Imagine that you are driving down the street and as you attempt to slow down you discover your brakes don’t function. You reflexively swerve to avoid a crosswalk full of people, fumble for the emergency brake, and strike an old woman on the sidewalk. She is killed right in front of her son and granddaughter. They stand over the woman’s body, grappling with their loss.

You are a good person, and two things are true. First, as you review the horrible event in your mind, you are comforted by the realization that you did not overlook some harmless option — you saved the lives of people whose names you will never know. You can’t know for sure, but as far as you can tell, you did the least harm you could. Second, you are overwhelmed with sadness and horror for the family of the woman that you did kill, and you feel anguish for the life you have cut short.

The fact that you had no better option will not prevent you from apologizing deeply and sincerely, and doing whatever you can for these people in their grief. You will surely want them to know why you swerved onto the sidewalk — you were not distracted or indifferent, nor did you make a tragic error. Even when there is no harmless choice, a good person feels bad about harming other people. And good people apologize when they do harm.

The presidential election has occurred. I am shocked at the fact that many Americans imagine they found an excellent leader on their ballot. To them I have little to say at this moment.

Many others recognize that the ballot did not contain an option that was both viable and acceptable, but imagine that, given the choices, there was a clear best answer. They may be right, though I think many such folks are missing the iterated nature of the particular electoral game we have been forced to play, cycle after cycle.

My point here is not about how you should have voted. My point in this essay is that, however it happened, the general election contained no harmless choices for those eligible to vote in it. Those who opted out of voting altogether exposed us to risks and harms they could have acted to mitigate, just as those of us who voted to mitigate one set of harms could not help exposing us to others.

Individual voters in this election might have been able to reduce net harm, but as in the brake-failure scenario I opened with, every move hurt an innocent constituency that deserves protection.

If you opted not to vote, you had the option to deliver a rebuke to a sexual predator, and you didn’t do it. You may have refused to vote for valid reasons, but that does not negate the harm to which you exposed women. You also did not act to protect average Americans from predatory investment banks, and you did not act to protect the world from an unpredictable Commander in Chief with nearly 7000 nuclear weapons at his potential command.

If you voted for Clinton, you would have, among other things, created grave dangers in the Middle East, and also put the entire world in danger of a renewed cold war between the U.S. and Russia, which could turn hot all too easily. You have exposed Americans in the middle and at the bottom of the economic ladder to continued economic predation at the hands of Wall Street. You may have done all this to repel a race-baiting misogynist who appears comfortable targeting disadvantaged people, and is potentially capable of anything — including, perhaps, an entirely incoherent nuclear attack on nations he finds irritating. But your defensible act came at high price to most Americans, and generated large risks to a huge population of people, most of whom had no say in the matter.

If you voted for Trump, you validated a sexual predator, creating the very real risk that more women will be assaulted by men who have learned that such behavior is no bar to any office. You have risked military engagements occurring out of sheer ignorance, the casual use of nuclear weapons, powerful populations within the U.S. ganging up on minorities that can’t defend themselves, and who knows what else. You may have done this because you wished to derail our nation’s present addiction to belligerent militarism abroad, and corporate trade agreements, or because Trump is distrusted by a predatory elite that has targeted us all, but you have embraced staggering risks in so doing.

If you voted third party, you decided to leave the above choice to chance, creating harm for women, and increased risk for Americans of non-European decent in the case of a Trump victory, which has now occurred. Had Clinton won, your symbolic gesture against Wall Street would have left the street with increased actual control. You may have done this to increase the viability of third parties in future elections, and/or to send a message that you do care about policy and don’t accept the corporate stranglehold on power. But you gambled on a high risk present, for the slim possibility of a viable third party down the road.

And if you wrote someone in, you generated all the same risks and harms of the third party voter, while making a noise so quiet that you might as well be whispering to yourself. You may have done this because democracy is the principle on which all others in a civil society rest, but your principle is a simple abstraction, while the immediate harms and risks to others are quite concrete.

I raise these points, not to make people feel bad about their particular votes. All possible actions are covered on my list, including the one I chose. I wrote this to turn an unnatural divide into an organic basis for unity. It does not make sense that we should have elections where all options necessitate apologies. That is something I believe all of us can agree on. And if that’s true, we must transform our system — or replace it — so that the need for universal apologies are not an automatic feature of all presidential elections.

It would be pointless to attempt to apologize to everyone who might have been hurt by my vote. But I believe it is important to go through the exercise of genuinely recognizing the harm my choice invited, and to signify that I understand the debt it implies. I encourage all those eligible to vote in this election to do the same. Figure out whose interests were jeopardized, and let them know that you take responsibility.

Here is my apology:

To women, Americans of color, and the citizens of the world, Donald Trump, if he is taken at his word, represents a threat to you all. As an American citizen, I could have voted to minimize the chances that Trump would win the presidency. I did not do that because I judged that Trump’s popularity was a symptom of a disease that afflicts our nation more generally, and that Clinton, another symptom of the same disease, is herself unacceptably beholden to private interests. With that said, I am appalled that my vote has put vulnerable people at increased risk. I am sorry for having done that, and I accept that my vote places an extra burden on me to protect vulnerable people from both sexual predation, and race-based oppression. I also acknowledge that my vote of conscience obligates me to work for systemic change that prevents such risks from arising in future elections. I hope you can accept that, although my choice was bad, it was chosen from a list that included only bad choices.