This week I saw a tweet from an author, pastor, and activist with a following of nearly 400,000 people.

Spoiler alert: I hated it.

A former friend who is full-on MAGA wrote me and said “Our friendship is worth more than politics.”

I disagree.

He’s now against vaccines, voting rights, immigrants, LGBTQs.

I think all those people he is hurting are worth more than our friendship.

Here’s why I think we need friendships more than ever, especially friendships with people who have different experiences and viewpoints than our own.

In a 2017 article describing snowflake as “the ‘it’ new insult,” Brianna Stone defined it as “a slang insult, often used in a derogatory way to suggest that people—often, but not always, young people—who take offense to anything from political policy changes to offensive comments are as weak and vulnerable as a speck of snow.”

As Stone explains, the cut-down is hardly new. Over 150 years ago, you might have heard it used in Missouri to describe anti-abolitionists. During the 1970s, “snowflake” gained prominence as a way to describe white or Black people “who were perceived as acting white.” Twenty years later in the Chuck Palahniuk novel Fight Club, popularized by the Brad Pitt movie of the same name, the term tightened its grip on our discourse: “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone and we are all part of the same compost pile.” Lovely, isn’t it?