“You shouldn’t let politics get in the way of your relationships.”

You’ve probably seen these sentiments pop up on social media, come across them in eloquent think pieces, or heard them in daily conversations: the idea that family members and friends are too important to lose over something as benign as a political position or a ballot choice.

That idea made philosophical sense before 2016, back when we had reasonably functioning parties and candidates with actual platforms; when we were just debating methodological or economic approaches to problems that we all agreed were problems. Choosing people over politics was a logical position in the days when we believed that our fathers, cousins, coworkers, neighbors, and lifelong friends cared about diversity, justice, personal freedoms, and helping people as much as we did.

We are way past that, friends..

The fate of the America we are seeing on our phones and outside our windows, this nation besieged by senseless violence and battered by a wanton disregard for the law and human life, is no longer a political conversation; it’s a moral one.

This is not about a policy difference, not a simple disagreement on the responsible way to deal with collective national challenges; it isn’t a matter of agreeing to disagree on less-than-critical subjects where a stalemate is acceptable.This moment is about whether we will reject or embrace legislated racism, the dehumanization of vulnerable human beings, the erasure of civil rights, and a lawless, merciless, State-sanctioned brutality.

It’s about 5-year-old children used as bait, families terrorized in their homes, young men accosted in their workplaces, bystanders executed in their cars, and entire communities living in fear simply because of the color of their skin or their place of birth.

And these things are worth cutting people off, severing ties, and social media blocking.

The lives of hundreds of millions of flesh-and-blood human beings now hang in the balance of the choices we make right now: their freedom to make healthcare decisions for themselves, their access to fundamental liberties promised in the Constitution, their agency to govern their own destinies, and their basic sense of safety from harassment and harm.

If there was ever something that justified a deleted contact number or an empty chair at the Thanksgiving table or an exodus from a church or the termination of a friendship, it’s this.

A guy I grew up with who supports Trump texted me recently, saying, “We’ve been friends a long time. I’d hate to see politics get in the way of our friendship.”I assured him that politics hasn’t. I told him that his acceptance of genocide has gotten in the way of our friendship, that his minimizing of the covering up of pedophilia has, that his justification of insurrection has, that his support of murderous masked thugs has, that his turning away from a relentless and senseless violence against the Latino and immigrant communities has.

At some point, we as adult human beings whose time here is finite, need to choose whether we will lean into our deepest convictions or into relationships with people whose presence increasingly causes us to compromise those convictions.

We need to decide whether we will keep a tenuous peace with those we share blood or history with, but little else, or whether we will step out into the raking light of full authenticity and fight for the things that break our hearts and boil our blood. Will we choose people we know but who we realize we are morally incompatible with, or the strangers whose lives are upended and threatened by them?

The tangible, terrifying impact of this Administration on people of color, on LGBTQ human beings, on the sick and the poor and the elderly, on our immigrant communities (let alone the rest of the world) is beyond what we can comprehend right now.

And this kind of inhumanity demands a response that affirms our humanity.

I’m not telling you to disconnect from everyone you know who supports this mad despot and his willing collaborators, but as we slide swiftly into a Police State, as we step further into authoritarianism, and as we see the bloodshed and chaos increase, many of us may decide that we cannot forgive or align ourselves with those who not only allowed it to happen, but did so with perverse joy and unrepentant cruelty.

If that isn’t a reason to end a relationship, nothing is.

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