Dear Sheldon,

I still don’t know right now if we’re going to be able to call you “Don” for short, because I don’t know how this story ends. After all, I wanted to name you after your great-grandfather, a staunch liberal from the Bernie Sanders mold. (If you don’t know who he was, I am sorry and I will explain old-school Democratic Socialism to you next time we sit down.) Right now, I’m just not sure if any name that hearkens back to President Trump will be acceptable in polite company while you come of age. We can only hope.

Speaking of hope, we still have about two months before my all-time favorite President, Barack Obama, leaves office. If he is able to impart the gravity of the office of the Presidency to a man who has never demonstrated a willingness to listen, then I will note it as the greatest accomplishment of his eight years in office. It is surreal, indeed, that President Obama’s legacy may rely on him scaring President Trump into taking the job seriously, especially after the immense disrespect Trump showed by repeatedly questioning the legitimacy of Obama’s citizenship during his campaign. (Again, if you never learned about any of this, either you’re reading my letter before you’re old enough, or we truly have turned into a totalitarian state. I hope it’s the former.)

So, why am I writing to you now? Well, I wanted to do it in the moment, because this election may go down in history as one of the most important junctures in human, let along American history. It’s just surreal, watching history unfold before you. I needed to try to preserve that urgency, that raw emotion that will settle down in time, so that I can try to impart you with my feeling of awe and existential dread. If a car crash were slowed down, spaced out over a week, and you just got to examine and contemplate it over and over as you watched the glass shatter and the plastic crumble, that would be an apt metaphor for the electoral experience of November 2016. (I digress, but I sincerely hope you find it impossible to relate to my archaic, early-twenty-first century metaphor about car crashes, because I doubt you’ll ever experience one. Remind me to show you a picture of your father actually manually driving around Grandma and scaring her by going too fast.)

So, President-Elect Trump. I never thought I’d say those words. I bought a “Make America Great Again” knockoff hat on eBay when I thought it was all a joke, and I even put down money on an election-betting website on Hillary Clinton to win. I kept having nervous second thoughts, but I thought that competitive Magic had taught me to ignore those “irrational” gut feelings that didn’t line up with the math. Well, I was wrong, and now we’re likely going to see a very different America from the one I anticipated you growing up in.

You see, East-Coast, college-educated, dare I say “elite” folks like us had a vision for the future. We were going to science our way into Utopia. Elon Musk was (and maybe still is) going to put the first manned rocket on Mars, we’d limit global warming by inventing carbon-sequestration technologies and solar power, and we’d even cure aging with the right cocktail of compounds and supplements. Bigotry, parochialism, and maybe even organized religion as a whole were supposed to slowly wither away to the fringes of society, and rationalism was supposed to usher in a new age of tolerance and prosperity. I guess the wheel of history spins both ways, huh?

Look. You know from history class (or from our various conversations over the years) that many Presidents were fairly awful human beings in their personal lives. Kennedy was a philanderer, Johnson was a bully, even Jefferson had numerous children by his slave, Sally Hemings. Trump was just the latest in a long line of Presidents who simply didn’t act with moral rectitude (or much of a sense of compassion) in his personal life. The only difference was, he proudly displayed his moral failings as evidence of his diametric opposition to the forces of “political correctness”.  His base, or “target market” as they term it in business settings, loved it. Many Americans, however, found it hard to come to grips with this brazen callousness on the part of their leader, especially after the quiet dignity of Barack Obama.

I don’t need to tell you, President Trump should never be an example for your behavior, and you know well that we give everyone in our lives respect, and treat them equally no matter what. Judge people on their actions, not on their backgrounds, and recognize that everyone has the freedom to live their lives as they choose. That, not an idealized re-telling of a mythical, prosperous Middle America, is what makes our country truly great.

I am writing to you now, as well, because I believe that history is cyclical. Obviously I have a bias towards Western history, as that is what I know best, but you are a child of the new Counter-Enlightenment. The original Counter-Enlightenment was a backlash to the 18th Century rush towards rationalism, towards using the scientific method as a metric for all policy decisions, both public and personal. It invoked populism, conservatism, and nationalism that eventually led to the overly charitably-named Romantic period. Needless to say, the wars and suffering that marked this period only fully concluded in 1945.

Well, now the European Union is weakening with Britain’s departure, and President-Elect Trump has made overtures to the dismantling of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), so two of the pillars of post-WWII rationalism and globalism are currently under immense stress. Should they break, we will undoubtedly slide back towards the same nationalistic, anti-science, anti-progress forces that brought humanity to the brink of destruction in the first half of the 20th century. Even if you don’t grow up in the shadow of a mushroom cloud (and as of right now, I am optimistic that you will not), you’ll certainly grow up in a world much less certain than the one I grew up in.

In the heady days after a consequential election, it is obviously very easy to fall victim to the same irrational fear that drove President Trump’s campaign. My fear is different from his supporters’ fears, of course, but that in and of itself does not make them rational or legitimate. Only careful examination and analysis of what Donald Trump has said and done, and is likely to say and do, will vindicate the left’s fears. You know well that our family tries to be careful not to make hasty, unexamined decisions based on emotion rather than facts. What do I fear the most, and what reasons do I have to consider them legitimate?

