Mom’s Spam

“When I see a fuzzy photo of a pile of naked Iraqi prisoners who have been humiliated in what amounts to a college-hazing incident, rest assured that I don’t care,” reads one email presently circulating among America’s conservatives.

Another reports that Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack H. Obama “takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim.”

Among the politically semi-aware, screeds like these are the new chain mail. Their viral propagation makes them an incredibly powerful means of preaching to the choir.

When it comes to winning converts, however, the missives fall short of being compelling, particularly when they wind up in the inboxes of college students who are active members of left-leaning campus organizations. Alas, that doesn’t keep these kids’ parents from sending them unwelcome bits of political wisdom. Over and over again.

Each of the two e-mails quoted above made their way to members of the Harvard College Democrats last week. They were each sent by friends and relatives back home who were apparently unwilling to watch their kin slide freely into Harvard’s pinko leftist abyss.

I think it’s fair to assume that a lot more people leave Harvard with liberal political views than arrive here that way. Surrounded by left-wing peers, taught by left-wing professors, and bombarded with the campus media’s left-wing bias, it’s more than a little difficult to graduate with the ability to say “family values,” “trickle-down effect,” or “the invisible hand” with a straight face.

(I’m sure there are some Harvard students who make it through four years without becoming pretentious ivory tower liberals like the rest of us. But you don’t tend to meet those people writing for The Crimson.)

Parents seem to be acutely aware of what sort of environment their children are entering when they come to Harvard. Amid all the usual anxieties about their kids’ growing up and moving out—will they succeed, will they make friends, will the linens I ordered from Ikea be long enough, and so on—there’s an extra fear for some.

Will my son come home a liberal?

Joshua D. Smith ’08 did precisely that. A native of Plant City, Florida—the Winter Strawberry Capital of the World—Smith left home with his conservative credentials intact, and returned having been elected co-chair of the Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Supporters Alliance (BGLTSA). But the e-mails preaching the right-wing gospel have kept on coming.

“The problem with these e-mails is that they comprise about 50 percent of the e-mails from my family and family friends,” Smith says. He has a hard time appreciating the family pictures, jokes, and anecdotes that make the trip from Plant City to ever-so-liberal Cambridge, when they’re overshadowed by the vitriolic diatribes that arrive with them.

“The e-mails I get that make false/racist views of the war in Iraq and the Muslim community here and abroad aggravate me to no end,” Smith says. “This makes me want to request that they stop sending me e-mails of that nature, but I don’t want to lose my connection with them any more than I already have by coming out to them as a—gasp—liberal.”

It’s a precarious—and frightening—balance for many Harvard students. Alienating one’s parents is at best an unsavory prospect, but dealing with waves of political junk mail from them isn’t much more appealing. Some send angry responses, some ask their families to cut it out, and others simply ignore the e-mails entirely. I fit into the latter group. When I got tired of reading about “former president Jimmy Carter’s anti-Israel frenzy,” I put a spam filter on messages from my mom. Lo and behold, the e-mails stopped coming.

My mom’s motives, and those of Josh Smith’s parents, are fairly easy to understand. With their pride and joy off at Harvard, that ivy-encrusted boot camp for America’s liberal elite, the least they can possibly do is try to get a word in edgewise. It’s a political umbilical cord that connects to a totally different universe, and growing up being the way it is, it’s hard not to be a little peeved at the insistence with which the unwelcome manifestos keep on coming.

And to be fair, a lot of the stuff that shows up is very interesting, however wrong it might be.

As politicos across the country ride the wave from last year’s midterm elections to the presidential contest in 2008, politics in this country are going to stay as personal as ever for the foreseeable future. For Josh and me, that means a lot more parental spam.

It’s our job to understand their motives, and to appreciate that the separation anxiety that runs just beneath the surface of our interactions is very real on both sides. To a parent, seeing your child’s politics change while they’re away from home and out of your grasp has got to be agonizing. It’s a little more change, a little more distance. That can’t be easy to watch.

Meanwhile, it’s up to our parents to understand that our assertiveness isn’t just petulant immaturity. We’re capable of making our own judgments when it comes to politics, and we ought to be trusted to manage our own opinions. And our inboxes.



Adam Goldenberg ’08 is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears regularly.