His cousin is staying with him for the summer. It was our first time meeting. We talked about life and society and engaged in catharsis at the expense of ourselves and others. Our ideas didn’t always align, but political alignment isn’t a prerequisite for breaking bread.

A couple of plates later, we played Five Thousand, a risk-taking dice game. Santiago’s cousin won the first match. I won the second.

It was in the middle of the afternoon, in our festivities, when we got the news that Donald Trump was shot at a rally. We checked our phones and then turned on the TV to see the live coverage. The video of Donald Trump grabbing his ear after a sequence of distant pops looped like a .gif. Over and over, we saw a single moment of political violence play for an evening.

We prayed. We prayed for the soul of our nation, the end of political violence, and the wisdom to use our nation and democratic processes as intended.

At the dining room table, where a few empty cans of domestics and imports stood nonchalantly among snacks and dice scores, stood a still-life of American innocence. A whole Saturday evening—and election year—in the United States was soured by the violent manifestations of divisiveness. Why can’t people be chill? Why can’t they sit at the table with one another? Why do they resort to violence?

Alienation has a firm hold on humanity’s psyches. As we’ve become more physically connected, we’ve become more socially divided. We cannot accept that others have very different ideas from us, so instead of seeking to understand each other, we double down on our own beliefs and protect them by any means necessary.

We reward divisiveness with attention, likes, views, ratings. Algorithms tend to show content that makes us upset—that keeps us watching. This is the ethos of the cable and internet news cycle, in which coverage of divisiveness makes more divisiveness because divisiveness makes money.

To me, it doesn’t feel like an election year—especially after an assassination attempt. Culture wars, the kind that can never be resolved, dominate campaigns and politics. Few real issues and solutions are on the table because we love to fight with ideas, and the culmination of such struggles will always end with violent revolutions. And can you imagine that? The weighty struggles between people are based on whims less massive than dust.

This year will be the first year I vote for neither presidential candidate. I may leave that ballot item blank. Each major candidate represents different forms of demise. In an election like this, prayer will be more important than voting because election outcomes don’t matter if the demos of the democracy are broken.