Well, in order, here are my biggest concerns.

1: Mere months after President Obama’s administration helped bring the United States into the Paris Climate Agreement, President-Elect Trump plans to appoint a notable climate change skeptic to head the transition over the EPA. I believe that the chances that humanity overcomes the global warming crisis in my lifetime have dropped significantly, simply from listening to Trump’s claims that “global warming is a hoax designed by the Chinese to make America less competitive” combined with his actions to essentially castrate the EPA. This will affect all of us, and it means your world is a lot gloomier than I’d hoped.

2: President Trump has received massive support from Russia, an autocratic state with Vladimir Putin as dictator in everything but name. His actions on this front have been non-existent, of course, because he isn’t President yet, but there is reason to be concerned. If NATO is to collapse, the resulting nuclear proliferation certainly increases the risk that you will see a nuclear weapon detonated over a human population center in your lifetime. Understandably, that concerns me.

3: President Trump has enabled and emboldened certain marginalized hate groups and hateful rhetoric to poke their noses into mainstream conversation. There is a concept called the “Overton Window”, which basically describes how extreme you can get in your viewpoints before you are laughed out of a public discussion. Talking about “the genocide of the White race” as a response to the increasing diversity of the United States was once basically taboo. We’ll see if under President Trump, that kind of talk gets normalized. It worries me that the people who do discuss these sorts of things are likely to incite violence, and if the United States experiences its first lynching in decades under Donald Trump, now you’ll know why.

4: I’ll lump my distaste for President Trump’s remarks about and actions towards women, minorities, immigrants, and the LGBT community together in this one. Vice President Pence may end up determining significant amounts of policy, as President Trump is a political neophyte and has no experience crafting policy. This is troubling for those who thought that LGBT and abortion rights were essentially a foregone conclusion after two landmark Supreme Court cases, Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges. Mike Pence has voiced his disagreement with both of these court decisions, and for all the hateful rhetoric President Trump enables, the most concerning part of his administration will be watching the attempts to dismantle these rights. If you live in a world where gay marriage is not granted the same legal recognition as heterosexual marriage, now you know how unnerved we felt on the eve of its destruction.

I’ll keep the mushiness to a minimum, because I am sharing this with my friends, and I don’t want to embarrass you. I know I’d be embarrassed if my dad shared something like this to Facebook, and I’m doing this before you’re even around to voice your opinion! I am beyond excited to meet you, to grow with you, and to help you become a person of consequence in the world. Now that President Trump is a reality, that excitement has been moderated with a healthy dose of worry, because you are likely to enter the world in a uniquely turbulent time. I hope that I am equal to the task of raising you, and I hope that you will continue the endless campaign for knowledge, reason and progress, even in a time where it seems like everything is moving in the opposite direction.

Your Father,

Ben Friedman

I sat there in the backseat as the dented old SUV slogged through some forgotten corner of West Virginia, off the Interstate and in search of gas. Run-down old farms turned to run-down old trailer homes as we rolled through what turned out to be the town center of Pliny, WV, and the solitary gas station that marked the town’s only sign of activity. And of course, right there in the window of the convenience mart, a “Make America Great Again” sign sat squarely between two fading advertisements for cheap domestic beer. Now, the gas pumps at this station didn’t take credit cards, so we had to wander in and speak to the friendly clerk, an older woman wearing a crucifix necklace and smoking a cigarette who immediately recognized that we were out-of-towners. A brief, unremarkable bout of small talk about life in Pliny followed, and we were soon on our way, but something about that tiny little town and that image of the window sign in the beat-up old gas station with thirty-year-old gas pumps stuck with me. I could not help but view those human beings as “others”, and I am certain they felt the same way about me. Not in a malicious way, of course, but one that could lead to disregarding the very real pain and suffering of the other group. As the election winds to a close after over a year of wild twists and turns, I can’t help but consider that empathy is the missing ingredient that has torn our country almost cleanly down the middle.

Now, the easy conclusion is: No, duh. Of course, when everyone is hammered by partisan talk shows and 24-hour news cycles, and when social media causes clustering around similar beliefs, thus shifting people’s informational intake to more match ideas they already agree with, it will cause problems in bridging the gap between Red and Blue states. The problem has only gotten worse over each of the last four elections (which are, incidentally, the only ones I can remember), and it figures to get even worse no matter who wins tomorrow’s election.

So, in recent days, what have I done to make this election philosophically relevant to me? I’ve contemplated the unenviable position of the people with whom I disagree. I’ve really, honestly tried to “walk in their shoes”, so to speak. I sat there, and I meditated on what life would be like if I’d grown up in Pliny, or any other small town dotting the map between the major metropolises. I invite you to join me. Take a moment, right now, and envision yourself growing up in a working-class family in the Rust Belt.

(If you did in fact grow up in a working-class family in the Rust Belt, I apologize for my overgeneralization, and I urge you to contemplate what life would be like, as, say, an undocumented immigrant living in Texas or Southern California instead.)

