Imagine having a conversation with three family members, often two at the same time, as they inflate a remark about a specific perspective of a specific detail (e.g. Park Police says smoke grenades, instead of tear gas, were used to push back protesters) into a full blown argument going six different directions because they
thought that you were trying to be argumentative and defend what happened "because of the way [you] sounded" when you only said the thing without any accompanying argument in a conversation about what had happened in the first place, complaining about you being disrespectful for raising your voice as they dogpile you and consistently respond to arguments that
you never made.
Imagine being told that wanting to verify what you see or hear when you don't understand the "why" behind it and aren't able to merely trust your eyes (e.g. smoke grenades being thrown at protesters-- what happened? Did anything happen anywhere else? Was there something that wasn't noticed? We don't know who ordered what, or if anyone ordered anything, at the time it happened?) is something that only psychotic people feel while having it stressed out to you that you
saw what happened, you
saw! Because it's not like I'm actually there.
No, these aren't even issues specific to the reactions about the protests-- this is regular family BS that I deal with, just happening to occur in these conversations. They have concerns about me but keep trying to have conversations with people that aren't in the room, or
assume I'm saying something I'm clearly not for reasons that have nothing to do with what I actually say, or dogpile me while forcing me to talk in 3-4 different directions. I can't even say "black people are disproportionately represented in violent crime such that they commit the majority of it" without first meeting "no, that's not true", showing the stats, and then having a conversation about the exoneration rates of these cases with someone who himself has no true scope of that as if he didn't deny that those were the stats to begin with, while also trying to act like I'm saying black people are more predisposed to violence and that that's what people would get from those stats and I should be thinking about what builds those stats
as if I didn't repeatedly say.
It's tiring.
Just a word of advice, I really advice against sharing counter-revolutionary opinions with anyone during this. Not with coworkers, not with friends not with family.
Don't do anything that could get you labeled as a counter-revolutionary
Go even further. Don't say anything. Even being expository will incite everyone.