Since the election, I’ve heard so many stories from colleagues regarding their Thanksgiving plans. A lot of their plans or their friends’/partners’ plans are being revised because they do not want to spend them with their families for Thanksgiving. These are people who come from politically divided families where they don’t believe the same things as the majority of their families do, and they know if they go home, the topic of the election will come up, and they will get attacked.

I honestly don’t know when it became the “right” thing to do to support a presidential candidate with no actual policies and who is constantly spewing lies, but like so many news commentators have been saying lately, we now live in a world where facts no longer matter to the average American – we’re so smart. Well, “lies” only matter in this case when we are scrutinizing a woman, since as during biblical times, Eve was supposedly responsible for conning Adam. In this world we live in now, we have to penalize dishonesty in women but admire it in men. Oh, progress.

I’m saddened to hear the news of these families, though. I really am. People are cancelling plane and train trips and just not spending family holidays with families. “It’s not that I cannot disagree,” my colleague said to me, nearly in tears while we caught up during our one-on-one. “It’s that they don’t even want to listen to anything I have to say and immediately say I am stupid and I am supporting a crook. They won’t even listen!” I jokingly asked if she was referring to Trump as a crook (since that’s what he is), and she laughed in response.

I mentioned this during our early Thanksgiving meal at home this past weekend, and my friend’s boyfriend said he thought it was so “lame” (I guess it’s easy to say that when you have no connection to your family at all and your parents are dead, though). I don’t think it is at all. If you fundamentally have different opinions from the family and “friends” you think you are closest to and love most, how can you actually “look forward” to spending time together? In your heart of hearts, if you believe that Asians or Muslims or brown-skinned or black-skinned people are lesser than white people, if you believe that women are inherently less intelligent and capable than men, if you believe that your heterosexual identity gives you the right to oppress the lives of people who do not identify as you do, then I don’t believe that we can have a functional relationship. I mean, I already struggle with this in my own family: my uncle thinks all the black people getting shot and killed by police officers are better off dead than alive, that the “Black Lives Matter” movement is ridiculous and anti-police. “The world can always use one less thug,” he said. I was so shocked when he said this to me over dinner one night that I didn’t even respond and changed the subject. Then, there’s my parents, who basically think everyone who is not white or Chinese is bad in some way. My mom blamed the recession in 2008 and my 2009 layoff on “that black president.” Funny how she forgot that the recession actually happened during a white man’s presidency, but she, like so many other people, forget the things they want to forget and only remember what they want to remember that is convenient for their deluded story.

It’s hard to have political debates with people who don’t want to listen just as my colleague said. But when I say “listen,” I mean actually listen to people who have substantive arguments and views, not ideas that are based on lies like “Obama was born in Kenya” or racist desires like “America would be better off with less black people.” I think I’ve spent enough time “listening” to those people.