It doesn’t take a genius to realize we live in a divided country; it just takes someone who knows how to turn on the news.

 We are a country with a long list of things to divide us. We have distance and state boundaries that put a gulf between us so wide that our accents make our version of English sound like a different language when compared to what is spoken across the country. We have political parties and issues that are so turbulent that many Americans get more offended by the word “republican” or “democrat” than the f-bomb itself. We have religions and belief systems that have inspired hatred so strong that people have killed others because of it. We have cultures and races that are so diverse that saying things like “black lives matter” can spark a fight.

 As if that list of divisions wasn’t already long enough, more are being added to it as we add to our list of identifiers. We are no longer merely a country of men and women. We are a country of cisgender men, cisgender women, transgender men, transgender women, nonbinary people and agender people. We are no longer a country of straight people. We are a country of straight people, gay people, bisexual people, asexual people, pansexual people and polysexual people, and the list goes on. New identifiers continue to be added to these lists all the time.

 However, these descriptions are just boxes that we check on pieces of paper about ourselves. Just because a wall is going up on the Mexico border doesn’t mean that we should continue to perpetuate the walls that we place between us and those that we deem different than us. In reality, we are not that different. We are all just humans, united in our struggle to live a good life in the country that we share

 We live in perilous, divisive times, and despite this, and perhaps even because of this, we need unity more than ever. It’s time to say, “This is who I am. This is who you are. We are different,” and yet still reach our hand out in love across our dividing lines.

 We have too much up against us for unity to be a choice anymore; it’s now a necessity. If we continue to let our differences place a chasm of hatred between us, we are not “one nation, indivisible”; we are 323 million people living on the same piece of land. As individuals, we must be the ones to say “I’m going to shorten the rift, not widen it,” and then prove it. Our survival as a country depends on it.