This year’s midterm elections yielded an impressively high turnout: Over 30 million more people voted than in 2014, approximately 50.3 percent of the electorate at latest tally.

The violence of the last week and the ending of the contentious midterm elections are further proof that America has become a political tinderbox — one in which roughly half of Democrats and Republicans alike report they are afraid of the other political party.

During the 2016 election, I was spending my senior year at Harvard exploring the history of Boston’s civics education for my thesis.

We were sitting on his porch, his dog yapping as people walked beneath the street lights. Over 1,000 miles from home, in Dubuque, Iowa, I was interviewing him about what it meant to be an American, about the things that everyone in our country shared.

In the days after November 8th, I noticed a scary trend among my classmates at Harvard. Instead of levying their criticisms at politicians – Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump – many people seemed to instead express their political anger at their fellow citizens.

I remember the first time I was in awe of Harvard. I had just arrived, and I was talking to my roommates as we settled into our dorms.