Seeing a lot of "reach out to your family who didn't vote like you" discourse (mostly repudiating the idea, thankfully, that being the bigger person means having to console someone that "yes, more please, genocidal tyrant" didn't pan out for them like they'd hoped).

I've spent 16 years arguing with my family and trying to convince them that they should care more about marginalized people and the destructive impact of the policies they endorse.

When Trump won in 2016, I made the effort to write them a long, earnest email explaining why a lot of people were terrified, and could they please consider how they've bought into and aligned their interests with racism, even if it's not what they thought they were doing.

At the very best, and this is being generous, I got a "we see you, we hear you, and we'll just wait for your little tantrum to pass."

It has felt like one of the biggest betrayals + disappointments of my life to hear them downplay the situation at the border after what our family went through during the Holocaust (they did, after all, raise me to believe that we need to be vigilant lest history repeat itself).

And at the same time, growth for me over these last four years has looked like gradually accepting that they're a lost cause and not where my energy is most needed anyway.

It's also looked like coming slightly more to terms with the fact that I'll never be able to have a close relationship with them as long as our values are this different. Keeping them at arm's length has been the best way to manage this without cutting them off completely.

I know this is a healthy choice for a lot of people with toxic and abusive relatives, but I was lucky enough to grow up in a relatively loving and supportive home, and I can't tell if that makes it more or less painful to feel like I can't really be part of it.

Tl;dr: It would mean the world to me if they woke up one day and decided they were willing to do the hard work of searching within themselves for the fear and cruelty that got us to this point (and then taking meaningful steps to address the harm that it's caused).

Barring that (and I'm 100% not holding my breath), I will never forgive them or recover the respect I've lost for them after all they've condoned these last four years, and that's a boundary.

Enforcing that boundary means there's no walking back or downplaying everything they approved of. I can't do that and simultaneously make them feel better about any of this.

This was a bit of an emotional dump + I guess I'm writing this mostly for people who are dealing with a similarly complicated form of grief over fraught family relationships, but also for people who are insisting on "forgiveness" in the absence of any sort of real accountability.