For years, manufacturing jobs have been flooding out of the US. Coal mines have been shut down. Entire towns in rural America have lost their jobs and their means to provide for their families. Though many aspects of our economy have bounced back since the great recession, these people’s lives have remained largely unchanged. They feel abandoned. They feel forgotten. They feel like no part of the system is actually working for them or cares about them.

So what happens? Along comes a candidate who says “I will bring your job back.” Whether its through reopening a coal mine or renegotiating a trade deal to bring manufacturing back to the US, he tells them exactly what they want to hear. And that’s all they hear. And that’s all they care about, and it’s what drives them to the polls. Not the racism and hatred, but in spite of it.

I get that. It is truly awful what has happened to these people. They deserve better lives, and they deserve a voice in our system. Here’s the thing though: I empathize with them, but I do not forgive them.

You do not get to pick and choose the aspects of a candidate your vote supports. We don’t get to say, “Well here’s part of my vote to support these things you said, but I don’t agree with these other things.” It is all or nothing. When you cast a vote in our system, you accept everything that comes along with the person you voted for, so when that person is a hate-filled monster, you don’t get to just focus on the parts you liked and that spoke to you. You enabled all of his hatred and bigotry; you sent a message to the people that thinking and saying these things is okay; you sold out your fellow Americans who lie in his crosshairs.

The underlying message, then, is that your problems and the things that concern you are more important than the well-being of wide swaths of people. Maybe you purport to care about the ones Trump “others” and actively seeks to harm, but you don’t care enough. You pretend his darkness doesn’t matter. How much damage could a President really do, after all? Turns out, unsurprisingly, quite a bit, the beginnings of which we are starting to see as Trump’s cabinet unveilings just get worse and worse. It’s a who’s who of deplorables and Washington insiders you probably actively voted against.

It didn’t have to be this way. In fact, a lot of the problems you face are shared by communities of color. This could have been your opportunity to empathize, to gather a better perspective on the plights of Americans who have been pushed to the sidelines for hundreds of years, as you feel you have now. We could have come together and built a better understanding of one another’s problems, even some of our shared struggles, but instead you chose the easy way. You chose to listen to a snake oil salesman who promised to solve your problems on the backs of the disenfranchised. The sad irony is that for all the damage Trump will inflict on the poor, on immigrants, on people of color, on the queer community, on Muslims, he won’t fix your problems either. In fact, he might make them worse for the benefit of himself and his rich friends.

You sold us out for a lie. You sold us out because of your hardship; one that is not negligible, I will grant you that. You deserve empathy. You deserve a voice. You deserve better. But I will never forgive you.

Former Stanford athelete Brock Turner will serve six months in county jail with probation after being convicted of three felony counts of sexual assault because, according to the judge, “A prison sentence would have a severe impact on him … I think he will not be a danger to others.” If you are unfamiliar with the details of the case, you can read about them here. That isn’t what this piece is about.

I want to talk about rape and justice, or lack thereof, in America. I want to talk about rape and our priorities in America. I want to talk about rape and privilege in America.

Did you know that for every 100 sexual assaults in the United States, only two will result in felony convictions or the rapist seeing a single day in jail? Is it really then at all surprising that 68% of sexual assaults go unreported to the police? This is one of the greatest modern tragedies we face, especially when confronted with the fact that one in five women in the US has been raped in her lifetime, roughly 22 million.

When victims look at the justice system, all they see is an impossibly steep mountain to climb, one in which their attacker is incredibly likely to walk away unscathed yet will cost them dearly. Let’s not forget that the victim has just experienced a horrific trauma and is in a vulnerable state. In his book Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, Jon Krakauer writes:

Rape and war, she explained are among the most common causes of post-traumatic stress disorder, and survivors of sexual assault frequently exhibit many of the same symptoms and behaviors as survivors of combat: flashbacks, insomnia, nightmares, hypervigilance, depression, isolation, suicidal thoughts, outbursts of anger, unrelenting anxiety, and an inability to shake the feeling that the world is spinning out of control.

Choosing to seek legal action only means prolonging that stress. It means repeatedly reliving the trauma during testimony, it means having your character and personal life picked apart and scrutinized in the most degrading ways, it means having to face your attacker head on, even if you aren’t ready. Those that choose that path are undeniably brave.

