Betty Little speaks in Saranac Lake about the road salt bill signed by Gov. Cuomo in December 2020. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Cerbone)

Betty Little doesn’t talk politics with her six kids who, she knows, do not necessarily agree with her politics.

“Everyone has a right to their own opinion. I don’t think any conversation like that convinces anyone,” said Little, who lives in Queensbury, is a member of the Republican Party and recently retired from the state Senate.

“Within my family, I think, everyone is very respectful of each other,” she said.

Silence can be an effective strategy for avoiding relationship-ending disputes with family members and friends in an era when political differences have gotten sharp-edged.

“You hear people speak sometime, and you think, well if they knew I was a Republican they’d probably hate me,” Little said.

The immediacy of social media and its tilt toward negativity can draw any difference of opinion toward a virtual shouting match. The politics of the Trump era, which have frequently focused on issues of character and morality, provide fuel for arguments that feel personal.

“For people to connect socially is important, but social media is the easiest place to say the meanest things in the world. They get out there and you can’t take them back,” Little said.

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Unbridgeable gulfs

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Two local women who have brought their activism into the public square in recent years said the tensions of the Trump years made their relationships untenable and led to breakups.

Bethann Wadleigh of South Glens Falls said she was involved in a 25-year relationship with a man that broke up when Trump’s campaign and election brought their existing political differences to the foreground.

“I guess we never talked about politics,” she said, of the years before 2016. “I paid attention, but not enough.”

In January 2017, the day after Trump’s inauguration, she attended the women’s march in Washington, D.C.

“He thought that was ridiculous,” Wadleigh said.

“He identifies totally with the American Patriots Express group,” she said, referring to a local pro-Trump group. “He’s a Second Amendment guy. I realized that our core values are so different. He hates my friends that are political. It just snowballed.

“I said one day, this is just not working, you hate everything I stand for. I hate the Trump 2020 flag on your wall. It’s a core values thing.”

Wadleigh has been a frequent presence in downtown Glens Falls over the past few years, joining protests of various Trump-era policies. She has been screamed at and sworn at by pro-Trump counterprotesters, sometimes through bullhorns.

But she has also found the divisiveness is no longer restricted to public protests or social media but is bleeding into her everyday life. A couple of weeks ago, a man standing next to her in line at a local grocery store was wearing a mask adorned with a swastika. When she stared at it, he swore at her.

“I think the division is here to stay,” she said. “I don’t know if we’ll ever truly come together. I feel like we’re in a civil war. I try to surround myself now with like-minded people.”

She has made overtures to counterprotesters but has been rebuffed, she said.

“I’ve reached out and said, hey, I bet we have things in common. And the answer was, ‘Why would I want to talk to you? You’re a snowflake r—–,'” she said.

Brigid Martin, also of South Glens Falls, has run for local office and is now the Moreau town historian. Although she is a Democrat, she supported Republican Todd Kusnierz for town supervisor because he puts aside politics to get things done for the good of the community, she said.

She, too, had a relationship founder on the rocks of political difference.

“When we met he was a Republican. We kind of decided we wouldn’t talk about it. When Trump won, he could never ever see my point of view.

“I said, you love Trump more than you love me. Why don’t you go have coffee with Trump?”

They’re still friends but have not been able to find any political common ground, she said.

“He still thinks he’s not wrong. Not that I’m right, but ‘You can’t hear me,'” she said.

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Listening, being influenced

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Eric Geisel grew up in the Ticonderoga area and went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy but left in 2009, his senior year, when he lost his student loans because of the national credit crunch.

He lives in Putnam Station now, outside Ticonderoga, and works as a carpenter. He has been together with a female partner for almost 10 years, and they are raising two children together.

His conservative pro-Trump politics have clashed with his brother’s and his mother-in-law’s, which he described as never-Trump Republicanism (although she has been voting for Democrats “probably since Obama.”) “We argued a few times since the election,” he said of his mother-in-law. “I think we’re getting to the point we’re walking on glass around each other. We just kind of don’t even discuss it any more.”

