“It’s just — Well, I thought you were white trash,” she stared at me, this racially ambiguous girl, thin as a rail, with a freckled face, wild hair, and fur-lined coat.

It was September of tenth grade, 1993, as I sat on a bumpy city bus in Providence headed home. The girl apologized to me for almost having knocked my block off one day after school the spring before. I didn’t even know those girls. I was their target that day. One blonde with a high, tight ponytail and blue eyes, pushed me. Her friend, now sitting in the seat front of me, flicked the ashes of her cigarette into my hair.

As I stared at this girl, now trying to apologize for the near-beating of which I no longer appeared worthy, I began to fear. I’d never feared before. I started to look in the mirror and ask, “Self? Do I look like white trash today?”

Fast forward to September 2015. I was standing on the White House Lawn, in a sea of people, exasperatedly waiting for Pope Francis to address our country. Two DC interns stood behind me, chattering about their apartments, their jobs, their gym memberships, and their travel plans. The woman was blonde, probably no older than twenty-three, and the man was clean-cut with dark brown hair. They blended seamlessly into the DC crowd.

As we waited, packed like sardines in the sun, their conversation drifted into actor George Clooney’s recent marriage to Amal Alamuddin.

The woman remarked, “Is she Indian? I think she’s Indian. She has that horseface, you know, that horseface those people have. But she’s pretty.”

Horseface.

Having seen pictures of this woman on TV, I had immediately decided she was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen.

Also, Amal Clooney is Lebanese.

There we stood, on the White House Lawn, waiting for the Holy Father, in all our imperfect splendor, judging a woman we’d never met.

Fast forward again to November 2016. Election Day. D-Day, I mused.

So here we have this president, this billionaire, with a history of controversial business dealings, alleged abuse towards women, and an apparently quick temper (all things we’ve seen before), attempting to Make America Great Again. And all I’ve seen is hatred.

Since his taking the Oath of Office in January, I have witnessed every form of hatred imaginable. Protests. Rallies. Violence. Social Media attacks. People organizing from every level of society, every occupation, every gender, every possible permutation of human being, to register their discontent. Trump’s presidency has become a bit of a carte blanche to say everything everyone’s ever felt or thought about others.

A virus. A virus that has spread unchecked since the 2016 election.

And instead of fighting this plague by showing how strong we are as a people, we’ve chosen to rip each other apart. Instead of standing up and saying ‘We will not condone the perpetuation of hatred in this country’, we’ve chosen to go to our respective corners to pitch rocks. We’ve chosen to show each other (and the world) the very worst of who we are.

We’ve decided that instead of loving each other, we should band together and hate him. That instead of loving our brothers and sisters, we should hate them. That instead of coming together to make lemonade out of these lemons we’ve been given, we’re letting them ferment, then angrily squirting the juice into one another’s eyes.

I’ve spoken out in support of friends feeling oppressed. I’ve apologized for the obvious state of chaos into which we’ve all been thrown. And I’ve been repaid in kind — with cruel words and even more cruel treatment. So here I am again. White trash on the city bus.

The vinegary aroma of our once-illustrious melting pot singed the hairs in my nose. And made me angry. And down went another soldier, another ordinarily loving person.

Hatred is a virus. And no one is immune.

It takes a strong person to withstand humiliation. It takes an even stronger person to avoid judging others, especially when the whole world’s judging him. And it takes the strongest of all to withstand the gale force winds of hatred as they whip so loudly past our ears.

We’re divided.

And when we’re divided, we’re weak.

And an eye for an eye truly does make the whole world blind.

Use the ones we have left to see that.