Oct 16, 2016 4 min read

A little more than a decade ago, vice presidential candidate John Edwards rallied the Democratic Party’s base with the idea that there were “Two Americas,” and the gap between the rich and poor was growing at an alarming rate.

Although he and the party’s standard-bearer, John Kerry, lost the 2004 election, it did begin to open a dialogue regarding wage inequality, especially after the country’s Great Recession that followed a few years later.

There is now a different and more sinister gap dividing America. That divide now includes how we see the world.

We are no longer living in “Two Americas” anymore – our country has been fractured well beyond that – but instead we are now enduring “Two Realities,” as this brutal presidential campaign lurches to the finish line.

The cable outlets FOX News and MSNBC are such polar opposites in how they cover events and present issues that even President Barack Obama opined that it’s like they’re in parallel universes. The hapless CNN is in the nether reaches of cable television news, too busy chasing missing planes.

The advent of these 24/7 cable news stations in the past 20 years and the myriad of blogs and “news” websites have splintered truth into a million pieces. If you don’t like the facts as they’re presented by one television network or website, you can retreat to your own reality elsewhere to bolster your beliefs. Then you can amplify that falsehood a thousand times over on social media.

Since our founding, Americans have always argued about policy and disagreed on the future of the country – and many fights were contentious – but the two parties at least were shooting at the same target.

Take Social Security, for example.

It is universally understood that it will one day become insolvent and needs to be adjusted to ensure funds will be available to future retirees. Of course, there are differing opinions about how fix the problem.

Republicans in the mid-2000s floated an idea of privatizing Social Security and allowing taxpayers to invest their money directly in the stock market. Democrats, on the other hand, have suggested lifting the salary cap that limits Social Security withholdings to $117,000 of someone’s annual salary.

But we’ve now reached a point where we can no longer even agree on facts.

When Donald Trump claimed in 2011 that Obama was not born in Hawaii, his birth certificate had been forged, and continued to perpetuate that lie for another five years, he was misinforming Americans about their leader.

When Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton claims that she never passed classified information on her private email server, despite a Department of Justice investigation showing some messages with confidential information were included in chains, that is a lie that undermines her trustworthiness.

The fact that these things happened cannot be disputed. But it is leading to other instances where fundamental realities are said to be untrue despite mounds of evidence to the contrary.

Trump, unhappy with the unflattering media coverage about his alleged behavior toward women, is unleashing a barrage of attacks in the final days of the campaign on reporters and journalism itself. His supporters have followed suit by hurling insults at reporters covering his rallies, some going as far as spitting on them.

It’s getting dangerous, not only for those reporters, but also for our democracy that thrives on an informed electorate.

Facts are facts. That’s the case no matter how hard you work to create your own reality.

After this election, we will have one president who must lead us all. We must not make their ability to govern any more difficult by claiming that the sky is falling, or denying that it’s blue.