What do I do?

What do I do?

What do I say?

What do I say?

You know, there's a desire to connect, and we do have opinions and want to talk about the world, and yet we can't do it in a way that doesn't end up with yelling, hanging up, you know, swearing the other person off, or overall just feeling crappy and feeling...

I mean, angry is one thing, but also just sad. I think disappointed that we can't find a way to talk about this.

Welcome to How To. I'm Amanda Ridley.

I don't know about the rest of you, but sometimes I get pretty annoying when I get added to a big group chat or email chain, and my phone just started blowing up with memes and forwards and jokes.

Before I guess this week, that sound fills them with an extra dose of dread.

I have a family situation, a pickle, you might say, that I'm hoping y'all can help us out with today, that deals with political emails and fathers.

That's Jen Brandell. She's a friend of mine who I've worked with on a couple different projects, and she's also a journalist from Chicago who co-founded Harkin, a company that helps organizations listen and connect better with their audiences.

Which is to say, Jen is a pro at communicating. One of the best I know, which is why it is so frustrating to her that she and her brother Todd get these email forwards from their dad that leave them occasionally baffled and frequently fuming.

Hi, I'm Todd. I'm 45 years old, married with a daughter. I mean, software development, and very much have strong political opinions and find myself getting into passionate and dispassionate arguments with family and friends all the time.

Overall, Jen and Todd describe their family as pretty tight-knit.

We all get along well, and I'm grateful for that. We all get along well most of the time, I should say.

And my dad is someone who is very extroverted, he's very Mr. Party guy, and he's someone who likes to send us political articles that oftentimes not only don't align with our worldview, but are actively either...

I don't know if I should say racist, because it can be, but they are really upsetting. And we end up getting into it over email or over text or over phone. I have hung up on my dad before, which I'm not proud of.

And I personally have kind of decided to just give up and not talk about any of this stuff with him. I've asked him to take me off of his emails that he sent, which he hasn't done.

Now you might be wondering, what are these emails?

Well, they usually start out with pretty benign subject lines like food for thought.

Then the body of the email is a slanted piece of commentary often written to provoke the kind of thing your own family members might post on Facebook.

Most recent forward from their dad had the subject line, I used to be a normal person, and it starts out like this.

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