Well, I think it's safe to say that nobody saw that coming.

I don't think the Clinton campaign saw it. At the risk of rubbing salt in fresh wounds, I don't think the Trump campaign saw it coming either. Last Tuesday will go down as an unprecedented comeback from a candidate that many Americans had written off equally. Plays will be written, films will be created and students will study the night's events in classroom one-hundred years from now. When surveyed before the election, even many Trump supporters had come to a large agreement that they Clinton would emerge victorious.

I found the atmosphere after the election disquieting, especially on social media. It felt a lot like a blackout, a lapse in communication where people were no longer being told what to think by their peers. We live in an age in which clickbait news articles, Hollywood celebrities and major corporations are telling us how to feel every second of every day. Our information and the lens in which we view the world is shaped by how we choose to consume information.

Everybody, from right-wind pundits, to evangelical newscasters, to the stock market, was anticipating a Hillary Clinton presidency. What I found most interesting the morning after, as I combed through my Facebook feed and looked at various articles, was that the media itself had been fractured. Its voice had been rendered silent, and there was really no articulate way to form a response to Trump's reelection.

This alone should open up questions to ponder. After all, under laws of journalistic integrity, the news we consume should not be formed by opinion, but fact alone. Yet with all of the newspaper endorsements and false polling, it seems the media has certainly played a large part in our false security and even our decision-making.

Was a Hillary Clinton campaign anticipated only because liberal America had chosen to lock itself in a bubble, feeding itself on the same information over and over? One of the main themes of this election was division: division between the candidates' policies, division in the manner that they conducted themselves, and division within the country as a whole. We fed ourselves on tenuous information. We locked ourselves into this air-tight bubble and read the same articles over and over, which already shows one of the greatest problems in this country. We're not listening to each other.

We prefer to have answers, and not discussion. We prefer to have opinions, and yet banish the compulsory need to defend them. In the information age, we've reached the point where anyone can post their opinion online, and fall under the impression that what they say can be immediately construed as fact.

We surround ourselves with people on Facebook that agree with our political affiliations, deleting people who are different than us because their ideas frighten our well-being. What does it say about a country that can't have a discussion because our ideas alone are too fragile? Is this a reflection of an America that listens, or rather an America that's chosen sides and been unwilling to speak to one another?

I don't think the negative rhetoric in Trump's campaign should be attributed to Trump alone, nor do I think his supporters are the the sole cause of their own fear. I see the animosity after this election as almost a chicken-or-the-egg scenario. At what point did we become so frightened of ideas different than our own that we decided to surround ourselves only with people that agreed with us? What discussion is there when you surround yourself with people that think exactly like you, and refuse to engage in different outlooks? We see it at college campuses across America, where books by authors are outlawed for being too conservative or too liberal.

This is not an issue unique to a certain political party, but a disease within our society as a whole. America doesn't enjoy stepping outside of its own comfort zone. Our country has split into two feuding factions, both of which are convinced that their values are at risk, and that any attempt to reason them with them is fueled by malicious intent.

When you take a cloth and tear it, it doesn't pull itself back together. It keeps ripping, until eventually the two sides are ripped apart. The fate of America during Trump's presidency will not be the fate of an America falling mercy to his policies. It will be the fate of an America that has refused for years to acknowledge the pain and opinions of its own neighbors.