I suppose one thin silver lining to the horrific rise of the far-right across the globe is that it’s pushing my parents further left.

My mom was always left-leaning, but these days she’s digging into feminist and socialist theory, and cares enough about trans people that she’s in no danger of falling into the TERF pipeline.

My dad always was and still is fairly apolitical, but had enough right-winger friends that sometimes he’d just randomly have some really surprisingly callous or bigoted takes on things despite generally being a pretty gentle, open-minded person and also having a lot of immigrant friends. These days he’s so horrified and morbidly fascinated by everything happening around Trumpism, American Republicans, conservatives in general, and conspiracy theorists (and especially horrified about how his sister and niece have become antivaxxer conspiracy nuts who support the trucker convoy, and that a fair few people in his social circles are supporting the convoy as well.) that these days he’s listening to/watching a lot of left-wing podcasts and commentary shows, and listening more to the perspectives of his immigrant friends, and it’s changing his mind about a lot of the more fiscally- and occasionally socially-conservative views he’d sort of unquestioningly taken before. I’d say at the very least he’s moved from dead centrist to liberal, which is nice to see.

My younger brother had a brief conservative-leaning-or-at-least-centrist phase right after he got out of high school, but these days he’s pretty solidly on the left and, similarly to my dad, is keeping up with a lot of news and commentary about the convoy and . . . *gestures broadly at everything*. He’s been enjoying watching people troll the convoy, and he thinks it’s funny watching the convoy people try to organise themselves because, as he describes it, “It’s a bunch of people who don’t want to be told what to do, trying to tell each other what to do.”

I guess it’s just nice to know that my immediate family members are the kinds of people who generally try their best to care about other people, and who are willing to keep learning and growing as they get older rather than getting stuck in their ways. I feel proud of them for it, and it also gives me hope that I’ll keep learning and growing as I get older, too.