America has never been so divided. We are living in a time where, on one side, we are being told that immigrants are stealing our jobs, that “the gays” are going to indoctrinate our kids, and that the liberals are banning the word “Christmas.”

On the other side, we are being told that Republicans are lunatics, that MAGA supporters seek a purely white nation, and that they are fascist bigots. Following the growing divide between the left and the right, we are being conditioned to hate our neighbors.

However, this could not be further from the truth.

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Recently, I along with seven other students made up the Hawaiʻi delegation to represent our school at the National Association of Independent Schools’ Student Civic Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C.

As a high school freshman in one of the most progressive states in America, I was excited (and to be honest, a bit nervous) to meet students from across the nation. I was walking into the conference with my own stereotypes.

I expected that the Southerners would be all about cowboys and guns, that the Californians would be all about surfing and their oat milk lattes, and that we would be profiled as living in grass huts and riding our dolphins to school (which I do admit would be pretty fun).

More seriously, I believed that we were so divided that compromise would be unattainable, that the GOP was too headstrong with their crazy fantasies and cult of Trump that we would never be able to find common ground. I believed that “the other side” was simply too extreme to reason with.

I am proud to say that this was not the case. I met students from every background imaginable: from the beaches of the U.S. Virgin Islands to the deserts of New Mexico, from the well-to-do neighborhoods of Massachusetts to the working-class towns of Virginia.

There were gay, straight, and transgender students, students whose families had been in America since its founding, and others who left their families behind in search for a better life. There were whites, Blacks, and Asians; Muslims and Jews.

There were Republicans, Democrats, socialists, anarchists, nationalists, and everything in between.

On paper, we couldn’t have been more different, and yet, we were united by something unexpected: a shared sense of purpose.

I learned that all of us share the spirit of being American at heart. To be American means wanting what is best for oneself, one’s family, and oneʻs community, a principle I found to be undeniable.

We all had the same goals for this country: safe streets, strong schools, accessible healthcare, and, above all, the pursuit of the American Dream. We all recognized that the system isn’t working as it should, and that too many Americans feel unheard.

Where we differed was not in our goals, but in how we believed those goals should be achieved. No one wants people to die young; the disagreement is whether better outcomes come from a single-payer healthcare system or a market-based approach. No one wants failing schools; the debate is over how to fix them.

Moving forward, we must be willing to do something simple yet increasingly rare: talk to one another. We must turn off the TV and truly talk face-to-face. We must listen not to argue, but to understand. We must see each other not as enemies, but as fellow countrymen who want what is best for this country.

Further, if we want hope for the future, we must be instilling these values into the next generation. My experience showed me that young people, when given the opportunity to do so, are more than capable of finding respectful compromise. The question now is how to continue this forward, and how to inspire our fellow citizens to do the same.

These differences are not evidence of a broken nation; they are evidence of a democracy at work. Most importantly, this experience gave me a renewed sense of hope for the future of America. Living in an isolated, politically homogenous state like Hawaiʻi makes it easy to develop fear of the “other side.”

Yet this conference proved to me that people are not as crazy as they seem in the news. The overwhelming majority of Americans, regardless of political affiliation, genuinely love our country. Most people are, at their core, good people who love the peace and prosperity that the promise of America provides.

At our core, we are not enemies. We are citizens of the same nation, striving (often imperfectly) towards the same ideals. E pluribus unum – our national motto: out of many, one.

That is what it means to be American. And if we can remember that, then perhaps the American experiment will not only endure, but succeed.