Rolling pandas. Parrots perched on the shoulders of dogs without dogs knowing. Corgi dogs who get excited and yelp like crazy when they see their reflections in a mirror. Then there’s this recent video that’s gone viral of a kiwi girl having her very first taste of ice cream and completely lapping it up — a new experience, the first time enjoying sweet plus icy cold. These videos across YouTube and other forms of social media have millions, if not billions of views. The people who are a bit cynical and pessimistic think it’s all a waste of time and eye balls put to poor use. They think that everyone should be more serious and read real news and get with the current events.

I’d beg to differ. I don’t think that watching videos of rolling pandas shows that we don’t take life seriously or pay attention to current events or the disgusting and divisive state of our politics in this country. It’s not either / or; what about having and doing both? I think that this can all be enjoyed alongside being well-informed citizens. I love watching those panda videos; I’ll admit it. I don’t watch them every day or every month, but when they come up in my Facebook feed or on YouTube, why not? It’s a much needed light and fun break from a world today that is filled with so many problems, so much anger, and a political climate that literally is having me and so many colleagues and friends experiencing anxiety. It’s tiring and frustrating to see Trump’s face and the word “Killary” all over the news and social media every single day.

I think that like other women who are following the presidential race this year, I am filled with anxiety, and these presidential debates are only fueling that anxiety for me. The more I see how incompetent and unfit for president Donald Trump is, the more I feel fear for the future (this is when it would be helpful to channel Tony Robbins and be FEARLESS). It’s not even just about the notion of him becoming president; it’s that even if he loses, which we hope will happen, that his getting this far as a candidate and winning the Republican party’s presidential nomination will fuel this developing and growing group of people across this country full of bigoted, racist, sexist beliefs, people who choose to see conspiracy theories as “facts” and cannot even tell what fact is from fiction. Then, it will be the rise of the next Nazi party in modern day Divided States of America.

I don’t claim to be an expert of history, nor would I ever try to give anyone a proper U.S. history lesson. But one thing that really stood out to me in showing how little Trump knows about how laws work in the U.S. is when he accused Hillary of doing nothing as a New York senator, that she didn’t change any of the laws. No, Moron, she cannot single-handedly pass any law as a junior senator in New York State. That’s not how it works. I at least know THAT.

Someone please needs to make all this stop. I feel so embarrassed for this country and even the Republican party every time I hear this guy speak.

We all live in our little bubbles everywhere. In California, Massachusetts, and New York, I’ve been surrounded by liberals who accept homosexuality, interracial dating and marriage, and atheism, among other things. I grew up surrounded by Asians and was surprised when I traveled other parts of the country to see for myself that Asians weren’t in huge numbers everywhere. And because I’d only seen domestic violence and wife beating on television and in movies, I thought it wasn’t a real problem for most people. And then I read stories like this that won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, and realize that there really are cities and states where the lives of domesticated animals like dogs and cats are treated as more important than the lives of women. In South Carolina, a person can be jailed for up to five years for beating his dog, but put in jail for only up to 30 days for beating his wife or girlfriend on the “first offense.” Domestic violence and abuse is a huge problem in South Carolina, which has the highest rates of domestic violence cases of all states in the country, and little is being done about it. With a mix of old-school Christian marriage values, 2nd amendment nuts who want to protect even the rights of wife beaters and abusers to own guns, and dated, sexist gender roles, South Carolina is kind of like a domestic violence victim’s version of hell.

I read stories like this and realize that we have too many problems to solve for in the world. How do we prioritize these? How do we correct gender hate and the idea that beating one’s wife is “right”? I was deeply disturbed by reading this long, thoroughly investigated story in all of its seven parts, but again, I felt powerless to help. Powerlessness seems to be the theme of this week.

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.

The last few nights have brought me bad dreams. I’m not sure what has brought them on, but I have been waking up feeling disturbed, sleep-deprived (even when I have actually gotten adequate sleep), and this morning, I woke up with a terrible headache. The dreams have touched on everything from being abandoned, getting pregnant (yeah, that’s bad dream for me right now. I do NOT want to be pregnant right now), to giving birth, but never seeing my baby again. Maybe it’s the change in seasons, or the fact that Chris isn’t here, or that my friend just left New York that I’ve been having all these strange subconscious thoughts. I would love to have a real dream interpreter, one who knew exactly what every single one of my dreams meant.