Every so often I return home and spend the weekend with my family. I live about two hours south of the town where I grew up, which is in north central Louisiana. But after leaving home, I made a living among the Cajuns of South Louisiana.
When I go home, one of the activities that I really enjoy most (and it’s an activity that my wife dislikes) is a cigar with my father. He picked up this enjoyment of cigars later in life (I think it was sometime in the last five or ten years), and he’s really kind of found himself enjoying the occasional cigar to cap off an evening.
Where I live we have a very good cigar shop that I like to go to. The owner is very knowledgeable, and in fact, when my dad had mentioned how he used to love the smell of his grandfather’s pipe, that ended up being my Christmas gift to my dad – the owner of this shop was able to recommend a pipe with sweeter-smelling pipe tobacco that can kind of mimic those memories from the past. But actually, I’ve discovered that when we go out to the back patio on the evenings I visit, I will use the pipe because I find that it’s kind of a sweeter, milder flavor.
But when my dad and I are enjoying a cigar or the pipe, and when we’re sipping a bourbon, Irish whiskey, or whatever the spirit of the evening is, we tend to talk about not necessarily the things that I write about or talk about here, but we talk about some of the greater issues in society. He’s an avid reader of just about all things, and between his work-life reading and his personal reading, he can talk about almost anything. He has a perspective as a small business owner as a financial planner, and I have experience as a journalist and a teacher and somebody who reads a lot and studies a lot of these things in society as part of my job, so between us we can have a lengthy conversation on just about any issue.
A lot of my political ideology probably (unintentionally) comes from him. While I am pretty conservative in most of what I believe, it can sometimes be harder to pin him down. He is not an ideologue for either side. I would say that he is center-right, and I would say that he is more conservative than not, but there are times when the conservative side gets a little too crazy and a little too extreme for him (and I don’t blame him – I sometimes feel the same way).
These evenings that we have, these conversations with my dad, help me realize that this is the type of dialogue that I am most often searching for. I don’t like the extreme partisan rhetoric. I never have. There are things that I get passionate about. You can listen to that on my radio show, and clearly tell that I get passionate about things like the fentanyl crisis, education reform, etc.
But for the most part, I look for dialogue and discussion, because I know that, at the end of the day, when society comes together and we come to an agreement, that’s when society moves forward. It doesn’t necessarily require cigars and pipes and whiskey, but all too often it really feels like we culturally don’t sit down and have a chat. Sure, around the holidays we’re told “Here’s how you should talk to your crazy uncle about this political issue.” That’s not right, though. That’s not what we shouldn’t be doing.
What we should do is we should have a conversation.
It’s a conversation that can be just like the average “Hey did you see the big game last night?” except it can be “What do you think about this stuff going on in Florida?” or “What do you think about this stuff going on in Washington D.C.?” The best conversations about politics I’ve ever had have been conversations that aren’t about ideology but about reactions to what’s going on in the news and just how crazy some of it comes across. They are conversations about how can we fix the craziness – not even fix the problems, but just fix the insanity.
More and more, I’m becoming convinced that what we really need to do is sit down and have a chat. Maybe you do need to light up a Rocky Patel Vintage ’99 Connecticut. Maybe you do need to sip from a glass of Basil Hayden every now and then. Or maybe it’s just a meal. Every once in a while, just break bread with some folks in your neighborhood. Or some family members you haven’t spoken to in a while. Or your group of friends.
Don’t ruin the mood by going straight to politics, but if they go right into that arena, and they’re getting very passionate about it, back away for a moment. We don’t need to go right into the passionate preaching, because we don’t quite know the perspectives and experiences of the people around us. We should talk and get to know one another because, ultimately, I think the only way we fix what’s going on, that deep rot in our society, is to have a friendly chat about what is it that we can agree on and how do we move forward on it.
I’ve become convinced that we cannot move on because we’re not willing to take a deep breath, calm down and have a chat over a drink and a cigar.
