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My three-year-old daughter, my brother, and I flew back east to my parents' house for a friend's wedding. This was over Labor Day weekend. When we boarded the plane, there had been no food and water drops in New Orleans and Bush was still on vacation. Since my parents have been Rush Limbaugh listeners for years, (I still remember the time, several years ago, when my mother told me about a new cable news network she had started watching because it wasn't "liberal" like CNN), I knew that I needed to avoid any discussion of current events and politics.
The first night we were there, my daughter and I woke up to the sound of my father screaming at my brother at the top of his lungs "You're stupid! You're stupid! You're stupid!" My father, it seems, had decided he wanted to discuss politics after all.
In talking about it afterward, my brother and I realized that the most disturbing part was not the fact that we disagreed about the politics, it was the fact that our father had been conditioned to believe it was acceptable to bully, threaten, and intimidate people. I said, "It's not even about respect. It's about treating us with simple common courtesy." We have since made it clear to him that should he ever behave in that way toward us again, we will immediately remove ourselves from the situation until he is capable of acting like a rational person (As I say with my toddler, "You need to calm your body down now"-- the behavior parallels are amazing).
I've also used the parental blocking feature on my cable box to lock out Fox News on my TV. I may have to do the same to my parents' sets the next time I visit.
