I am.

I don't know if anyone has noticed or not, but it's an election year.

Election season for me means annoying social media posts, signs in yards, bumper stickers on cars, interns on street corners, divisive conversations, and higher quality Saturday Night Live skits. 

It also means the celebration of a government by the people.  I'm not sure that's as dependable as high quality Saturday Night Live skits and I'm pretty sure Bernie would agree with me.  Maybe it means the celebration of an idea, which is a government that was originally intended to be for the people. 

I digress. 

The point of this specific blog is to confess some aspects of my character that I have noticed through the overlap of world travel and the current election season. 

Election years make it really easy for me to identify people that I want nothing to do with. Put a sign in your front yard with a certain name on and I'll instantly know that we could never be friends.  

I know, in my head, that the sum of an entire human cannot be contained in the endorsement of a candidate. But damn, it's so easy to do that.  

Especially this year. Every endorsement feels like a proverbial wall giving me permission to actively stay on my side of the partition. Attach yourself to a specific candidate and I've given myself permission to write you off. 

I can rationalize it pretty easily.  

I teach in a community of students that are first generation Spanish speaking immigrants. I've spent years working towards helping my kids get citizenship before their 18th birthdays. I've walked that road with them. I know their stories. I'm part of their stories. 

I'm also a woman. And I have a radical idea that my gender is equal to other humans that have different genitals. 

Additionally, I work really hard to use the privilege I was born with, based on skin color, in order to level the playing field for my brothers and sisters that were born into a world of ignorant racism. 

A few more - I think that wealth and resources are to be shared. I think wisdom rests in the most lowly, most disregarded in a society.  I think leaders are meant to serve.  I'm a pacifist that believes in subversive opposition to systems of oppression. 

See? Easy. 

You stay on your side. I'll stay on mine. 

There's just one problem with the ease at which I segregate people of differing viewpoints from myself - It doesn't align with my own value system. 

I operate under the premise that we all have more in common than not.  I go across the globe and see entire cultures that live in a world with no resemblance to my own. 

Politics, culture, worldview, gender roles, societal norms, agriculture, cuisine, rituals - all different. 

The first thing I see, regardless of where I find myself, is all that we have in common.  

Love of family, desire for community, appreciation for celebration, need for expression, respect for the sacred, disdain for disgust. All the same. 

See?  Easy. 

I can spend a month with a group of people, living and laughing and learning one another, to the point that I feel eternally connected.  I feel really good about the world when I think about that, about how we are all so much more alike than any of us realize. 

That's beautiful to me. I want more of that. 

I can live on the same block as someone that I will intentionally avoid meeting based on the sign they have in their window.  I feel really good about myself when I think about that, about how I can write someone off so easily, dismissing them as humans because I think that they are ignorant.

That's abhorrent to me. I don't even want to admit it. 

But, it's true. 

It's true and I need to admit it. I need to say it. I need to address it. I need to weed it out of the garden of my soul. 

I want to see people.  Whole people.  Entire beings. I want to find all that connects me to them, all that we have in common and let that be my starting point. 

No labels.  No branding. No generalizations.  No categories.  No affiliations. 

Just human. 

I have to work on that. 

If I don't, I'm just adding to the problem. I'm just adding to the "us vs. them" world that I actively work to piece back together. 

The problem, I suppose, is that I don't want to have anything in common with these people.  I want to arrogantly state how ignorant they are and how different I am because of that. 

And I guess, that makes me the problem.  

I am the problem. 

It's an odd revelation to have, especially when I'm walking through Kibera, the largest slum in all of Africa, and actively seeing every commonality between myself and the people living here. 

But if I can't do it at home, what's the point of being here at all?

I have to work on that. 

I suppose if I do, if I work on that, I can be the solution, too.