“Fiddler on the Roof,” a somewhat depressing musical set in Tsarist Russia, centers on the tribulations of a small Jewish town persecuted by many and seemingly encouraged by nothing more than absolute faith. No one dies in the plot, so given the circumstances, it might even qualify as uplifting. In my third favorite film plot turn of all time, Tevye, the main character and father of five daughters, decides whether he will allow his third daughter to marry a Russian man. In their community, marriages are normally arranged, but his eldest daughter convinces him to permit her to marry the poor tailor she loves rather than a wealthy old butcher. The next daughter further flaunts social norms by asking, with her husband, merely for Tevye’s blessing rather than his permission. Each time, Tevye weighs his love for his daughters against “Tradition,” with a capital T. Walking through arguments for the former “on one hand,” and the latter “on the other hand,” he comes to realize a way to bring together his love for his family with his loyalty to his community. When this third daughter presents her betrothed, he stops and performs the same analysis. He finally comes to his decision: “there is no other hand.”

We could reformulate this in terms of dialectic. Tevye moves from a thesis (“My daughter must marry the man I choose because that’s how the world works”) to antithesis (“My daughter must marry this man I didn’t choose because she loves him”) to synthesis (“I choose to allow this man to marry my daughter because it’s the best option”). With this last daughter, the dialectic crashes, if you can even say that for such a non-starter. The decisions were already within Tevye. Tevye has finally hit the profound point in his beliefs and can go no further. She cannot pass go and collect $200. The contradiction must stand. No synthesis is possible.

I hate making choices as much as the next person. Specifically, I hate making choices with consequences. I can pick what color shirt I want to wear, or which route to take going to the store, or whether to listen to Taylor or Miley first. At the end of the day, it just doesn’t matter. It’s the choices that hurt that matter. That’s the choice Tevye finally has to make. He cannot accommodate his daughter and stay true to himself. Everything has its price.

One of the most curious phrases our President uses tries to deny this, at least in my reading. In the State of the Union last week, he dragged it out, infinitely quotable: “We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” In more literal terms, I take this to mean something along the lines of “we can both not racially profile and not be opening ourselves up for a terrorist attack.”

The problem is that compromising our ideals might increase our safety by one percent. That’s a meager benefit for compromising our ideals, and that’s exactly the true choice that you make: you (or we) determine it’s not worth it. The choice is still made. This isn’t news for the White House. The health care bill, if nothing else, is a giant rat’s nest of these choices. I doubt any Democrat thought striking a backroom deal with pharmaceutical companies was the most honorable route. I’m sure Obama ideally did want to allow C-SPAN to cover negotiations. It just so happens he chose the safety of the bill over the ideal transparency of the dealings.

This is the difficult math of politics. No one ever said making important decisions was easy. But saying it’s not even a decision at all is perhaps the most ludicrous way to address a problem. I assert as true the difficult choices we have to make, from the everyday to the once-in-a-lifetime, and suggest trivializing them as “non-decisions” in rhetoric does nothing to alter this reality.

Emily’s first favorite plot turn is “we should totally just stab Caesar” from “Mean Girls”. Send your fave to [email protected].