Can I Unfriend Trump Supporters?

I will always remember Election Night in the strange and fuzzy way one remembers a nightmare. Perhaps it’s all the wine I drank that was meant to be had in celebration; or because I stayed up past 4am in denial; or because after heartily crying, you get that piercing headache that never seems to go away. A Trump win would have been enough to confuse me, but the fragmented way it was presented added another layer of strangeness to the night. I watched CNN, while checking The New York Times on my phone, while receiving text updates from my friends and family, while checking Facebook and Twitter, and hearing announcements from the other friends I was with.

This election cycle has clearly shown that Americans are receiving information in very different, highly fragmented ways. The presence of myriad online media outlets opens up space for false stories and propaganda, and social media creates harmful echo chambers, while fostering the illusion of having hundreds of different perspectives on your news feed. Unfriending those radical high school acquaintances is not the solution, they say, but what if I don’t want to be “friends” with them anymore? When I know someone’s political beliefs directly interfere with my rights, the rights of my friends, and the rights of pretty much everyone, it’s hard to go back to casually “liking” the photos they post of their cat.

It’s hard to empathize, let alone even listen to Trump supporters because there should have been so many deal-breakers on the campaign trail. His campaign began with a deal-breaker: “Mexicans are bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” End of story. And then he mocked a reporter with a disability. End of story. And then tapes were discovered of him bragging about sexual assault. And it still wasn’t the end because here we are. It’s hard to put this all aside and respectfully listen when people say they voted for “economic policy” and that they’re “not racist.” It’s hard to imagine how one can overlook the countless problematic remarks he has made; empathizing with his voters feels like actively ignoring a giant elephant in the room.

So do I unfriend?

I’m still grappling with this question. First, I took a vigilante approach. I responded to a post of the statement, “Protests only work when human rights have been violated. Protesting for not getting your way is just crying.” I included a link to the hate crimes that were committed after Election Day, legitimate violations of human rights incited by our President-elect. That was the beginning of my first-ever Facebook fight. I didn’t unfriend, but now every time I see selfies or family pictures, I pause and think to myself, she’s a Trump supporter; you can’t “like” this. It just feels fundamentally wrong to simply “respect others’ opinions” and move on.

So where does it all go? What form do respect and acquaintanceship and mutual understanding take in this political climate? Before it seemed like they were all one and the same. I generally liked, respected, and understood my acquaintances; their political beliefs seemed secondary to their character. Now their political beliefs have the power to completely define my perception of their character. This may certainly be harmful to “mending the divide,” but actively overlooking political affiliation feels like a thing of the past. Minimizing politics in this time is normalizing them. It’s not OK to actively ignore political beliefs that are harmful to millions of people.

At the same time, generalizations and stereotypes can lead us down a slippery slope. We must find a way to listen to the concerns of the people who drove this surprisingly powerful movement. It’s an odd sort of tightrope we’re walking, between feigned reconciliation and fiery division. The possibility of a genuine solution to this political divide seems unlikely, but perhaps we can recuperate some sense of mutual understanding in attentive conversation. This sort of dialogue doesn’t really happen in the comments section on Facebook with an acquaintance you haven’t seen since high school. So I guess we can unfriend if we really want to. As long as we cross our fingers that productive dialogue will occur in other spaces.