Even if the victim decides to undergo this, the reality that their attacker will likely receive little to no retribution for their crimes looms over them. So why is it so hard to get proper justice in these cases? For one, our society has somehow accepted the myth that an enormous amount of rape cases are falsified, a tactic a woman is using to punish a man for something. From that myth, the idea that we must protect the accused from being fraudulently convicted prevails, and the bar for finding them guilty is raised ridiculously high. In fact, the bar for getting the police to even believe a victim is high (you can read more on that in Missoula).

Once a case arrives in court, the defense’s tactic is always centered on discrediting the accuser. Perhaps she was drinking. Perhaps her memory is imperfect (“When did you leave your house?” “8:00” “Ah but yesterday you said 8:05! See she can’t remember important details precisely like this, how can we trust anything she says?”) Perhaps she was dressed too risquely. Perhaps she has a promiscuous reputation. Perhaps she was just saying no because she likes to be a tease. I could go on, but honestly I recommend reading the words from the Stanford victim herself. She explains this, and what it’s like living through one of these trials, much better than I ever could. My point is simply to say that our society has accepted these things as valid excuses for why a woman is raped, which is mindbogglingly stupid. Author Jessica Valenti says it best in her book The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women:

Now, should we treat women as independent agents, responsible for themselves? Of course. But being responsible has nothing to do with being raped. Women don’t get raped because they were drinking or took drugs. Women do not get raped because they weren’t careful enough. Women get raped because someone raped them.

That’s a lot of framing, but I think it’s important to keep in mind when examining the Stanford swimmer’s case. It ends up being a perfect example of the injustice rape victims face. Very few sexual assault cases have so much evidence going for them, including two witnesses who saw the crime in progress. And yet the result is the same: extreme leniency. At least this one got a couple days in jail (albeit county jail and not actual prison).

That isn’t fair. That isn’t just. The judge is concerned about the impact prison would have on his life? Seriously, fuck that and fuck him. What about the impact on her? She has to live with the trauma he caused her for the rest of her life. Why are we so concerned about his well being that we ignore proper punishment? And even if you’re uncomfortable with the idea of justice as retribution, then think about the message being sent to men everywhere: raping once is okay. Maybe you’ll get a slap on the wrist.

Now, I say men everywhere, but that’s a bit of a lie. It just so happens that this rapist was a star athelete, expected to oneday swim in the Olypmics. His future was so promising (*eye roll*), and so we fear the impact prison would have on him. How much you want to bet if he’d gone to a state school or come from a poor neighborhood and his skin was any shade of brown the outcome would be a hell of a lot different? This case is seething with privilege. The judge’s words that “I think he will not be a danger to others” are racially tinged. He isn’t considered dangerous because he’s white and affluent. He’s seen as just a nice kid who made one tiny mistake because our society is trained to look at people like him as good and innocent by nature, unlike the many black and brown boys his age that are apparently predisposed to being a danger to us all.

This narrative is false in a lot of ways, but since we’re talking about rape, let’s talk about just how dangerous Turner likely is to women in the future. Krakauer writes:

Lisak and Miller examined a random sample of 1,882 men, all of whom were students at the University of Massachusetts Boston between 1991 and 1998. Their average age was twenty-four. Of these 1,882 students, 120 individuals — 6.4 percent of the sample — were identified as rapists, which wasn’t a surprising proportion. But 76 of the 120–63 percent of the undetected student rapists, amounting to 4 percent of the overall sample — turned out to be repeat offenders who were collectively responsible for at least 439 rapes, an average of nearly 6 assaults per rapist. A very small number of men in the population, in other words, had raped a great many women with utter impunity. Lisak’s study also revealed something equally disturbing: These same 76 individuals were also responsible for 49 sexual assaults that didn’t rise to the level of rape, 277 acts of sexual abuse against children, 66 acts of physical abuse against children, and 214 acts of battery against intimate partners. This relative handful of male students, as Lisak put it, “had each, on average, left 14 victims in their wake….And the number of assaults was almost certainly underreported.

