Around the dinner table, on long car trips, maybe even just sitting around together, family members tend to share their opinions on everything from the upcoming presidential election to ?Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.?
Do the people you live with have strong opinions? Does everyone usually agree? Are there significant generational differences over certain subjects? What?
Ana Hebra Flaster, who is part of the three-generation family portrait shown above, wrote an Opinion piece about defying her parents. In ?Don?t Tell Dad, I?m Going to Cuba,? she writes:
I lied to my father, told him we were on Cape Cod when, in fact, we were bouncing around the battered streets of Havana in our friend Jos??s 1953 Chevrolet Deluxe, the one with the new Toyota engine but no working gauges on the dash. Nothing about Cuba is easy. Not the politics, not the crazy convertible peso and definitely not the getting there. But as a Cuban-American trying to connect with the last twigs of our family tree in Havana, the biggest obstacle I faced was my father?s disapproval.
My working-class parents originally supported the revolution ? my mother even sold bonds and collected medicine for the rebels. But after it triumphed, politics became the center of life, and the new society demanded daily doses of vigilantism, denunciations and repression of the self. My parents muzzled themselves, applied for permission to leave the country, waited years for it to come, and finally, in 1967, immigrated to the United States.
Now my 80-year-old father, like many older exiles, vehemently criticizes Cuban-Americans who return. Papi sees each dollar, bar of soap and laser printer we bring back to our families as power flowing into the Castro brothers? hands. When I told him I was considering a trip to Cuba, he fought hard to dissuade me, calling me daily from his home in New Hampshire. ?Don?t you see you?re keeping those bastards in power? Cuban-Americans threw $4 billion at that economy last year! You?re legitimizing their repression! After all we did to get you out, now you want to go back??
I did. Since I?d left as a 6-year-old, I?d been back only once, in 1999. I wanted to know my cousins. And now that the Obama administration had loosened some travel restrictions, I wanted my husband and son to see where I was from.
Students: Read to the end of the piece and see how this writer?s father reacts once she returns and tells him where she has been. Then tell us:
- Have you ever changed a family member?s mind about something? What happened?
- In general, how much do the different members of your family tend to agree in general?
- Are there generational differences in your family, as there is in this one? That is, do your parents or grandparents see certain topics in a way that is very different from the way you or your siblings do? Why do you think that is?
Students 13 and older are invited to comment below. Please use only your first name. For privacy policy reasons, we will not publish student comments that include a last name.
Source: http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/22/have-you-ever-changed-a-family-members-mind/
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