Mom stayed at home, Dad worked at the factory, or maybe in a store in town. They scrimped and saved and they just barely managed to raise you and your siblings. You went to high school where, sure, there wasn’t much diversity, but you read about Martin Luther King in class and celebrated equality just the same. There was never any issue with racism, and all the differences in the world melted away when everyone was sitting together on Friday nights at the high school football game.  You graduated, and you thought about trying to get to college, but you wanted to make some money for yourself, so you contented yourself with part-time community college while you worked as a clerk and sometimes-assistant at the auto repair shop in town. Somewhere along the way, you had a kid, school got left behind, and you had to get serious about earning a living *NOW*. Unfortunately, the big factory in town was downsizing, laying people off, and you had to settle for picking up some shifts at the Wal-Mart 12 miles away. No matter, you grit your teeth and bear it. You need to make rent, and diapers ain’t cheap! Meanwhile, your brother breaks his leg at his construction job, and gets addicted to the painkillers that the doctor prescribed him.  Ugh. Okay, well, your hours keep getting squeezed at your jobs, and your car is making this annoying whine that you know you can’t afford to fix. On top of that, Mom’s got this hacking cough that won’t go away, even though it’s April and cold season is over. Health insurance? Not since Dad got “early retirement” (read: laid off), and they’re not eligible for Medicare yet. If only there were any good jobs…

Dig deep, and try to identify with the people who would just as soon call you out for being a fool on a public Facebook thread as they would come to your aid if your tire blew out on some remote Interstate Highway exit in Kentucky or Tennessee. Try to see things from their position, see how a certain narrative that has been pushed about the candidates might line up with their pre-existing biases, and how they might view a Hail Mary vote for an unqualified authoritarian as a desirable alternative to the slow decay they see creeping in around them.

If not for the value of empathy in its own right, at least do it because empathy is certainly more likely than antipathy to bring would-be political adversaries around to your way of thinking.

In an odd way, this entire election has been about empathy. Hillary Clinton, while dodging accusations and indictments, has spent the last year repeatedly trying to show her empathy for common voters (with only middling success) while her opponent, Donald Trump, has spent that time expressly showing a lack of empathy to remarkably impressive results. Maybe people like it more when a candidate isn’t obviously trying too hard to empathize with them, and while Clinton makes it too obvious, Trump makes it obvious that he couldn’t care less. People want to win his approval, to be on board with him as he “Makes America Great Again”. I don’t know if this is inadvertent genius on Trump’s part, but it’s not entirely relevant to the matter at hand: Selecting a President.

Look, I understand the impulse to make the election about controversies and scandals. Both major-party candidates have had their fair share of over-hyped, sensationalist stories that aren’t truly pertinent to their abilities as potential Commanders-in-Chief. Of course, you can make this election about emails and Benghazi versus sexual assault allegations alongside a string of failed businesses, lawsuits, and shady tax evasion techniques. However, I generally prefer the more substantive questions about policy that actually determine what kind of President these candidates would make.

Fortunately, I have two wonderful algorithms that I’ve created for each of these axes of the election. One of them smoothes over all of the messy policy differences and offers a choice based on instinct and tribalism. The other ignores any of the candidates’ personalities or histories, and asks the single most pertinent policy question for a young voter. Inexplicably, both of these algorithms point to the same candidate, which demonstrates both my implicit bias in algorithm design and my explicit bias for which candidate I prefer. But enough meta-discussion, let’s get right down to it. (And I hope I don’t alienate too many of you along the way. If I do, please take a minute and pretend like I’m sitting right there in front of you before you hit “send” on that snide comment or message).

Algorithm A (The sensationalist, cynical, content-free algorithm):

1: Which candidate do the KKK and Neo-Nazi/White Supremacy groups support?

2: Vote for the candidate who is most likely to beat that person.

Easy, right?

But let’s pretend like we actually care about the issues for a moment. In a long-range view, there are a few existential threats to humanity that must take precedence over smaller, pettier economic and social issues, no matter how painful those social and economic issues may be to the affected individuals. The most prevalent existential threat to humanity today is most likely climate change, although strong cases could be made for nuclear war, AI catastrophe, or drug-resistant super-germs.

I humbly present for your consideration, Algorithm B (the “there’s only one issue in the long term that matters here” algorithm):

1: Which candidate denies climate science and the existence of anthropogenic global warming?

2: Vote for the candidate who is most likely to beat that person.

Now, I know that over-simplifying the election to a one-issue algorithm is an extreme expression of my privilege, but there is no reasonable way for me to distance my preferences and choices from the circumstances of my (fortunate) life.

And really, we are all bound by the circumstances of our upbringings, the happy accidents of birth that landed us here in the 21st century in a pivotal time in human history. I sincerely hope we don’t blow our shot at overcoming our existential threats and someday colonizing the galaxy, but that is the beauty of our current democracy. Whether we sink or swim is entirely in our hands. We may be divided as a country politically, but until and unless we really do colonize Mars, we’re going to have to learn to live with each other. Whether your preferred candidate wins or loses tomorrow, I urge you to start practicing empathy now, because if we are going to repair the rift in our country, we’re going to need all of the empathy we can get.