Growing up I was told, "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." Today, that is still good advice. Spreading negativity is something that happens far too often in today's society, and we should spend more of our energy helping, lifting each other up, and understanding.

If you haven't noticed, the United States is experiencing one of the strangest, most confusing election season there has been to date. Although silently protesting my opinions through likes on twitter, video shares on Facebook, and avidly discussing them with my friends, I have never really publicly said anything. Maybe this is because I'm a 19 year old from a small town in New Jersey and I don't think many people will listen. Maybe it's because I know there are people in my life that will totally disagree with me. And maybe it's because I was just trying to put it all into prospective and understand exactly what is happening.

But the more I sat here, waiting and watching, the more compelled I felt to speak out. You see, there is a line between saying nothing to be polite, and saying nothing because you're scared of what people will think. I am 19 year old girl from small town New Jersey, and there are thousands and thousands of 19 year old small town girls out there too. The silence of one is the silence of many. It only takes one person to speak out, and maybe someone will read this and share their opinion too, you just never know. There will be people who won't see eye-to-eye with me on what I will talk about, but maybe if I say something, tell them how I feel, share my view, it will change theirs and we can understand each other more, making the world around us a better place along the way.

However, I don't think that hate and fear and misinformation is the way to achieve greatness. America, your presidential candidate, Donald Trump, will not make you great. I can promise you that. And when thinking of what exactly I should include in this article, it was extremely difficult to find a starting point, so I have broken it up in sections ranging on a variety of topics, which I plan on discussing through multiple articles, for the purpose of throughly addressing each topic for what it is, and being as realistic and informative as I can be.

Immigration & The Famous Wall

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Unless your ancestry has links to Native American tribes, the chances are that you are likely here because yourself, or your family before you decided to move here. America is supposed to be the place where we are all equal, and opportunity is available to all who reside within it's borders. That was the first thing that made us great, giving opportunity to those who did not have it previously. How can we expect these people to feel comfortable and safe in a country that is so harsh to them? How is greatness achieved when your citizens don't feel like citizens?

Donald Trump has called the people of Mexico drug addicts, rapists and criminals. Mexico is a country with the population of 122.3 million, so making that assumption about that large of a group of people is not only false, but highly offensive to millions of documented Mexican Americans, who are indeed, Mexican and American- something they should be proud of. America should be a place where everyone can take pride in who they are, and be proud of others for embracing their own backgrounds and cultures.

So, to keep these people out, Trump wants to build a wall. This is almost like when little boys would make pillow forts with a "No girls allowed!" sign out front and expect that to actually do anything. I personally think we should elect a president that can come up with a better idea than that of a five year old, and can research to actually find out statistics.

The wall would have to be built over many different types of terrain, from oceans to urban areas, to deserts. The United States also shares part of the Colorado and Rio Grande rivers, farms and mountains. The wall would be a nightmare for the engineers, the politicians, the architects and the environmentalists, not to mention the 12 million people who legally live along the border, and would have to uproot their lives to make way for the wall. This could possibly cost millions of dollars to compensate the landowners for their lost property, and agreements would be hard to make as plenty of law suits would be filed.

Mr. Trump has said, "We’re going to build the wall, and we’re going to stop it. It’s going to end." Not only will the wall be costly, 25 million dollars just to build, excluding labour costs, maintenance, employee incomes, etc. for years to come, it really will not stop the illegal immigration problem. Trump also fails to mention the large decline in illegal immigration within the last eight years, so the wall would actually end up costing more than the forces actually needed to fight illegal immigration. You see, most of the undocumented persons residing within the United States are here on expired visas, not just by crossing the border. Visas can be extremely hard to get depending on certain circumstances, financial status, and locations, leaving many people without much of an option than to move illegally, for a better life not only for them, but for their families. If we made the process of getting a visa more efficient, the government could make a profit while helping it's citizens.

Deporting citizens to leave with undocumented family members is also not the answer. If a person has a child in the United States, even those living here illegally, the child is automatically considered an American citizen. If you want to fact check that, please read the US Constitution's 14th amendment. It's been there since 1868. The odds of repealing the amendment’s citizenship clause would be close to impossible. This would require the votes of two-thirds of both houses of Congress and support from three-fourths of the nation’s state legislatures. Republicans in Congress have repeatedly failed since 2011 to pass bills aimed at ending this clause, and haven't had much luck. So little luck that you probably didn't even know it was being voted on.

Trump knows that these plans won't work. To build the wall, the entire Mexico-U.S. Boundary Treaty would have to be renegotiated. Our own Congress would never even pass the building of the wall, with 84% of democrats against the build.

Trump also has been very vocal about his belief that America should have a ban on Muslims entering the United States. The very basis of our constitution is that people have the freedom to just be who they are. How can you promise to be a good president when what you are doing is trying to control the limits of who someone is and the rights they possess based on the very core of themselves?

He believes all self identifying Muslims, including tourists, casual visitors, refugees, and those looking to move to the United States, should be denied entry. This would not only separate families from one another, for the United States is home to 3.3 million muslim citizens, but also ruin ties with many nations.