Lisak also states that, statistically, 90% of rapes are commited by serial offenders. In other words, rapists are highly likely to be repeat offenders, which makes sense. Someone who chooses to sexually assault someone else must have a warped sense of the world, must lack an understanding of consent or not care about it. People don’t just wake up one day and decide they’re going to rape someone: it’s a learned perspective on the world and people around you. Brock Turner’s decision to sexually assault an unconscious woman behind a dumpster says everything you need to know about his perception of women and his danger to them. He is a danger. He is a problem. Too bad the mask of his whiteness and privilege has caused the judge to see only that image of the inherently good but misguided boy who just made a mistake.

Everything about this infuriates me. Our society is broken, on many levels, but particularly egregiously when it comes to rape. The first and easiest step to fix things would be to give a proper punishment to those found guilty, but we can’t even manage that. It’s resulted in outcomes like this one remaining unsurprising to people who understand the current state of sexual assault and justice in America, and that is a fucking travesty. It’s wrong. It’s sickening. It’s an all too common event across every sector of society in every town and city across this country. It has got to stop.

Imagine for a moment you’re sitting in the cool dark of the theater, watching the first big blockbuster of the year. The story is centered around the conflict between the two biggest fictional heroes in American popular culture. One, an alien gifted with godlike abilities, stands for truth, justice, and the American way. He’s a beacon of hope to his people and can do incredible things. Sometimes, his intervention leads to collateral damage, but he feels it’s necessary to prevent the worst for the rest of humanity. The people love him. The other, a vigilante, is a normal man who seeks out his own form of justice in the dark of night. He is brutal, unforgiving, relentless. He will go to any extreme to fight evil, except for one thing: he never kills. The loss of any life, no matter their crimes, is unacceptable. In his quest to right the injustices of a broken system, he refuses to cross that line.

The film opens with the vigilante witnessing firsthand the destruction resulting from the alien’s methodology. He loses people he loves. He watches lives of innocent people destroyed in the wake of stopping a great evil. After spending decades fighting great evils, he has never broken his code. He has always found another way. The alien was sloppy and reckless and too many people died as a result. His power is too great, and he is too willing to sacrifice others for the greater good. He must be stopped.

Throughout the movie, you are presented with the merits of these opposing ideologies, culminating in a physical confrontation between the two heroes. The vigilante seeks to capture and restrain the alien, to remove him from the equation without breaking his code. He sets traps, uses strategy and wit to go to-to-toe with a super human, analyzes weaknesses and exploits them. Despite what seem like insurmountable odds, he wins; the alien is incapacitated.

When it seems like all is over, a new threat emerges: a superhuman abomination laying waste to the city. The vigilante makes attempts to stop the beast, but nothing works. The creature grows stronger and smarter by the second. The vigilante decides he has no choice but to seek the help of the alien he captured. Together, the two fight and triumph, but in the process the alien is killed. The film ends with the vigilante better understanding the lengths to which the alien went to save humanity and the price he was willing to pay. He does not relent on his code, but no longer vilifies the deceased. Instead, he seeks to honor him by assembling a team of exceptional people to assume the mantle of humanity’s protectors.

You leave the film unsure of how to feel, unsure of who was right and who was wrong. You question the morality of “any means necessary.” You consider how much collateral damage you can accept for the greater good. You recognize the allegories to modern warfare: The alien’s actions resemble drone strikes, the vigilante’s form of justice allows torture. One is a force of nature that attempts to solve problems through brute force, the other is a cunning tactician and analyst who solves problems in ways that require little to no force. You question the meaning of justice and what it costs. You’re impressed that what could be considered a popcorn movie is simultaneously entertaining AND intellectual.

This is the kind of movie Batman vs Superman should have been. Instead, we’re left with a garbled mess of too many plot threads, characters with paper-thin motivations, and the 8 minute fight sequence (of a two and a half hour movie) between Batman and Superman could have been avoided altogether if Superman had taken the time to say a few words. The motivation for their conflict becomes muddled. Batman, supposedly the world’s greatest detective, seems to believe unbelievable things (for example, that Superman killed a bunch of people in a desert… with bullets, or that Superman blowing up the capital building… with a wheelchair bomb). He derides Clark for the destruction he caused but kills without hesitation. Superman runs away instead of making any attempt to clear his name, and only comes back to fight because Lex Luthor kidnapped his mother.

