It’s election day in America. Now it begins.

What’s that you say? You thought this was the end of the election? Well every ending is also a beginning, and in America elections are always the end of one cycle of governance and the beginning of a new one.

It’s important to remember, also, that what happens on election day is in many ways less important than what starts to happen on the day after.

I am both hopeful and confident that Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States. Some of you reading this are hoping she will not. One of these hopes will be fulfilled tonight. So what will you do tomorrow.

Consider this: after the U.S. won our revolutionary war against England we had a major advantage in getting our new democracy to work the way the founders wanted it to. The people we defeated left. We didn’t have to figure out how to include the royalists and British sympathizers into our new republic. Anyone who didn’t want to be part of this country could simply go home to England.

But we nevertheless set up a system of government that would require us be inclusive of dissent. And to agree both that the people whom we do not elect would step aside and become the loyal opposition to those we do.

We are in danger of losing that. And if we do, we are in real trouble.

Too many people in this election cycle are talking about running away if their candidate loses, or even more frighteningly, taking up arms and preparing for revolution.

The first idea is just silly, really. First of all, it’s not all that easy to emigrate. It’s more complicated than just saying you’ve decided to be Swiss now. Other countries have the same kinds of requirements for citizenship that we have. It can be time-consuming, expensive, and sometimes unsuccessful. More importantly, politics around the world this year have shown us that there is no democratic country in the world where you can escape the need every once in a while to confront politics that dismay or even frighten you. There is no democracy in which you will not have to sometimes learn how to live with a government whose philosophy and policies you despise.

That’s how democracy works. Karl Rove once spoke of establishing a permanent Republican majority. He couldn’t do it. A few Democrats have suggested that Donald Trump’s candidacy might give them the opportunity to establish a permanent Democratic majority. I sincerely hope that they are wrong. I even hope that we can shake off the idea that an either/or Democratic/Republican majority is the only possibility.

The second idea is dangerous. Revolutions make enemies of us all. It has been 150 years since the Civil War and we still haven’t figured out how to deal with the people who lost and integrate them fully into the national identity. All movements, including the Neo-Nazis, the “Patriot Militias,” the Tea Party, the Black Lives matter movement and its often insensitive imitators, the Occupy movement, and the protesters at Black Rock are motivated by a desire to be heard above the noise, to have their needs and grievances addressed. They feel disenfranchised, marginalized and oppressed. They need to be heard.

That doesn’t mean that the country needs to give them everything they say they need, or even anything they need, depending on what they are asking for. But we have to include them, we have to validate their existence even if we need to vigorously oppose their ideas.

There are people I know who are planning to vote for Donald Trump. These are good people. Their votes are sometimes based on fear or anger or ignorance; sometimes their vote is based on one or two issues of importance to them, local issues, even personal issues, personal experiences. Often they simply have a different understanding than mine, a different moral compass; they are coming from a different place. I can both disagree with them and respect their choices.

I need to do that or I risk forgetting something important about a democracy: they aren’t going away, and sometimes they will win. And if they do win, I will want to be respected and included and listened to.

Democracies all over the world have elected demagogues and dictators who refused to give up power. Democracies have succumbed to revolutions or been undermined by insurgencies by those who have lost at the voting booth. It rarely ends well. It is hard enough to bring people together after an election in which everybody is invested in making it work. When we lose that, when we stop trusting the agreements that are inherent in our Constitution, we risk our democracy, our culture, our national identity, and our safety.

I am confident, as I said, that we will be looking at a President Hillary Clinton tomorrow, so let me address those who will vote for her. Use this as an opportunity to look inward. You believe, perhaps, that the Trump campaign has validated LGBTQ bigotry, sexism, xenophobia, jingoistic nationalism, racism, religious intolerance, and extremism of all kinds: and you are probably right. But please take time now to look inward. These are aspects of our culture that have infected us all. They are both symptom and cause. How have you worked to mitigate or eliminate their influence on your own life? How can you begin to work now to understand the fears and injuries that keep them in place for others. How can we address them in ways that recognize and validate those fears and injuries without validating the bigotry, or participating in the violence?

There is clearly a lot of work to be done in this country to move our culture away from the entrenched privilege of wealth, whiteness, and the masculine; there is a need to work toward the elimination of all kinds of bigotry and toward a diverse and vibrant and just society. None of that will be fully accomplished in the next four years or the next eight. It won’t proceed uninterrupted or unchallenged. There are powerful forces arrayed against it. But unless we recognize the need to engage with, include, try to understand, and address the needs of all our citizens, even the ones whose ideas we find hateful, it won’t happen at all.

If we want to succeed, we need to lead. If we want things to change we have start with ourselves, if we want to end the divisiveness we need to stop dividing. If we want elections that aren’t predicated on hate, anger, fear-mongering, misinformation and disinformation, gossip and innuendo, then we have to stop buying into them.

In a democracy, voting isn’t the end, it’s the beginning. It’s not just whether you voted or how you voted, it’s what you do after the voting is over that really counts.