The first time I voted for an American president, I was 45-years old. It was 2008– McCain vs. Obama– and I can’t remember whom I chose. I’d registered and cast my vote only because my writing group had marveled at my willingness to dismiss a right others had given their lives for, a right I could have availed myself of at the age of 18.

Peer pressure is a wonderful thing.

As much as I’d railed against my father growing up, I absorbed a good deal of his attitude and mindset, far more than I’d care to admit. According to Dad, all politicians were crooks, not just Richard M. Nixon, the first president I can clearly remember. It didn’t matter who won the office; they were all the same. The stuff that came out of their mouths was all a pack of lies. Even Jimmy Carter’s cardigan was a prop to dupe the masses.

Our lives, Dad claimed, wouldn’t be altered one bit, regardless of who ran the show. Thus the no voting thing.

This weekend I found myself weeping as Biden and Harris celebrated their victory. I felt a surprisingly strong wave of relief knowing that Trump wouldn’t be re-elected. Both Walt and I had done our duty as American citizens living abroad by casting our absentee ballots, but I had no idea just how invested I’d feel in the results.

Because from my dad I’d also learned that I couldn’t affect outcome. That it didn’t pay to even try.

Happy as I am, I’m also afraid for our country. For the division, the polarity, and the trouble that portends. Particularly after watching the documentary The Social Dilemma, which dramatizes just how little we understand the variety of American perspectives. Just how separate the conversations have become. The us vs. them thinking.

What I’m most afraid of is civil war.

Back when I lived in Iran, and we’re talking the early 90’s, I witnessed some serious unrest in the streets. Demonstrators in our city were burning cars and buses because the government had raised the price of heating oil and gasoline. After an eight-year war with Iraq, the economy had yet to recover and the average citizen couldn’t afford the cost of living. One more expense was simply too much to bear. “There’s going to be another revolution,” I told my then-husband. But he disagreed.

Those who had sacrificed their safety to depose the Shah and bring in the Ayatollah Khomeini to form an Islamic government wouldn’t give up power quite so easily, he claimed. These were people who’d take a bullet. Despite the burning buses on the street, the average citizen would never pick up arms and fight because he or she stood to loose too much personally. No surprise, the news channels never reported the unrest, which contained the trouble.

Some time back, a friend of mine loaned me a copy of Deer Hunting With Jesus. We’d been questioning, over wine and expensive cheese, just what kind of person would support Trump in light of the scandals and the obnoxious behavior. The author had the unique perspective of being both the native son of a rural Virginia community that would vote Republican come hell or high water and a successful reporter who’d spent a good number of years among fancy intellectuals. In other words, he had a foot in two opposing worlds, one blue, one red. I walked away with real insight.

Reading, I’d also thought of my father who’d been raised on a North Dakota farm during the Depression. He was an outsider in our Connecticut neighborhood. He’d earned an engineering degree thanks to the GI bill, but he was forever the hick amongst the “New England snobs”. His job, our job, was to work really hard in order to deflect criticism, save money in the bank, and to keep quiet. To be left alone was the best one could expect. When he’d moved back to North Dakota after getting divorced from my mom, he was an outsider once again because he’d supposedly developed airs.

It’s so easy to assume that Trump supporters are all a bunch of hillbillies waving Confederate flags, like many of the folks described in that borrowed book. The type who will load up gun racks and take up sniper positions along I-95. But it’s not so cut and dry. People I know, like, and respect want(ed) what Trump had to offer for a whole host of reasons, reasons that need to be better understood, not swept under some carpet. This division isn’t black and white, rural vs. suburban, intellectual vs. good-ole-boy. Not at all. Which makes matters all the scarier.

What we need is far better communication. We need exposure to different perspectives. Otherwise, burning buses will be the least of our worries. Unlike in Iran, news channels are going to report on that shit night and day, not keep it under cover. Spread, it will.

When I was a kid, my mother would take visiting relatives from North Dakota to the Mark Twain House in Hartford. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s place was right next to Twain’s, though I can’t recall ever stepping foot inside.

Right around 1851, Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. According to Wikipedia, the book’s emotional portrayal of the effects of slavery on individuals captured the nation’s attention. Stowe showed that slavery touched all of society, beyond the people directly involved as masters, traders and slaves. Her novel added to the debate about abolition and slavery, and aroused opposition in the South.

Many claim that Uncle Tom’s Cabin influenced Abraham Lincoln so much so that he took our nation to war.

I can’t remember Uncle Tom being assigned reading during high school, though it probably was, but I read it during my grad program. As old-fashioned as the writing was/is, the story broke my heart.

And that book opened my eyes to the realization that an individual can provide insight that affects outcome, NATIONAL OUTCOME, by writing.

If you want to change the world…if you want to affect outcome…share your unique perspective. If you’re angered by the election, take your fear and your rage and your indignation and turn it into a story that will move others, that will allow them to understand why you think and feel the way you do. If you’re happy about the election and you know it’s only a bandaid given the gaping social wounds we need to heal, turn that into a story as well.

Do it for yourself. And do it for us.