clocked it as odd, then brought it up to me to verify her suspicions, that would be a whole different thing. That’s a step in the independent fact-checking train. But that wasn’t how she couched the conversation. She was coming from a place of having already decided that this thing she had read was absolute truth.
We’ve been through something similar when it comes to just general media analysis.
There was a book series she was reading that was composed of different arcs. At the start of one of the arcs, they introduced a gay couple. My mom brought this up as a complaint because it seemed “unnecessary.” Now, my mom has actual gay friends in real life. She was an unwitting beard a few times as a teen in the sixties. I’m queer. She’s met my queer friends. We watched Will and Grace together growing up. But she still views things LGBTQIA+ with a level of abstraction and compartmentalization, sometimes.
So I found myself in the position where I had to ask her, in kinder words, “what exactly do you mean?”
And it took a looooong time to get there, but despite her focus on the gayness of this couple, that wasn’t actually her concern. The previous arcs of the series didn’t have any romance, and she had liked that. She liked that everyone was platonic. The presence of any kind of couple had ruined that for her. That’s what she meant by “unnecessary.” I was the first person she had ever had to articulate this to, though. She had never had to put her thoughts “on paper,” so to speak, so they weren’t well-organized.
But this is also kind of the underlying issue with my mom’s current consumption of media. She doesn’t have anyone to actually have these conversations with regularly except for me. Her work hours are different than my dad, so they don’t have a lot of time for these sorts of conversations, anymore. My sister just doesn’t really have any interest in more complex discussions about current culture. Mom doesn’t have any friends she hangs out with regularly. She’s not in online discussion forums. She doesn’t have a book club. She doesn’t have consistent coworkers.
She doesn’t have anyone to talk out her opinions to. And with no external sounding board, she doesn’t get the feedback to force her to actually think about her thoughts and feelings and media assessments.
And that’s something we overlook when we talk about family members with crazy opinions. If you’ve never been challenged, you’ve never had to justify your position. If you’ve never had to justify your position, you’ve never had to really think about it.
If you’ve never really had to think about it, has your worldview ever been properly vetted?