Hi, Ashton!

This is so nicely expressed I can't do any better. I can imagine us changing the world and making it better. At times like this it seems like a stretch of the imagination, but we need to try. That means we all need to remain calm and respectful and stop using social media as a platform to unleash angry rants against each other. It only fans the flames and leads to more violence. I believe in a completely different approach. When you encounter someone you perceive as your polar opposite, instead of dismissing or attacking them, listen to what they have to say and appreciate where they are coming from. Try to identify common ground and areas of agreement and turn that person into a friend.

It's not "us and them." It is only us.

A few quotes come to mind.

Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain: "But we are here for something new, this has not happened much, in the history of the world. We are an army out to set other men free. America should be free ground, all of it, not divided by a line between slave states and free - all the way from here to the Pacific Ocean. No man has to bow. No man born to royalty. Here we judge you by what you do, not by who your father was. Here you can be something. Here is the place to build a home. But it's not the land, there's always more land. It's the idea that we all have value - you and me. What we are fighting for, in the end, we're fighting for each other."
- Gettysburg (1993)

"Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."
- President John F. Kennedy

"Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space