Trump is using this as an easy tactic in his political race, because instead of identifying the root of the issues, he wants to give people a simple, quick answer. When asked how his policies will be enacted, he tends to brush the question off and try to divert the problem by blaming other things, whether it be other people, countries, or an entire faith. He wants you to believe that banning these groups or not allowing them in the country would result in peace, to shut you up and move on to other topics to make him even richer. Many Americans are obsessed with terrorism, and trying to find out what will stop all the bad stories on the news, but the main threat, they assume, comes from Muslims, when that is the farthest thing from the truth.

This ban would cause irreversible damage to the overall reputation of the United States as a whole. We are a country that has taken pride in its openness, tolerance, and diversity ever since the very start in Philadelphia 1776. How could we even have the audacity to claim we embody these qualities, when our frontrunner for the Republican nomination is a man who promotes the isolation of an entire class of 1.6 billion people, because of their faith.

This ban could actually even further break the counterterrorism efforts in the United States. Mr. Trump doesn't seem to understand something very important. The war on terrorism is not just about religion, guns, and bombs. To fight terrorism, you need all groups working together. Islamic countries are just as tired of the attacks as we are, and their citizens are also being hurt. Americans aren't the only targets, and thats something we should begin to recognize because terror attacks happen in so many places, but don't get as much news coverage if they are directly related to Americans. If you isolate a group of people, and tell them that they are wrong, unwanted, and dangerous, how can you expect them to help you?

Not only is this idea extremely unethical, demeaning, and embarrassing to the United States, the policy, like many of Donald Trumps claims, is impossible. Many people want Trump as president because they say, "he will make us great again! Get us out of Obama's policies," but actually, you will be stuck with what we currently have, because your presidential choice knows nothing about law or politics, so he does not understand you can not just say things and have them be done like a dictator.

For this ban to work, you would need to screen people coming into the United States by their religion, and their is virtually no way that exists to do that, because as far as I know there isn't dogs that can sniff out what type of religious place of worship you attended and X-rays have yet to identify what you say when you pray, if you pray at all. What Trump and his followers want to implement is a ban of certain countries. For the ban to work, every single traveler would have to be screened upon entry, and you can't look at someone and automatically know their religious beliefs the way you can know the color of their eyes. This would lead to every single person being screened one by one when entering the United States. And you thought TSA was hard to get through now?

There also is no country in the world that is purely Muslim. Much like there is no country in the world that is completely Christian, Jewish, Hindu, etc. Most governments do not track the religious affiliations of their citizens, and most only hold documentation of a statistic of roughly how much of it's citizen participate in a certain religion, not individually who practices what.

So, hypothetically, lets say there is a country of 100 people, and they document that 60% of their citizens are Christian, 20% are Jewish, 10% are Hindu, 5% are Muslim and 5% are non-identifying. Now lets say, a girl wants to marry an American man, but now she isn't allowed to move there, because there is a 5% chance she would be a Muslim, and that is something the ban would not allow. This is not fair to begin with, even if she was Muslim, because she did nothing wrong. And this country, listening to the complaints of its citizens, may begin to reciprocate the action, forcing any American citizen who wants to visit to also apply for a visa, instead of visiting as desired with a passport. This would break apart families, personal relations, create complicated political links, and result in billions of dollars being lost.

Today, there are roughly 38 countries whose citizens can travel to the United States without a visa, and there are large populations of Muslims in these countries. These 38 countries do not track their citizens religion, because really, why would they? People visit counties for a variety of reasons: weddings, funerals, business trips, family, friends, education, and the list goes on and on. All of which bring billions of dollars to the United States annually. Seemingly the only way for the ban to take place would be to disallow the visa-waiver forms, so that all 60 million foreign travelers would all have to individually apply for a visa in their home country for permission to enter the United States, leading to an increase in need for applications, and increasing professionals in the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department, which would be another one of Trumps idea's that would cost the country billions. To coordinate with this policy, even though Trump promises it won't last forever, would cause other effected countries to cancel their already made programs to allow Americans to visit them without visas, and traveling the world with just a passport would be a thing of the past.

Trade and sales are also extremely important to the United States economy, so relationships with other countries is extremely important. Trump hasn't even began to weigh the pros and cons of his actions, all he wants is to get people excited, to gain votes. The actions he performs could hurt our country for years and years to come that will surpass way past 4 years.

America is great. It is filled with different cultures, educated people, bright ideas, hope, love, freedom, success, dreams. For many it is still a place to fantasize about, for means safety. We are supposed to be opening our doors and building bridges, not walls. We are great, and there are also other places that are great. Maybe it's time we stop acting like everything is a race to be the best, and learn how to coexist with one another instead of trying to find cheap ways to blame our problems on someone else.

You can't make another country pay for something they don't want. You can't go against the basics of the constitution. Instead, Trump is implanting ideas. He wants you to see the people who are different than you, that don't share the same background and faith as him, as un-American, and rapists, and terrorists, and killers. He wants you to be scared, because fear is the most powerful tool, and with power comes fame, and money, and gets your face in the news for a few more minutes. But at what costs?