I know singer Ed Sheeran. (Well, in a way I do, and so do you.)

In his address, Sheeran attempts to position himself above the fray of the rest of us, writing, “I am not complicit. I have my personal views on this devastating conflict. Just because I choose not to speak publicly doesn’t mean I don’t have them. Nor does it mean I don’t support causes in my own personal way.”

Denying complicity is a confession that Sheeran is aware there is something barbaric to be complicit in. His fervent defense is actually self-incrimination. The singer declares that he has personal views on the Palestinian people that he chooses not to make public. (I’m sure that’s a comfort to those strewn among the blood-stained rubble of Gaza.) I’d love to ask Sheeran what private convictions do to help anyone, what unspoken words do to bring justice or restoration, precisely how silence is instrumental in liberation.

Further, the singer sermonizes, “If we only focus on shouting the loudest, nothing will change.”

Macklemore didn’t shout from the stage. He spoke with direct, unflinching conviction about a people being systematically driven to extinction. There were no histrionics, no profanity, and no politics. Sheeran’s creating some wild, screaming straw man out of the sober demand for an end to a genocide is an effort to shut down conversation by setting up a false equivalency between power and the powerless, all couched in avoiding “politics.”

If this sounds familiar to our ears, it should.

We all have people like Ed Sheeran in our lives: people who believe that staying out of politics is somehow virtuous, as if silence is a show of restrained maturity that the rest of us lack. We all live alongside family members, friends, neighbors, and coworkers who seem to believe one can separate “political” things from the rest of their lives, as if there is a set time and place reserved for speaking with clarity and specificity on human rights.

That these people feel a choice in these moments is even possible shows the subtle and insidious ways privilege works. It allows a person to have urgency as an option, where for others it is a necessity. When you believe yourself safe from harm and immune to violence, the fence of neutrality feels like a righteous place to sit, even if that position is deadly to those not afforded such comfort.

But Ed Sheeran and the Ed Sheerans around us don’t realize that there are times when our morality requires an outside voice that says without ambiguity, “This is a threat to humanity, and this is wrong.” In these moments, vulnerable human beings are pushed to one side, with unrelenting brutality against them on the other—while the silence of remaining apolitical declares us conscientious objectors in that war.

The fights for justice and equality always work this way. Sometimes life necessitates a decisive choice; something that pushes us out of neutrality because the situation demands it. In such times of consequence, to not make that choice isn’t an act of tolerance or maturity, but of cowardice. Despite the vehement protests of Ed Sheeran and the people in our lives who share his view, being apolitical is being complicit in the atrocities we refuse to publicly confront.

Because of the volume and the relentlessness of the dangers we’re facing, there must be a similarly loud and steadfast response to them. Because each morning a different attack comes on the safety and worth of human beings, then each morning there must be those of us who unequivocally oppose it all. The power holders of this planet are testing how much inhumanity the people will tolerate, and saying nothing only emboldens them to seek a deeper moral bottom as silence becomes more commonplace.

There is no protection in a fascist regime: not silence or wealth or apathy or position. Eventually, they’ll come for all of us. We are tethered together. Remaining silent in turbulent times is a luxury privilege affords, but it a temporary one. That passivity is born out of the illusion of our safety, but none of us are safe forever, as all liberation is collective.

The Ed Sheerans in all our lives need to understand that privilege is currency that we are responsible for spending in a way that stands with and defends those without that privilege, something Macklemore chose to do on the biggest stage he had been given. The rest of us need to be doing this on the smaller but still critical platforms we’ve all been given, in our homes, our social circles, our communities, our workplaces, and social media profiles.

Staying out of politics is an impossibility; the politicians are making sure of that. The war is or will soon be on all our doorsteps despite how much we’d like to avoid it.

And the only way we’re gonna survive and save this place is by not looking away, by deciding what matters to us; by getting off the fence of neutrality and out of the cover of politics, and speaking so that there will be no doubt as to who we are and what we will not stand for.