There is no moral conflict here where there could be one — a great one. The movie does not live up to its title. There is no logic to the actions of characters other than forcing them into conflict or setting up scenarios for later plot points (why does Lois Lane throw the Kryptonite spear in the water? so that she can later get trapped fetching it and Superman must save her from drowning before they say their loving goodbyes) The entire film is, in a word, contrived. Which is beyond disappointing, considering how great it could have been.

It’s the closest thing to divorce I hope I’ll ever feel, and in the subsequent days that’s truly what it was like. Going through belongings and divvying them up, deciding what to do about the apartment neither of us could afford on our own, realizing that the dog we had adopted together, whom I had grown to love deeply, would have to be returned to the shelter, and of course, letting friends and family know, accompanied by a peculiar sense of shame, as if the failure of your relationship somehow reflected on your quality of personhood.

This isn’t easy for me, talking about this. It isn’t something that I’ve been particularly open about publicly. Obviously, there were friends I spoke with at length, friends for whom I will be eternally grateful because I don’t know how I could have made it without them. But this is different. This is me speaking from the heart for anyone to see, and it scares me. I am not overly open with those who are not close to me, my sister often describes me as aloof. However, I feel that I want, even need, to share some of the things I thought about, realized, and experienced over the past year so that anyone who feels like they might be experiencing something similar can find comfort. Or answers. Or maybe even just a distraction for a few minutes.

Breakups are a difficult thing, and not only because they’re emotional and full of loss, but also because everyone around you brings in their perspectives, whether invited or not. That can be a great thing, some people have sage advice to share, nuggets of wisdom they’ve acquired over the years going through the same kinds of heartbreak. But others are, in a word, ill-equipped. Like they don’t know how to handle you all of a sudden because you’re unhappy or acting like they know EXACTLY what you’ve been through. They don’t. No one does. Everyone’s experience is different, and that’s okay. Some people are able to take their own experiences and frame them in a way that’s helpful to you. Others can’t seem to get past bringing in their own baggage.

It also seems that when most people think of breakups, they think of the instant in which people who have devoted themselves to one another decide to part ways, for one reason or another. It is so much more.

A breakup is the days, weeks, months, even years leading up to that one particular day. It’s arguments you thought you’d gotten over, it’s changes in your relationship you thought were temporary. It’s the gnawing, twisting suspicion in your gut that something is off, that something is being lost. Until one day you lose everything. One moment in time separating “us” from “him and me”, but that itself is not the breakup.

A breakup is also the pain you feel for days, weeks, months, even years. It’s the look in people’s eyes, their delicate handling of you as if you were a piece of expensive china, that reminds you you are fragile and broken. It’s the nights you spend dreading sleep when you are forced to be alone with your thoughts. It’s telling the same story over and over, each time opening a wound you wish would just scab. Some people will help you bandage it up, others will rub salt in it and tell you it’ll help. A breakup is the flashes of memory you see, at any moment, triggered by something seemingly so innocuous. One day, you’re sitting in your car, pulling into your new studio apartment, and you look to the passenger seat remembering the days when you’d look over and see him there, smiling that sly smile of his. A look of love in his eyes you’ll never forget. And he’d take your hand and kiss it and tell you he loves you, and for a moment you’d think you’ve got it all. Then reality sets in: you, alone and cold in the quiet of your solitude, stuck with the gaping hole of what you once had that is no longer there.

Those last three paragraphs were something I wrote one night just a month after, and I think they’re the truest words I’ve written all year. A breakup can define a piece of your life. This one certainly did for me. And that is not to say that I didn’t have my happy moments. On the contrary, I had countless happy moments, even in the days just after. But the breakup is always there, simmering below the surface waiting to bubble over.

In my case, things were complicated. I had a lot of anger, some that persists to this day. In some ways, that anger helped me move past some of the early stages of a breakup. There was no longing or wanting to repair things, no false hope. Much of the melancholy was replaced by a palpable rage that I kept mostly concealed. Often in talking with friends that rage would boil over, which thankfully helped convey how hurt and damaged I truly was.

But that anger also left me feeling dissatisfied. There were so many things I wanted to say, so many tantrums I wanted to throw, so many long winded, inflammatory social media posts I wanted to make. I did none of them, it’s not the kind of person I am. However, that meant that the anger just burned inside me with no outlet, and for months I instead stoked its fire. It took a long time to let that go, and honestly I still haven’t let it all go. I may never let it all go, and I’m comfortable now admitting that that’s okay. There are certain things in life that don’t deserve to be let go, as long as you don’t allow them to define or otherwise interfere with who you are.

