Someone recently said to another, “Thank you for holding our differences with such gentleness.”

Thing is, I know people who feel hatred and a desire to harm others that it’s almost impossible.

Who am I kidding? It IS impossible. Fully impossible.

Gentleness has its limits

We like to believe that if we just stay calm, reasonable, and kind, hate will soften.

That if we meet cruelty with compassion, violence will somehow dissolve.

But look around: hatred is organized, loud, and armed.

It doesn’t fade because we whisper sweet words at it.

Gentleness has its place.

It matters in ordinary disagreements, in the friction of daily life, in the places where people can still listen. But when hatred grows into a political movement, when it seeks to erase people’s rights, when it spews lies to justify violence—gentleness alone is useless. Worse, it risks making us bystanders to harm.

History is clear: silence and softness don’t stop hatred.

Resistance does. Boundaries do. Collective action does.

That doesn’t mean we have to become hateful ourselves. We must not. To fight fire with fire is different from becoming fire. It means standing unyielding. It means calling out lies, protecting those in danger, refusing to normalize cruelty dressed up as “differences of opinion.”

Gentleness without backbone is surrender.

Gentleness paired with courage, though—that’s power. It’s saying: I see your humanity, even as I refuse to let you strip it from others.

So no, we cannot hold all differences gently.

Some must be held firmly, fiercely, with the full weight of our moral clarity. Because people’s lives and futures are on the line.

We defend the right to vote.
We defend the right to bodily autonomy.
We defend the right to love freely.
We defend the right to be safe from gun violence.
We defend the right to learn truthful history.
We defend the right to live without fear—
because of race, or religion, or gender, or identity.

These rights are not negotiable.
They are not up for debate.

And the time for softness without strength—
is long past.