In my family, when I was a child, we would gather on most Fridays for dinner at my grandmother’s apartment, she would cook rich and overdone feasts. From time to time, the most awful fights would break out, they were often so ugly, personal and over-the-top that us kids would hide in the living room or under the dining room table.

Sometimes people threw things, or cursed, or said the most offensive and hurtful things to one another.

Things were said that should never have been said,  there were hurts it seemed to me could never be undone.

But they were undone, a week later most people could hardly remember them, or if they did, it didn’t matter, they came to dinner the following Friday and ate away and talked and fought some more. There would be hugs and kisses, laughter and gossip, dinner as usual, it was often as if nothing had ever happened.

Until the next fight.

It was, I came to see, life as usual, the emotional part of being human. Humans seem to need to fight sometimes.

It meant different things to them than it did to me, hiding in the other room.

Sometimes the fights were about politics, sometimes about family. Mostly, I came to see, they were about the very different ways people have of looking at the world, and the passions people express when they are free to say what they feel.

We live, as few people do, in a world where it is okay to say what we feel.It is considered the point of our country.  Even when other people find it hateful.

Our media right now is a hysterical medium, it thrives and profits on fear and confusion, just like demagogues do.

There is a lot of talk about the end of democracy as we know it, and dark forces that are now  unleashed, and can never be restrained, and about bitter divisions that can never be healed.

We seem to have forgotten that when people are free to say what they feel, they often say the most awful things. That is the tolll for being in a democracy, people get to talk and vote.

Political correctness is understandable, but it is also obnoxious and unnatural, people are right to be wary of it. It often promotes social justice but smothers people’s truth. We can’t ever know what people can’t ever say.

Only an Orwellian culture could force everyone to look at the world in the same way, especially in changing times. Can you imagine how empty life would be if everyone thought like we did?

I would not wish to live in that world, I’ll take the dumb and offensive stuff on occasion, or even, often. I mean, C’mon man, these are humans we are talking about.

They call this idea democracy, because in most countries of the world, people are not free to say what they think so we don’t get to hear and see those awful and offensive and jarring thoughts. I call this liberty, and I wish the idea of liberty had come up more frequently this year in all the shouting.

I am sorry that the millions of people who feel left behind turned to Donald Trump as their spokesperson. This makes it so easy to dismiss his followers as bigoted and ignorant because he is so flawed. It also makes it easy for his followers to dismiss everybody else as corrupt elites.

I feel this week like I did after one of those awful family fights, I can only imagine if one had gone on for more than a year. My brain would be fried, as are the brains of so many now. But when you embrace the notion of liberty, and permit everyone to speak and talk and vote, then you will hear a lot of things you don’t wish or like to hear, things were always felt but not expressed out in the open. To me, it’s like a flushing or a cleansing.

There is a lot of chatter about violations of our Democratic practices, and our system being in peril. Liberty is a very American idea, we are the world’s first and oldest constitutional democracy. From the first, the idea of Liberty was embedded in our country, it’s government, our documents, goals and practices. Liberty For All.

What does “liberty” mean?

It means, says one dictionary,  “the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views.” There are very few, if any, restrictions on how liberty relates to what people wish to say and how they feel. The constitution does not say that people are only free to say what other people like them to say and want to hear.

We fight for our beliefs gradually, hopefully patiently, and over time. Just look at the women’s movement, or the rise of gay or transgender rights, or the emergence finally of the Latino culture as an integral part of our world and governance. These ideas evolved over generations, sometimes centuries.

My fellow citizens are not obliged to only say things that conform to my idea of civility and reason. One of the messages of this campaign that is very clear, and that does suggest we are perhaps more united than we think, is the idea that our two-party system isn’t working well any longer, and we may have to evolve to a different way of governing. That’s what I keep hearing. We have different believes, but no one seems happy with the system, and no one is listening to the others long enough to see the common ground.

Our media – especially our electronic media – is profit making. The more serious and traditional media turned up their noses at the Internet and permitted various outliers and corporate greedmongers to seize control of our public dialogue. We are all paying for that. Donald Trump is the love child of cable news, much as he rails against them.

These new media are mostly in the entertainment and ratings business, their ethics center on profit and loss, not truth and facts. Just as local TV news if full of fires and murders, cable and Internet news is often tilted to the most extreme and outrageous and combative, that is what draws viewers and makes money.

These new media are very rarely about a common truth, they advance argument, not facts, and the more you watch them, the more fearful and angry you will become. You will not be well-informed or know either facts or truth.

Politicians are now marketers of opinion, just like cereal manufacturers. They rarely speak their minds or speak the truth, and thus it is not surprising when a radically different way of communicating – Donald Trump’s way – seems honest and refreshing to people. It is not that he is telling the truth, it is rather that he is telling what they think of as their truth.  He is not censoring himself, he is saying whatever comes to his mind, and it seems starkly honest and refreshing against the suffocating and restrained voices of establishment politicians.

