2016 has been a turbulent year, to say the least. The election in America has polarized America so much that Associated Press has an interactive section called “Divided America.” Mass shootings, racial and religious tensions and global terrorism brought news of hundreds of undeserving deaths and made us blame and point fingers at our neighbors. The world and its people are tired of all the violence, division and hatred, and deservedly so. At the time of writing, #2016in3words took #1 spot on Twitter’s trending hashtags and garnered over 122,000 tweets. Most of them read like this: “end is near,” “stop the violence,” “world is burning” or “worst year ever”. They sound like lines from a movie—a disaster movie, at that. So many people, it seems, have lost hope. We’re angry. We’re scared. But most of all, we’re exhausted. Exhausted of all the violence, exhausted of all the hatred and exhausted of all the division. We have resorted to slandering, labeling and cursing each other. But if we’re going to fix it, which we have to, we can’t give into the hate, the violence and the division, because the only way we’re going to fix this mess is by joining each other, hand-in-hand, and showing the world that we are far from giving up on hope, love, compassion and understanding towards each other.

Now, we can’t create and hide in a bubble filled with flowers and cuddly animals and pretend everything is fine while the world is suffering from hate and injustice and people are dying because of it, because that would be just stupid. We have to face the problems and somehow work them out together, regardless of our race, religion or political affiliation. And we can do it. Heck, some of us had already done it.

This picture of a protester and two police officers in Dallas taken just hours before the tragic death of five officers, this video of protesters and counter-protesters in Dallas coming together and praying for one another and this beautiful gathering of Muslim and Christian Scouts in Naperville, IL all teach us one thing: we can come together, we can see past each other’s differences and that we can stop with our bigotry, prejudices and all the other trash we hold against each other.

I’m not trying to start a political debate with Black Lives Matter vs. All Lives Matter, or what religion is responsible for what. Why? Because both debates have devolved into stupid blame games. Alton Sterling might have had a slew of criminal records, but that shouldn’t justify the fact that his children will have to live with the trauma of losing their father; no child deserves that. Just because some terrible men in uniform abused their power and murdered people without reason doesn’t mean Officer Montrell Jackson had to die in Baton Rouge, LA; will any one of us, whether we’re pro-black or pro-police, have the guts to tell Officer Jackson’s newborn son how his father was killed when he grows up? And are we just going to ignore the fact that Muslims are also victims of radical Islamist terrorist groups? Are we going to blatantly ignore that people are dying while we’re arguing about who’s the bigger sinner?

We’re wasting precious time labeling each other as either racists or terrorists; it’s not solving anything. Policemen don’t feel safer because we generalized all protesters as terrorists. In fact, it’s creating inflammatory rhetoric, which is the last thing they need right now. ISIS and other radical Islamic terrorists are not being subdued when Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich said to ban Muslims from entering America and test all American Muslims, it only fueled them. What we need to do is sit down and talk to understand one another. Everyone needs to understand what it means to live in America as a black person, a police officer or a Muslim. Then we need to have constructive dialogues—like how we’re supposed to solve problems—to brainstorm solutions to these immensely difficult problems. Racial tensions and ISIS are already the most harrowing problems of our generation, so we may as well have as much brainpower as we can get.

Many people are wondering how Pokemon Go exploded into a worldwide phenomenon so quickly, and it’s probably because it did something that hasn’t been done in such a long time: it brought people together. And when a simple video game about fictional animated creatures did a better job of bringing people of all races, religion or political affiliation together, then we all have some reflecting to do. We are letting emotion get the better of us and if we keep allowing that to happen, more people will die, more families will be ruined and our children will have to live in a world that’s regressed further than progressed.

I wish my Muslim friends could live without being labeled a terrorist; I wish my small group teacher—who goes to work everyday with his police badge on his chest—could return home every night safely to his wife and three daughters; I wish my friends were treated equally without being prejudiced because of their skin color; I wish fewer people were killed at the hands of law enforcement officials; I wish my 10 year-old sister, my four year-old nephew and two year-old niece will live in a world that’s not tainted by hate, division and violence. Since I already mentioned Pokemon, I want to end this with a quote from a Pokemon—specifically, Meowth’s quote in the first Pokemon movie: “You’re right, we do have a lot in common; the same Earth, the same air, the same sky. Maybe if we started looking at what’s the same, instead of always looking at what’s different... well, who knows?"