I’m just finishing up a book I’ve been reading that won the Pulitzer Prize last year called All the Light We Cannot See. It’s a historical fiction novel about World War II. That may not sound very original from the outset, but the most unique part about it is that it’s told from the perspective of two young children, one blind French girl, Marie-Laure, living in Paris who is forced to flee, and a German orphan boy, Werner, about to “heil Hitler” after being chosen to attend a brutal military academy under Hitler’s power. As the story has progressed, I’ve realized that what is most chilling about it are the parallels I can draw to modern day politics in the U.S. right now.

For better or for worse, our country is becoming more and more divided. It doesn’t help that everyone has their own set of “facts” presented to them by their desired and read/watched media sources, or that Facebook seems to be the main source of news for most people today (which obviously skews everything you read toward whatever your political bias is). The saddest thing is that people cannot get their “facts” straight, and when presented with true “facts,” they deny they are true because they go against what they originally believed to be true (hello, the “fact” that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or that Michelle Obama is actually a man, or that Hillary Clinton never actually gave birth to Chelsea). Maybe Barack Obama becoming president and running the country for almost eight years freaked out all the Republicans and the white conservatives, terrified that blacks and people of color would overtake this country and take what they wrongfully thought was only theirs. The way Marie-Laure’s great-uncle’s housekeeper describes Hitler’s rise to power could easily be likened to how the tea-party movement and the extreme division of parties in the U.S. have evolved. Hitler’s rise to power wasn’t sudden or dramatic; it was marked by slow, subtle shifts. As Madame Manec says in the book, it’s like the slow onset of oppression to a frog being boiled to death, the frog not realizing the change in heat because it happened that slowly. This scary comparison — it could easily be today’s “rise” of Trump. And even if Hillary does win the election, it will incense the right (and even many parts of the left), and cause even greater division and grid lock, especially if the House continues to be controlled by the Republicans.

It leaves everyday people like me feeling powerless against the system and all the hate, kind of like these children feel in a world that’s being taken away from them. Except for them, it actually is about life vs. death every single day.