This has been a rough few days. Hell, this has been a rough year and a half or so. This election has been mired in division and hatred. I know that the political rift is long and deep and bloody, but for the first time I honestly feel like America is split into separate teams. We forgot that we’re all supposed to want the same thing, and argue on the right way to get there. We were supposed to be a contentious family on a road trip. We fight and bicker and ask if we’re there yet, some of us scream we need a bathroom break, or that we should take the back roads and enjoy the scenery around here, but we are supposed to want to end up in the same place.

It doesn’t feel like that. This country feels war torn: battered and bruised, and controlled by separate factions: a feud none of us can remember the reason for. This election wasn’t democracy. This wasn’t us coming together to find the best solution to our problems, to find the best way towards human progress. This was a war. One that came down to a single issue: the other side does not win. Democrat, Republican, Green, Libertarian, it was all the same.

The outcome of this election scares people, rightfully so. We elected a man who threatened to take away our right to free press by making it legal to sue anyone who writes anything negative about him, who has openly encouraged violence against women, who has publicly called hispanic human beings rapists and murderers and criminals, who has called for a ban on muslims entering the country. And he was elected for one reason: the other team does not win. That’s not how things are supposed to happen.

This election is going to hurt people. There is a Mosque, not much more than a ten minute bike ride from my apartment, those that attend will be hurt by the outcome of this election. People in the LGBTQ+ community that will be hurt. People in black communities will be hurt. Women, immigrants, hispanics—whether Trump makes good on his campaign promise, or people just take his victory as a sign that his public attitudes towards anyone different than him are suddenly okay now. I am in a decent amount of student debt, and I don’t have a high earning potential in my chosen field; these next few years are going to make my life significantly harder. I have family and friends who straddle the poverty line, and their lives are going to become significantly harder. The working class is going to fall on extremely hard times if even half of Trump's campaign promises come true. There will be a lot of hurt and a big mess to clean up after all of this.

But we will clean up. That road trip, we’re still on it. We may have taken a huge detour, and may end up backtracking quite a bit, but the march of human progress is unstoppable. And we are going to learn how much we need to be there for each other. This needs to be the last election where the other is the enemy. Because we are not enemies. We are all 99.9% the same. We have different backgrounds, families, histories, but in the end we all want the same things. We want to not worry about where our next meal is coming from, we want those we love to feel safe and secure, we want America to be a prosperous and proud nation, we want to love and be loved without fear, we want to be accepted for who we are, we want to have opportunities equal to those that were born in a different social, economic or racial strata, in the end we all want progress. We forgot that. We’ve been forgetting that for a while now.

We look at the past as some golden age instead of the shame filled swamp that it is. We rejected a boat full of refugees, sending them back to their increasingly hostile and dangerous environment. The refugees: Jewish European citizens. The year: 1939. We built this country on the enslavement of the African people, and the genocide of its native inhabitants. We continued eugenics and forced sterilization for years after WWII. We put Japanese American citizens into internment camps. Made it illegal to marry anyone outside your own race. Until the early 1990’s it was legal in some states to rape your spouse. This country's past is a terrible and shameful thing, and we have to fight to move forward.

America was never great, but it can be. If we come together, if you work to love and be kind to the people around you, regardless of their socio-economic status, of their race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation, if we listen to each other and try to understand where we’re all coming from, instead of brushing peoples hurt off as if it were nothing, if we remember that we are all in this together, we can make this a better world. But it has to be us. We have to be the change that we want to see; we have to fight for the dream; we have to be strong; we have to forgive; we have to move forward.