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What My Children Learned From the First Biden/Trump Debate
And what I plan on doing about it
About 30 minutes into the September 29, 2020 presidential debate, I left the room to get some air. Sitting in my friend’s backyard, I looked up at an orange moon, almost full, hanging in the sky. If I hadn’t known the color was caused by wildfire smoke, I would have thought it beautiful.
Very little about life seems beautiful right now, and I knew that when I pulled myself back to the couch, all I would see is ugliness.
Last night, friends apologized to their children when putting them to bed for the chaos they were living through, for the lunacy of the spectacle. This morning, I woke up to text strings and Facebook conversations laced with powerful adjectives: nauseated, depressed, disgusted, embarrassed, mortified. My husband wondered aloud if we should have shielded our children from the show, but it was too late.
Our daughters are 9 and 11, and four years ago, they watched another debate, one where Trump skulked behind Hillary Clinton muttering “wrong” and breaking her concentration. I knew this one would be similarly disturbing, but I had no idea how bad it could get. I arranged an evening around it, preparing dinner and settling in at a friend’s house, intentionally inviting my daughters to watch.
