Every week, the editorial board reflects on a current issue in Our View. The position taken does not reflect the views of everyone on the Hilltop Views staff. This week’s editorial board is composed of Viewpoint Editor Sully Lockett and Print Editor-in-Chief Jacob Rogers.

I’m writing this on Monday night, the eve of the election, and I can only tell you one thing with confidence: if you’re reading this, we will finally be free of this wretched election season, one way or another.

This long, vitriol-filled election season has dragged on like an unwelcomed guest speaker, one that, by the grace of God, we will be free of come Wednesday morning.

Nothing I’ve seen so far in the last year indicates that being optimistic is a wise decision and yet, here I stand, hoping for the best as future-me greets the new day. The election will have ended and democracy will continue. Unfortunately, a brighter tomorrow and a better future aren’t a given.

This election, characterized by scandals that (to our mind, at least) seem both louder and weightier than those shot through the last several elections, has not been an easy one to make it through unbloodied.

For example, no previous election (to the best of our admittedly non-omniscient knowledge) has had a candidate threatening to ignore the results of the election, to concede with grace.

Neither have we had candidates with the boldness to insult each other’s characters, to tell such outright lies in a public forum. I mean, for the love of all that’s holy: it’s 2016. People can check facts and do so, publishing the results with such wicked glee. How insane do you have to be to stand before the world stage and lie again and again?

I realized that people I’ve known for years must have some fundamental differences in the decision-making processes they employ when casting their vote. While I attribute some of their decisions to irreconcilable political differences — my party, right or wrong — but most of the people I tend to associate considered themselves ‘independent.’

Boy, was that a troubling revelation that was.

I looked aghast at the social media presence of people I’ve known for years, looking on in horror as rivers of utter malarkey spilled forth, sullying all they touched. What happened? How could we have been friends for so long, and you betray me by doing this?

I hope, in the days and weeks going forward, that I can bring myself to speak to some of those people. To show them that who we voted for, show them that we did what we thought was best, not out of a sense of wilful malice.

I hope that the years to follow won’t be the apocalypse anyone predicts. I hope that the president will do his or her conscientious best to fulfill the mandate to which they were elected — to serve, not to be served; to build, not to destroy; and to lead, not to order.

That is the point of democracy. This year has sucked. It really has. Hatred is not the principle America was founded on, and going forward, I hope we can find it in each of us to forgive the stupid things we all said this election and to work together to build a world we can all be satisfied with.