Miss Manners: Opting out of political messages

By Judith Martin, Nicholas Martin and Jacobina Martin,

Dear Miss Manners: I hold different political beliefs from many of my friends and family, although I don’t generally advertise them. This election cycle is causing me a considerable amount of anxiety. I stopped following social media once I realized it no longer brought me joy.

Now family members have started sending me political messages via email or texts. When this happens, I politely state that I am not interested in hearing more on the subject and ask them to refrain from sending me further messages of this kind.

Usually, the sender complies, but sometimes I am treated as if my request is unreasonable and rude. Is it?

No; their persistence is. But if your current method continues to fail, Miss Manners would also endorse your deleting these messages without comment.

Dear Miss Manners: I am of an unorthodox religious persuasion that holds the belief that the dead may be contacted and that there are various aids to this process.

Anything tied to the dead person may be used, although the more intimately tied, the easier it is to establish the connection. The most intimate items, of course, would be segments of the deceased’s own body. So, to the question.

Is there any polite way to make it clear to a loved one that you hope, when they pass on, to inherit some part of them? I have racked my brain on this one and even done some research, and I am failing to come up with anything.

I suspect that if any rules apply, they would be the same that concern making it clear to a loved one that you hope to inherit any specific item — which is to say, it’s very rude to ask at all.

But I think in this case it’s something not likely to enter most people’s minds. I would also like to make it clear that I wouldn’t be making this request to, say, anyone who may believe that it is necessary to their resurrection that their corpse remain intact. Rather, I would be asking friends and family who are (for instance) Buddhist or atheist, and therefore not likely to be overly concerned with what becomes of their physical remains, or coreligionists, who may be sympathetic to my inquiry but still distressed at conversations involving their own mortality.

What did you have in mind? “Mind if I borrow your eyeballs when you croak?”

Miss Manners is afraid that she is unable to help find a polite way to say this — as there is a reason it never entered anyone’s minds. If you truly think that certain family members or friends might be amenable to it, she supposes that you could ease into the conversation by telling them of your beliefs and asking their general thoughts on organ donation. If they’re squeamish about that, then you can be reasonably certain that they will not want their body parts used to get a call from you in the afterlife.

New Miss Manners columns are posted Monday through Saturday on washingtonpost.com/advice. You can send questions to Miss Manners at her website, missmanners.com. You can also follow her @RealMissManners.

2020, by Judith Martin