Blood and Salt Water

What it costs to love someone who's voting for your erasure

The notification popped up on my phone: "Zoom call starting." Three siblings, scattered across the country, catching up on a Sunday night. My software engineer brother dialing in from his Disney contractor gig, my architect brother from his home office where the bankruptcy papers probably sat in neat stacks, and me from Pearl, Mississippi, where I run an adult boutique in the heart of the Bible Belt.

I should have known it wouldn't stay casual.

"If I lose the house," my architect brother's voice cracked as he looked into the void of failure, "I want to move to Florida. You know why? Because they have laws there. If I see protesters blocking traffic, I can just run them over. It's legal."

The words landed in my chest like a physical blow. I sat there, looking at his pixelated face on my screen, watching him fantasizing about vehicular homicide with the same tone he might use to discuss weekend plans.

I could have stayed quiet. I could have changed the subject, made some excuse, logged off early. Instead, I took a breath and said it:

"You know I was just down in New Orleans for the No Kings Day protest, right? I'm part of those protesters you're talking about running over."

The silence stretched across three time zones.

But the awkward moment passed as I shifted into stories about New Orleans—the joy, the artistic expression, the deep soul freedom that city represents in our country. It's hard to stay mad in the face of a good time, especially when there are good snacks involved. We moved on to safer territory, recipes, laughing about Mardi Gras memories, and the eternal magic of beignets.

Later, brushing my teeth before bed, the thought came unbidden: He's just so, common.

I paused, toothbrush halfway to my mouth, startled by my own cruelty. But there it was—the voice of my bloodline, my mother's lineage, speaking through me with cold aristocratic disdain.

We don't share the same mother, my brother and I. Different women, different codes, different ways of moving through the world. And apparently, different responses to authoritarianism. Where I see a constitutional crisis, he sees permission to commit violence. Where I see fellow citizens exercising their First Amendment rights, he sees targets.

This is the head of the pin we all dance on. This is the moment when the human face appears in the crowd, when the soldier's finger hesitates on the trigger because they see their brother, their friend, their sister standing there. History turns on moments like this. The Carnation Revolution, the fall of Ceaușescu, when the military refused to fire because they recognized their own people in the streets.

But my brother wasn't hesitating. He was doubling down—despite his architecture business hemorrhaging money from tariffs on steel from Mexico, despite watching projects migrate south as labor problems mount in places like Yuma, Arizona, where workers who used to cross the border for morning shifts and return home each evening now find their livelihoods executed entirely in Mexico instead.

He's drowning in the salt water of policies he supports, and instead of questioning why he's drinking poison, he's fantasizing about running over the people trying to throw him a life preserver.

I know something about government overreach. I've lived it. In 2006, jackbooted thugs invaded my store, seizing $50,000 worth of inventory as "evidence" that we never got back. For three years, we fought in the courts just to get adult toys back on the walls—toys, not weapons. The only reason we prevailed was because, the echo of Larry Flynt wearing American flags as diapers and rolling into Supreme Court battles to defend free speech was fresh on everyone's mind.

In 1986, as Larry was doing that, I put on a uniform, I swore an oath to the Constitution, and I sacrificed the love of my life for that oath. So I'd like to ask my brother: When exactly did we cut the First Amendment out of the Constitution and make it okay to perpetrate violence on someone you disagree with?

Because here's the thing—I disagree vehemently with my brother.

But throughout history, the spell of violence breaks in moments just like ours. When soldiers are ordered to fire on crowds and suddenly see a face they recognize—their brother, their neighbor, someone from their own community, the Carnation Revolution succeeded because Portuguese soldiers refused to shoot protesters who looked like their own families. When Ceaușescu's regime fell, it wasn't because of superior firepower—it was because his military couldn't pull the trigger on people they saw as human. Those turning moments came after a lot of dinner table conversations like we were having on that Zoom.

