Over these past few days, the entire country of America has been obsessing over the solar eclipse. People traveled to different states, spent hundreds of dollars, bought specific types of glasses and cleared their entire schedule all to see the rare phenomenon of the solar eclipse that lasts only two minutes. Some people were so excited to see the eclipse, others questioned what all the hype was about. But, in my opinion, whether you cared about seeing the eclipse or not, this is exactly what this country needed.

The United States is going through a very tremulous time right now. Through everything that has been happening in Charlottesville, with protests involving white supremacy advocates, Nazis and people fighting back, it seems like everything has turned into a race war all over again, or even a war against the White House.

The white supremacy groups are displaying disgusting forms of hate towards other people that no one should condone, and some other people seem to think that the way to fix this problem is by showing more hate and violence right back at them. I don't know too many details about everything, but what I do know is that tensions are really high, and race relations appear to be getting worse before they get better. This is all very sad to me because I always thought that our country was progressive and accepting of people of all races. But this seems to have been changing over the past few years, and the media coverage of all the protests is not making anything remotely better.

But, despite these difficult times that our country is facing right now, we managed to let all of our hatred and anger towards certain people go for one day to focus on the solar eclipse. August 21, 2017, was the first day that there were more pictures of the sun on my timeline than political rants. And you know what? I am more than OK with that.

I don't care if I see 20 million photos in a row of a blurry sun out of a bad quality phone camera because I would much rather see us bonding as a human race over that than over hatred. The solar eclipse reminds us that we are all human in the human race, we all look the same when we are stripped away of our skin, that is only different because some people are born with more melatonin than others. We all look up and see the same sky, the same moon, the same sun, the same stars because we are all together on the same planet.

I wish there was something like the solar eclipse every day because I think we all deserve a break from violence and oppression with something that almost everyone can relate to.

So thank you, the sun and the moon, for aligning up perfectly this year on this beautiful day in August because it gave us the distraction we needed from the terrible things in the world. Even if certain people didn't get to see all of it depending on where they lived, we know that the eclipse was there anyway, watching over us all when we needed it most.