In the last few weeks, President Obama has broken away from his many political constraints and self-control, and has been speaking in a new, surprisingly candid and very human way. He is, in his own way, doing what Donald  Trump is doing, and his popularity is soaring. “C’mon man,” is wildly popular, just as “Lock Her Up,” is for Trump. He is crafting his one-liners like a Broadway hoofer.

The point is that Trump has broken through the stilted and wooden dialogue of our leaders and seems to be speaking plainly and directly to the emotions of people. I don’t like what he says most often, but  then, I don’t have to like it. I see that many people do like it  and there are lessons for all of us in that.

I encounter this almost every day on my blog. People frequently write to me and say they are reading my blog “even though I often don’t agree with you,” when what I think they should be saying is that they are reading my blog because they often disagree with me. In our culture, it is becoming almost heretical to read or consider anything apart from the things you already agree with. That is not my idea of liberty on either end.

I learn more from the people who disagree with me than from anyone. I don’t wish to live in a bubble, seeing my own words and thoughts reflected back to me.

That is a death of the mind to me, my values and ideas are not a debate for others to argue over on Facebook. My beliefs are personal, and I don’t need to be agreed with. I am not running for office.  That seems to startle people.

I cannot vote for Donald Trump for many reasons, and nobody, including me,  needs to rehash that there. I’m sick of even thinking about it.

I am plenty disturbed at the idea that someone who says the things he says, does the things he does, lies as openly and brazenly as he lies, endorses the very idea of sexual harassment, should be nominated by a major political party and come with a few percentage points of winning.

I do not believe he will win, or come close to winning, or was ever close to winning.

For all the hand-wringing, his sometimes hateful and and false rantings did not succeed, he will not be victorious, even in a time of great fear and uncertainty and change, and even against an opponent who is, fairly or not, deeply unpopular and could have  been easily been beaten by a saner and more rational opponent.

On this election day I feel awakened, enlightened and optimistic.

Democracy is messy, and if I were listing the times in our country that things were much worse than this – uglier, more violent, more threatening – you would be reading this for a long time. Just think a bit on the Civil War. Like my family, people will be ranting and squawking about different things in a week or so. Today’s reality is not our future baked in concrete, and the so-called pundits on TV can’t seem to see beyond their toes.

Our future will be what we choose to make of it, and no one can say what it will be.

These are not the worst of times, they are, in fact, pretty good times, for all of the many problems that arise in every culture in the world where human beings try to govern themselves.

I am strange in many ways, and as upsetting and endless as this campaign has been, it is, also a celebration of democracy writ large in it’s purest form and most powerful and raw form. Tomorrow, I believe I will see women in American take a huge step forward in their long and hard-fought revolution.

The angry old men who think it is all right to exploit and abuse and control them are going to have a bad day on Tuesday, and they can pound their chests all they want about how great they are and how much they have accomplished, but they will be losers by Wednesday morning.

And losing is not the same thing as winning, not matter how close the race.

Women have finally become one of the most potent political forces in the history of our democracy, and that is amazing, it has taken nearly a century and Donald Trump himself to make it happen. He is the unwitting hero of the women’s movement today.

Latinos, struggling for years to find a safe and accepted place in our culture, will make political history by demonstrating that they can no longer be ignored or dismissed or humiliated. In a democracy, when you help elect a president, you are in the system, and very few countries offer anyone that path. Same with the young, whose visceral tolerance and concern about the earth will help to re-define and perhaps unblock our constipated political system.

The very most onerous thing Trump did – his relentless assaults on the immigrant experience – will undo him. Is that a failure of democracy?

And then there are the millions of angry and disaffect people, mostly white men, who were betrayed and abandoned by our political system and the people who promised to serve them, and are so angry and so blinded that they and their cause have been betrayed again.

Perhaps their message will be heard. People with good work and security don’t vote for demagogues.

So to me, a former political writer and lover of liberty –  second generation Jews raised after World War II are strong lovers of liberty – I feel like I have once again been tempted to hide under the table and tremble in the face of so much hatred and anger. But I won’t. Life goes on. Next week, everyone will be back for more dinner, for another round.

I think I have also learned the world will not come to end this week, or anytime soon, and our democracy has, as it has always done, held together and stumbled along.

It is time, I think, to stop arguing and being frightened and move on to higher ground.

We are not a perfect system, we are not a perfect people. The pursuit of liberty does not promise us a perfect world, it promises us that we can be angry, even hateful, even wrong, even outrageous in the things we sometimes feel and the things we sometimes speak. I think that is a powerful escape valve for emotions that come out in very different ways in other societies.

Liberty does not mean people need to agree with me or hold my views, and I do not care to oppress others by encouraging them to think the things I think, vote the way I will vote, nor would I deny them the right to say just about anything they wish.There are no safe zones in a true democracy.

In a democracy, we are all held accountable for our words, and there is no parsing victory.

Liberty cuts both ways, and will, in her own way, hold all of us accountable for what we say and what we do.