Like many others, I slept very little last night as we waited for the results to come in. And as they did,  a sense of dread unfolded as the numbers came back: we have cancer. And then the finger-pointing started. Blame the independents. Blame the apathetic voters. Blame the “elitists.” Blame the “stupid hicks.” Blame the Democrats. Blame the Republicans. But this didn’t begin last night, and it didn’t begin 16 months ago when Donald Trump began his run for the Presidency. Trump isn’t the problem — he never was. Like any good Reality TV star, Trump is a chameleon — a mirror of our society. This election was never about *choosing* between what kind of society we want to be; it was a full-body scan revealing what kind of society we already are. Half the country is feeling deep despair and anger this morning at seeing their candidate concede. To you I say, take this as you would your MRI results: don’t direct your anger at the machine or the physician. Acknowledge the illness, and ask what you plan to do now. Accept that we live in a divided country, and that for all our talk of living in a melting pot, we have been divided for centuries. The other half is feeling a sense of vindication at seeing their candidate triumph. To you I say the same: yes, you were right. We have cancer. But to celebrate those results as an “I told you so” moment ignores the troubling reality of our plight. We have allowed ourselves to become complacent: to value pleasure over depth, numbness over pain. We’ve allowed ourselves to largely ignore the world around us, enjoying the fantasy presented by our band-aid politicians and television reality stars. How many of us truly, deeply grok (to borrow from Robert Heinlein) what is happening outside of this country? How many, when first viewing Johnson’s “Aleppo moment”, said the same thing before Googling: “What is Aleppo?” But even this isolation and separation is nothing more than a reaction to the real disease. We are still dealing with the same existential crisis the great scholars from the Holocaust desperately warned us about. Is this about sexism? Sure. Racism? Of course. Xenophobia? Absolutely. But these are largely byproducts of the deeper selfishness and superficiality we have embraced as a people. They are the childlike reactions to a collective emptiness that we all share. We sense something is missing, and erroneously assume we can find it elsewhere: that it is a commodity to be traded or stolen, rather than a product of community and integration. We have increasingly ghettoized ourselves (just look at the electoral maps) in a time when what we needed was the melting pot we pretended to live in. Isolation and separation aren’t the cure, they are part of the disease. And just like cancer, the cure lies in combatting the disease, not chastising the patient for their sometimes reckless reactions to it. Until last night, Americans have been able to pretend it only existed “out there” — in the “3rd world”. Well, the results are in. We have cancer. Stop yelling at the doctor and go do something about it.