His older brother has traveled a lot and lived in big U.S. cities, including Baltimore, Burlington and Seattle, where the political culture tends to be Democratic and liberal. He is back in Clifton Park now.

“We definitely have gone at it a few times. He’s more open to debating than actual complete arguing. When you debate you actually have to listen to each other,” Geisel said.

Face to face, most people will be civil, but social media poisons communication, he said.

“I’m a much more amiable person in conversation than I am in writing. In speaking, regardless of what someone believes in, I do still see the person behind the belief,” he said.

For Mike Parwana, who runs a blacksmithing business in Queensbury with his wife, Jeannette Brandt, and is the chairman of the Queensbury Democratic Committee, the hardest part of the increasing national focus on political divisions was the feeling that it pulled his father away from him before his father’s death in 2018.

Parwana grew up in Whitehall and Lake George, and his father, a civil engineer who emigrated to the U.S. from Afghanistan, worked as the village engineer in Whitehall for many years.

“I loved Whitehall, it’s a great community, a wonderful community, but in many ways, it’s kind of a backwater,” he said.

“People who really thought very differently and progressively would leave and not want to go back, not because they didn’t love the place, but because it was very wearing to have to exist in that atmosphere,” he said.

His father was a well-traveled, cosmopolitan man with a broad perspective on life, but in his later years, as his health declined, he watched a lot of Fox News shows and his outlook changed, Parwana said.

“I think he enjoyed the aggressive banter of it all. It was almost like pro wrestling. But it was insidious. That enjoyment changed him.

“At first it was kind of fun, he enjoyed it. But it really kind of drew him in and it became hard to deal with that.

“It was hurtful to me that Fox News stole my father from me in his last few years,” he said.

Wary, silent Dee Winter-Barclay, a history teacher at Glens Falls High School, has found that students have become wary of political debates and often keep quiet rather than arguing when presented with information that contradicts their statements.

Students were more passionate back in the beginning of the Trump administration, in 2017 and 2018, and seemed willing to put forward their feelings about the new administration.

“Debates were filled with passion. … I don’t see that anymore,” she said.

Now, students seem tired of the disruptions — perhaps more because of the pandemic than politics — and, above all, want their lives to return to normal.

She teaches global studies to ninth- and 10th-graders and advanced placement European history to 10th-graders.

“I don’t see a lot of willingness to participate for fear that the conversation is going to become political or politicized. I don’t know if it’s because they’re tired of the division or they just want their lives back and that’s their focus.”

She works to present all sides, and rather than telling students they are wrong, might say, “That’s not what I’ve heard. This is the information I have gotten.

“Then I provide evidence. Then I pause and see if there is a response of some kind and, in many cases, there is not a response,” she said.

Students’ viewpoints can be embedded in their sense of who they are, within their family and peer group and community. Winter-Barclay compared contradicting a student’s political belief to a situation in which “You think your mother is your mother and somebody tries to tell you they’re not.”

“All you can do is validate and acknowledge and hopefully over time open minds,” she said.

Will Fowler is a founding partner of Sidekick Creative, a graphic design agency in Glens Falls, who was recently kicked out of an online forum with Congresswoman Elise Stefanik hosted by the Adirondack Regional Chamber of Commerce.

Fowler insisted on trying to ask Stefanik questions about her refusal to acknowledge the results of the November election. Despite his political outspokenness, he has tried in his personal life to apply lessons from his professional life to cool down fraught political conversations, he said.

“In my line of work, I’m constantly having to explain and defend and pitch creative concepts. I try to keep it as objective as possible.”

“Are we just being subjective? I like this one, you like this one. Or can we talk about what’s best for the community, what’s best for the country?” he said.

Believing different things are true, however, can make productive conversation impossible.

“Over the past four years, we weren’t all working with the same set of facts,” he said.