In the context of world history, the United States is little older than a toddler. Our history lessons fill a thimble in time as other countries count their histories in millennia. Yet in the 248 years between 1776, the date we call our founding, and today we’ve managed three extraordinary transformations. All of them violent and each leading us closer to the equality, justice and liberty promised in the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

We’re about to live number four.

First we kicked out the king in a bloody confrontation that replaced the customary “one person rules everything” with the unproven strangeness of “all men are created equal.” Despite the rosy retelling of our history books, thousands of citizens rebelled or left the country, refusing to accept that regular folks were as worthy as they, the American aristocrats.

Over the next 80 years or so we began to explore the idea that perhaps equality was an entitlement for more than just white men who owned property. When that idea proved entirely too difficult for about half of the country to swallow, they quit the United States and formed their own country. The remaining half said “not so fast” and off we went to war on April 12, 1861, eventually leaving about 600,000 friends and neighbors dead.

On Dec. 8, 1941, 80 years after the start of the Civil War, the United States entered World War II, the kickoff of our third extraordinary transformation. World War II empowered women and Black citizens to claim their rights to the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness that had been enshrined for white men in 1776.

In the 83 years since then, the struggle for full citizenship has been fraught with anger, confrontation, bloody riots and marches, deaths and political turmoil. Yet the progress has been astounding. As 19th century abolitionist and Unitarian minister Theodore Parker (and later Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama) said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

Eighty years separated each of those three cataclysmic transformations and each eventually bent toward justice. But the fight remains the same today as it was in 1776: As long as the belief that one person is inherently better than another, the backlash against America’s arc toward justice will prevail.

I am fascinated by the consistency of those 80 years of separation, but there’s nothing magical or coincidental about them. Generally four generations are alive at the same time. Each of those four generations has about 20 years in power and it takes about 80 years to cycle through all four. We’re coming to the end of the fourth generation in the Boomer-Xer cohort. Millennials along with a handful of Xers will take us forward the next 80 years.

Tomorrow, Nov. 5, the United States makes a pivotal decision. We will either be a country of equality and social justice or we won’t. It looks from the polls that we’ve split ourselves in half. Not surprising really given that in the years leading up to 1776, 1861 and 1941, that’s about how we split ourselves. I can’t say it enough: Our history books, especially the revisionist kinds, lead us to believe that most Americans eagerly fought on the same side. Not true, though plenty of folks switched it up when they figured out which side was winning.

I’ll be working the polls tomorrow as I’ve done for years. Almost 60 percent of registered voters have already cast ballots in Monroe County. Mail-in and early voting across the country has been similarly robust, which means the choice of which way we go has likely already been made.

I’m not predicting the outcome though I remain hopeful, even in the face of contrary facts, that we will choose the rule of law over king and sycophants. Either way the next 80 years, much more the next half dozen, will be fraught with peril.

The 2016 presidential election exposed our schisms

This is what I wrote in 2016. It’s held up remarkably well.

10:45 p.m., Tuesday, Nov. 8: The anger, the dissonance, has been building since the mid-1990s. It’s not a surprise if one has paid attention to more than just one’s like minds. We have to weather the anger and the fallout from it for another five-10 years. It won’t be easy. It likely could be cataclysmic. But once done, our country will heal. And that’s going to happen regardless of who wins tonight. Keep the faith. Do the right things. We’ll be OK.

12:59 a.m., Wednesday, Nov. 9: I’m posting this before we know the outcome. I post it knowing I have friends and family who are horrified and those who are celebrating. I post it now because I am praying we will do everything within our power to avoid shredding our country. We did that once in 1860. It killed almost a million of us. I am an American who believes this country can rise to its best and resist the siren lure to sink to its worst instincts. To do that, the next president must pledge — and then act — to be the president of all Americans. And that means a full-throated pledge to pull back from the rhetoric that fuels the politics of dissonance. Remember. Half of us, give or take a few, are not celebrating this morning. We are devastated and most assuredly afraid. Godspeed, my friends.

I believe we will — eventually — bend toward justice. More than 200 years of United States history proves we can be our better selves.

But being OK doesn’t mean the next several years will be moonbeams and unicorns. The next years will be harsh, unsteady, inexplicable and frightening. We will, as a country, walk with that awesome shadow of the valley of death. History tells us that we must face our worst selves before we can create our best.

History says it will take 10 years to fully resolve the fragmentation that has become our lives. I think it will come faster than that because our 24-7-365 social media culture makes for fast-moving events and shortened cycles.

We will be OK. If…..

• If we do good by those who need us
• If we share our gifts according to the gifts we have received. The more you get, the more you give
• If we refuse to stand silently when injustice rears its head next to us
• If we refuse to look away when another is hurting
• If we pick up the trash instead of walking past it
• If we offer a smile rather than a frown.
• If we do the little things that matter and eventually pile up into a remarkable force for good
• If we stand steadfast against the haters — and learn the difference between a willful hater and an ignorant one. Most of us are teachable, my friends.
• If we hope for the best, protect ourselves and others from the worst, and work for the good of all. Back in cliched corporate days, the boss used to make us say “opportunity” instead of “problem.” It was dumb. It worked.

My faithful optimism is neither willfully ignorant of the challenges ahead, nor is it rainbows and unicorn thinking. Instead it is nurtured in decades of faith and decades of learning.

The words I’ve written come down to this prayer:

Show me my path. Teach me along the way. Direct my anger. Grant me peace. Sustain my hope. Let me laugh. For we will reap if we do not grow weary.

“Dear Connor” is a collection of essays written for Connor Cunningham by his grandmother, Linda Grist Cunningham. I began writing these as my construct for making sense of the unraveling American community. Connor may never read them, nor might others; but they’ll help me distill solutions from the cacophony that passes for discourse in final crisis generational turning of America. (Read more Dear Connor columns. Scroll down linked page.)