In contrast to the beautiful, patriotic inauguration ceremony yesterday that honored our military, our country and our people, hate-mongering protesters vandalized, shouted and sought to stir up dissension in our nation’s capital.

What is wrong with these people?

I did not vote for Obama either time, and in fact I cried both times he was elected. I had no “safe space” on my college campus, nor did I seek out Obama voters to yell at them or bash their cars. Sometimes your team doesn’t make it to the Super Bowl. But you accept it and you move on.

There was a time, not too long ago, when we were all on the same team. We had shared ideals and goals, shared hopes and dreams, shared concepts of duty and honor. We shared a culture.

We may have not come from the same backgrounds, but we loved the same country. We may not have agreed on everything, but we knew how to dialogue. We could distinguish friend from foe, enemy from ally and we acted accordingly. We knew the difference between strength and tyranny, between offensive and defensive. We knew how to protect, we knew how to cherish, we knew how to love.

Somewhere along the way, we lost this. We lost civility. We lost ideals. We lost kindness. We lost love.

Replaced with an entitlement to be angry, bitter and resentful, we became self-focused narcissists who saw the world only one way. We filtered our news, our music, and our preferences, straining out the things that were uncomfortable for us and replacing them with constant entertainment. We stopped having to listen to anyone other than ourselves. The ties that bound us as a people frayed away and everybody applauded it as individualism or a way to celebrate our differences. Those who feared conformity created new ways to be different, but also new ways to alienate us from one another. Now we live on islands of our own making: lonely and desperate, but filled with only the things that we like.

Yet when the winds change and our personal island is no longer filled with all of our own toys, we feel that we have the right to lash out irrationally, to fight, to rebel, to vandalize, and to throw a fit in front of the whole world.

This is what has happened to our country. Promoted by the leftist media, politicians and celebrities, the vandalizing protesters in our country have lost the ability to actually have a conversation. Instead they break things: the law, windows, and the hearts of their fellow citizens.

People continue to refer to the “hateful” election cycle of 2016 as if all of these divided feelings and emotions came out of nowhere. Yet 2016 revealed not so much a divided culture as a divisive culture. It is divisive along the lines of labels, issues and tensions promoted by the Left for the purpose of disunity.

The chronic protesting of the past three months should be the final referendum on the leftist sham vision of “unity.” They do not want unity. They want division. They promote (and in many cases pay) protesters. They rip apart our country, our military, our history and our way of life, exploiting any argument as a reason for the unraveling of our culture. Whether they emphasize race, gender, gender-identity, religion or socio-economic background, they continue to return to a myriad of labels to divide us instead of emphasizing the one label that unites us: American.

While there will always be issues we need to work on as a nation, we must approach these in sensible, non-violent ways. The Left has revealed that it is incapable of doing so. Reaching across the aisle has never meant smashing a window.

Unity will not happen until we clearly see truth and falsehood for what they are. Unity will continue to elude us until we realize that there is no “right” to be evil or to do evil things. Unity will never be our reality until we recognize the leftist façade of lies that purposefully pit brother against brother.

Our country is a family. And not everyone in the family agrees on everything all the time. Yet talking about how divided and disunified we all are doesn’t help anything. In fact, it makes it worse. And America, like any other family, has to learn to stop yelling and to just pass the potatoes.