Beyond everything that has been said this election, from policy regarding Syria to fighting global warming, there is still one thing that bothers me as someone who is experiencing their first election. As someone who considers myself to be an educated voter, there is something that I see as ultimately more important than deciding whether we should increase our tax rates or invest in infrastructure. This is much simpler than policy but yet is put to the wayside when we argue about which candidate should represent us.

This is the question of how we perceive people in our nation and how we have divided ourselves into Democrat or Republican, black or white, gay or straight, and man or woman. All these issues are artificially created. I mean that in a sense that these are all labels we have given ourselves to identify in a particular way. But how much should this really matter, we are all human beings, aren't we?

This election will not be remembered for what policies were being argued over, but how we divided ourselves so much that we treated people differently based on all these artificial ways of identification. It troubles me that people in this nation could treat others with such utter disrespect that it made others believe some were lesser than others. Obviously. this isn't surprising that events like this can happen, we can look through thousands of years of history and find hundreds of events involving persecution or genocide of people based on their religious beliefs, race, and sexual orientation. Obviously, in this day and age, it is hard for us to imagine our nation going through such an event, but that doesn't mean there aren't real issues surrounding the ways we perceive people.

It saddens me that our nation was based on the ideals of life, liberty, and happiness but yet we try and decide which people deserve to be a part of this. How can we as a nation that boasts of our eternal equality tell people that they can't marry who they love? How can we tell a woman that they don't have control of their own choices regarding their body? How can any human be "illegal"? You will hear opinions from both sides, but I'm here to tell you that you don't need a political party to make that decision for you, or even understand politics to understand that this isn't a political issue. This is a human issue.

We are all human. We share 99.9% of DNA but yet we fight over the things that make us different. It's time for a change. It's time to start recognizing and celebrating everything that brings us together. No human should be ostracized because of something that doesn't fit with the majority of people. We all comes from different places and that shouldn't be a reason to disrespect anyone.

I don't want to have to explain to my children one day that some people are inherently different than others and thus deserve to be treated differently than others because our policies determined that this is how our nation was meant to be. I want them to grow up judging people based on their character and not because someone is black, gay, poor, or has a disability. I want them to walk into their first class one day and see humans that all share the same space as them on this Earth.

I know this is a long shot, especially with the circumstances we face, but I want everyone to start moving past their judgements of those different than them. This isn't something that changes overnight. This will take the efforts of every individual to truly promote equality and don't just make equality available fully to those we see fit to deserve it. Everyone deserves respect. After all, we are all human beings, aren't we? I hope that this won't even have to be a question one day. We are all human beings.