I, like many others, have been emotionally, mentally, physically, and any other way a human being could possibly be "drained" after following this year's presidential election. No matter on which side you identify with, if your candidate won or not, I think everyone can agree we are in need of a little break of post-election media.

This article is not a political or opinion piece by any means. I'm writing this so that I may reach a larger audience, especially the millennial generation, as a cry of hope for not only our future, but the future of our children and our children's children.

Like many of you I read articles about Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton online through mainstream media. But not only do I read the articles, I read the comments from people all around the globe giving their "infinite amounts of wisdom" (aka things you would rather fall down a set of stairs than read or actually believe people would have the audacity to say these things). To be brutally honest, it's not the next four year, eight years, or even twenty years that scare me, it's how people are treating one another.

I recently read one article from the New York Times, mind it is an opinion article, and was written by a man who characterized himself to be liberal. He was raised in a rural town and his article basically discussed how he finally understood the reason behind why conservative people (i.e. many of his hometown friends) think the way they do, and why they so strongly disagree with liberal viewpoints. That's it. That's all it was about. The article itself took me maybe a few minutes to read through. However the comments took me over twenty minutes to read.

The results were horrifying.

People who considered themselves to be Independent, Democratic, and Republican were at each other's throats. These were grown men and women attacking individuals they didn't even know. Attacks that I will not post on the internet or have any desire to ever repeat.

Reading these comments made me angry, and unable to understand why a human could hate another based on one thing: an opinion.

(And by this I don't mean we shouldn't have opinions. I firmly believe in having strong opinions and standing by them. I might never agree with those whose opinions differ from mine, but I would never actually hate a human being for just not thinking the way I do).

We're taught around that preschool/kindergarten age to be kind, to treat our peers with the respect that we would like for ourselves in return. But as we get older, we tend to become more and more about ourselves and less about others, which can result in hatred. I've always wondered why this is? Because of reading these comments, I found my answer.

It's us.

I am tired of living in a world where no one is genuinely kind to someone who isn't like them. I am tired of the divide growing larger and larger every day in this country just because of an election. I am tired of human beings so quickly judging one another before you "climb in his skin and walk around in it." And if you don't know what that means, read To Kill a Mockingbird and it just might save your life. And most of all, I am tired of all of these things being expected from not only me, but every other person, just because this new strongly divided red and blue society deems it necessary.

And the worst truth of it all, we're all guilty of these things. We've all been unkind to someone who isn't like us, we've all said at least one not so nice thing about our opposing candidate or someone from our opposite political party, and we've all judged someone before knowing who they actually are or what they've been through. Again, I've pondered these things for a long time, even within myself and why I haven't been nice or judged a person too quickly in the past. After years and years, I realized that a quote by Stephen R. Covey said it all:

"Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply." Or in other words, we don't just take a moment to pause and actually listen.

Here's the thing. We now are hating, not just disliking, but hating other people just because of their opinions. Now just to put the word 'hate' into context, I looked up synonyms in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and here they are: abomination, spite, disgust, maliciousness, horror, repulsion, contempt, venom.

I don't know about anyone else, but this is what scares me. Seeing what hate actually is, and thinking that I could hate another human being just because they don't agree with me, makes me sick to my stomach. It should you too.

I've made a resolution to stop this hate in my life. I refuse to hate someone because they don't think like me. Instead, I can listen to these people and what they have to say. Now I don't have to like what they say or agree with it by any means at all, but I don't have to hate them just because we don't agree. Because this is the only way this divide that everyone talks about, is going to get smaller.

It starts with us, and by us, I mean every human being currently living in this country. If we want a future, one that we can be confident leaving our children with, we're going to have to be mature and figure it out together, because no one is going to do it for us.