For months I felt torn about my own feelings as well. How can you miss someone who turned out to be someone different than you thought they were? Well, you miss the them that existed before, you miss your own perception of life before, you miss a them that truthfully doesn’t exist. That is hard to cope with. It’s a real mind-fuck. And it makes you feel ashamed when you’re missing a person who caused you so much pain, who you don’t believe deserves to be missed by you. In fact, it turned me into one of those people who would defiantly tell others that he was “Just over it” when he so clearly WAS NOT. In time, you have to come to accept the world as it is, accept some of your own fault in the situation, in seeing what you wanted to see instead of seeing the reality that was in front of you.

It took me a long time to get there. It took me a long time to cool the anger. It took me a long time to see myself as someone no longer defined by the heartbreak they’d gone through. I’m happy to tell people that I really am there now, I really am over it. I promise. That doesn’t mean I don’t have my days, because I do. In some ways, I am still broken. That’s what happens when you experience a trauma, it never truly leaves you, and there are some parts of yourself you’ll never get back. But as time goes on the days will get fewer, dreams that remind you will cease no matter what time of year it is or what song you’re listening to. It is the most infuriating thing to hear when going through this kind of thing, but also the truest: only time will heal you. Thankfully, it has.

But that’s not why I’m writing this. I’m writing this because of a problem I see emerging this election that directly rises from our increased connectedness. Over the past few weeks I have seen so many articles making broad sweeping claims about which candidates have to win lest we face the death of America. “Bernie Sanders Must Be the Democratic Choice to Beat Trump.” “Why Electing Hillary Clinton Is More Important Than Electing Obama in ’08.” “If Cruz Becomes the Republican Nom, the GOP Is Dead.” And it’s not just articles, but impassioned supporters citing polls and trends to point towards disaster unless their candidate is the chosen one.

Sigh…

None of those things are true. Well, whether or not electing Hillary is “More Important” than Obama’s election was is a matter of opinion I suppose. But the basis for this hyperbolic shouting that ends up reverberating around the echo chamber is flawed. Extremely flawed. And I don’t mean that polling as a concept is flawed. It’s not, it’s actually, when done right, quite a reliable science. However, WE ARE NOT IN A GENERAL ELECTION YET.

What do I mean by that? Neither the Democratic or Republican nominee has been decided. People may be able to give you a 20 page thesis on why their candidate has already won, but they’re wrong. It isn’t decided, on either side. Anything could happen. And until we have those candidates chosen, we will have no true indication of how things might play out. And even then, that doesn’t preclude a 3rd party candidate like Michael Bloomberg (rumored to be considering a run) from coming in and creating chaos across the electoral map. Yes, I have seen the polling data that pits each of the popular candidates against one another. The thing is, that is only an accurate representation of how things would play out if the general election were held THAT DAY.

There are months left before the next President will be chosen, and within those months, people’s views will shift depending on how the months unfold. In some cases, dramatically. One reason the election cycle starts so early is so that candidates have the opportunity to make their case to the American people, hoping to sway the people their way, particularly crucial for outsider candidates like Sanders who must convince the general electorate that democratic socialism is OKAY. Crises sometimes emerge. Remember how close to the ’08 election our economy collapsed? Obama benefited immensely from it because he was able to pin the greatest financial disaster in the United States since the Great Depression on Republican policy and leaders. Aside from crises, skeletons are pulled from closets that can have huge impacts on a candidate. Who doesn’t at least entertain that Clinton’s email scandal could throw her candidacy into turmoil or Donald Trump’s possibly criminal tax avoiding schemes could render his candidacy moot or Marco Rubio could have another malfunction on the debate stage and crumble?

Don’t get me wrong, I love the political engagement I’m seeing from my peers and beyond this cycle. I really don’t want that to stop. But what I do want is an end to the exaggeration, to wildly extreme claims on insufficient information. Ultimately, I want people to look at things in a measured and realistic fashion. To do their research. To engage not in the reactionary, click-baity, hyperbolic way that the Internet seems to function, but in a thoughtful way. We can do better. We deserve better.