It doesn’t have to be this way. We can be better. We can have civil conversations about our perspectives and how they are informed by our individual lived experiences.

In fact, this year, it seems like some trends have been around the entire year. Specifically, the trend of telling your minority friends about all the awful things your relatives have said about people like them.

Here’s my seemingly-backwards call to action: consider inaction. When you’re banging your head against a wall of ideology that doesn’t match your own values, and it’s doing more harm than good, stop.

Disagreements are simply a part of human nature, but how we handle these disagreements holds the difference between advancement and imprisonment in our own ideologies.