This is the work of de-escalation: not changing minds through argument, but through recognition. Making the "other" visible as family, as neighbor, as fellow citizen deserving of basic humanity.

So when my brother talks about running over protesters, I have to make it personal. I have to make him see that the crowd isn't some faceless mob of enemies—it's me. His sister. The one who served. The one who's been persecuted by the very government overreach he now cheers.

But here's what I'm learning: de-escalation isn't a one-way street. It's not just about getting him to see my humanity. It's about me doing the harder work of holding onto his.

Because the truth is, I'm not the hero in this story. Standing there in that Zoom call, listening to him fantasize about vehicular violence, part of me wanted to write him off completely. That cold, aristocratic voice whispering "he's just so common" wasn't noble—it was my own version of othering, my own temptation to choose tribe over truth.

It's easy to sit in our news silos and think all the enlightened people agree with us, while the others are troglodytes. But my brother isn't stupid. He's a talented architect, capable of designing beautiful, complex structures. And yet here he is, supporting policies that are literally bankrupting him, choosing a dictator over the Constitution I bled to defend.

That's what makes this so much harder than the neat narrative we tell ourselves about "us" and "them." Smart people can choose delusion. Talented people can drink salt water. Your own blood can choose authoritarianism over the principles you sacrificed everything to protect.

And here's the part that cracks my chest open: he's not just choosing destruction for himself. He's tying all of us to the railroad tracks. His support for policies that normalize violence against protesters, that gut constitutional protections, that enable government overreach—that doesn't just hurt him. It makes my world more dangerous. Every vote he casts for authoritarianism is a vote against my safety, my livelihood, my right to exist as I am.

So what does it cost to love someone who's voting for your erasure? What does it do to your soul to keep reaching for someone who's pulling you under?

I could cut him off. Block his number. Write him out of my story entirely. It would be cleaner that way, easier to maintain my moral clarity. But that's not de-escalation—that's just another form of tribalism, another way of choosing sides instead of choosing connection.

The real work is this: holding his humanity while he threatens mine. Remembering that the drowning man drinking salt water is still my brother, even when his thrashing could drag us all down. Choosing dangerous grace over safe righteousness, even when—especially when—the stakes are this high.

Because if I can't save my own brother, how can any of us save the country? If I can't make him see me as human, how do we make any of them see any of us as human?

This is the impossible love that democracy requires: the choice to keep seeing each other as family even when we're choosing different paths to destruction. To keep throwing life preservers even when they're being used as anchors. To keep believing in the possibility of recognition, of remembrance, of return—even when the evidence suggests we're all going down with the ship.

The Zoom call ended with laughter about beignets. But the real conversation—the one about blood and loyalty and what we owe each other—that one is just beginning.

• Larry Flynt and the Flag Diaper Protest:

  • In 1984, Larry Flynt appeared in court wearing an American flag as a diaper in protest of what he saw as hypocrisy in the legal system’s approach to obscenity and free speech. This was part of his long-standing, performative defense of First Amendment rights.

  • Source: Sullivan, Andrew. “A Symbolic Protest.” TIME, 1984. (Note: specific archival links may require access to historical periodicals or documentaries like Larry Flynt for President or The People vs. Larry Flynt).

• Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988):

  • This is the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled 8–0 in favor of Hustler Magazine and Flynt, holding that public figures cannot recover damages for intentional infliction of emotional distress without showing that the offending publication contained a false statement made with actual malice.

  • Key precedent: It cemented satirical speech and parody as protected forms of expression under the First Amendment.

  • Citation: Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988)

• First Amendment Protection:

  • “Speech that offends... is protected speech.” This case reinforced that even outrageous, offensive, and emotionally distressing expression about public figures is constitutionally protected.

  • Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote:

“From the viewpoint of history, it is clear that our political discourse would have been considerably poorer without the use of satire and parody.”
— Hustler v. Falwell, 485 U.S. at 55.