The atmosphere is so heated, and the statements are getting more and more extreme. Let’s just assume Harris wins the election. After a campaign like this, how could you ever have a normal relationship with your pro-Trump neighbor/father-in-law/Uncle/Barber or what ever again?
Trust me, most of us have tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and tried. Some certainly may have preemptively cut people out without discussion, but most of us have beaten our heads against a wall for almost a decade now, trying to convince them that we’re human beings with dignity who deserve respect. We just withdraw from engagement, piece by piece, until there’s nothing lost by just giving up. Cutting them off is usually the last and most consequential move, rather than the first.
At the end of the day (or life), your mother/father was and forever have been, your mother and father. Family is immutable, giving up is reprehensible.
I’m a US Army combat veteran, my wife was a foreign national (we left America), my son was born in his mothers home country making him a foreigner in America, my other two (son and daughter) were born and raised in America.
My parents voted against support for Veterans, they voted against immigration, they voted against gun regulation (guns are the main cause of death for children in America), they voted to take rights away from my wife and daughter, they voted against my family. Ignore all of that I kept trying to talk to them, kept trying to keep in touch… my dad told me in a letter, that if we aren’t for trump we’re against him and told me to no longer try to contact him or my mom.
I’m glad they cut ties, because I was already done. I just helped them keep to their words and have ignored them since.
I have friends who were abandoned by their parents and subsequently adopted. I lost a half-sibling with mental illness after their religious paternal family subjected them to actual exorcisms and other emotional trauma which eventually led to their suicide. My wife has a new 60-year old biological sister that she discovered 2 years ago via DNA. I have friends who cut ties with physically and sexually abusive parents. Family is quite mutable, we are under no obligation to hold fast to toxic blood relatives, and in many cases what we consider “reprehensible” depends entirely on how “reprehensible” the blood relative’s committed offenses are.
I’m going to assume you’re just arguing from extremely limited personal experience and save the long list of expletives I want to hurl at you on behalf of my friends and family because I’d prefer not to be banned from this community. Good day to you.
That’s entirely different, and valid. I’m sorry for your friends who went through that, and it’s something I understand myself. My own mother, who passed away recently, is someone I had cut off for decades due to a very long list of emotional and physical abuses I myself suffered at her hands. In no way I was implying that abuse should be tolerated nor expected. That being said, there was room for a limited form of relationship when she as a much older person apologized, and expressed a desire to repair the relationship and make a meaningful change. I got to see a different side to her as a result for 3 years.
Now to say that you cut family off because of how they vote, is to me, entirely absurd. Either they’re misinformed, or obtuse, and in some cases sure, abusive. But cutting family off because they share a different political viewpoint, that’s what I’m calling reprehensible.
Also, don’t fucking assume shit, I’ve been through the hell your friends have been through directly, and know it all too well. People who snivel about sensitive feelings when they have absolutely no idea, are best giving some benefit of the doubt, which is something extremists on both sides of the politics could stand to improve.
Again, that’s not what’s happening here. Stop misrepresenting what people are saying to you.
This you?
This is the most circular argument I’ve ever been a part of. Can’t say I didn’t try.
You are exactly the lunatic nut-job that fuels Trump rallies. Have a nice life.
If they treat you badly, cutting them out of your life is fine. No one should put up with that from anyone.
But cutting people out of your life purely because they vote differently to you is just weird and petty.