My dear little Gus,

I wish that you, my one and only grandchild, were old enough for us to talk man-to-man about all of this. Right now. While it’s happening. With history watching our every move.

But we can’t. You’re not even 9 months old, that ever-present smile on your perfect face proof positive that in your world, all is well.

You’re warm. You’re fed. You’re surrounded by people who melt at the mere sight of you and shower you with love.

It may not always be this way.

I have a terrible feeling that one day, your horizons broader, you’ll look around and see a world that is broken. A place where hatred and mistrust rule the day and no one, at least no sane person, dares speak his mind for fear of inciting the nearest mob.

“Was it always like this?” you’ll ask. “Were people always this angry and afraid?”

“No,” I’ll assure you. “A long, long time ago, things were different.”

I’ll tell you about how, way back in 1960, I was a 6-year-old kid growing up in a place where the Kennedy and Nixon campaigns had trailers sitting side by side in the middle of my hometown’s square.

Smiling volunteers from both camps would cheerfully drown us kids with bumper stickers, political buttons and little candidate cards with JFK and that other guy beaming back at us in glossy black-and-white.

We’d stick the pins to our jackets (one on the left, the other on the right), plaster the conflicting stickers on our bike fenders and clothespin the cards to our spokes, delighting in the clickety-clack of “Kennedy-Nixon-Kennedy-Nixon-Kennedy-Nixon …” as we tore up and down the sidewalks in sweet, Cold War oblivion.

I’ll tell you how later, as I teetered between adolescence and adulthood, I grew my hair long and patched my tattered jeans and argued passionately with my dad, your great-grandfather, about whether Richard Nixon was in fact a crook and whether the Domino Theory was a crock and whether the great United States of America was truly coming apart at the seams.

But then one day, one of my dad’s conservative friends asked him why he didn’t sit me down, get out the scissors and cut off that hippie ponytail of mine.

Dad calmly shook his head and replied, “I have far more important things to argue with my son about than the length of his hair.” And with that, amid all the upheaval, I knew deep down everything would be all right.

I’ll tell you how I became a journalist and before long found myself caught up in the rough-and-tumble of local, state and federal politics.

I learned early on how nasty politicians could get with one another. I also learned that when it really mattered, when something truly important was at stake, the tallest among them always managed to stand up straight, look their opponents square in the eye and get the job done.

I’ll tell you how one awful day in September 2001, evil descended from the clear blue sky, crashing into skyscrapers filled with innocent people of every race, every religion, every political stripe, every sexual orientation, every age, every hope and aspiration.

Never in my life had I witnessed such pain as the day I looked down from the press box during the memorial at Yankee Stadium onto a sobbing mother and her fatherless children, clinging to one another for dear life.

And as I rode the jam-packed subway back to my hotel late that afternoon, never in my life had I felt like this entire country was more unified, more determined to stand together against those who would tear us apart.

I’ll tell you how we went to war and ever so slowly, that resolve began to erode. How during the same period, our economy collapsed and a sense of hopelessness and despair set in.

At first, we blamed the banks, the politicians, the lobbyists, the whole damn system. But the system deftly deflected all that righteous indignation until, finally, we began to blame each other.

I’ll tell you how the news business, my lifeblood, changed. How newspapers began to decline and suddenly all the people on the right drifted to one cable TV channel and all the people on the left drifted to another – and thus neither could see what the other side saw, or hear what the other side heard.

On top of that came the explosion of the internet, where propaganda masqueraded as the truth and facts lay buried under gigabytes of real-sounding fiction. With the advent of Facebook and Twitter, the silos only grew higher.

Eventually, we agreed on nothing. Immigrants, guns, poverty, welfare, homes foreclosed, factories shuttered, jobs lost – all became the markers by which we defined us versus them, liberals versus conservatives, natives versus newcomers, the haves versus the have-nots.

I’ll tell you how things came to a head right now, in the fall of 2016. How we went into an election divided by race, by geography, by educational background and by gender until it soon became clear that Election Day would bring no resolution after all.

It was supposed to be no contest. But even as I write this, my little Gus, I cannot say with certainty who will emerge victorious from this sorry spectacle.

But I can tell you this: Whoever wins, the fighting will rage on. The anger, as the pundits like to say, is “baked into” the body politic. The wounds, many fear, will never heal.

I know that sounds terribly pessimistic. But even as I close my eyes and picture you as a young man, I still hold out hope.

Sooner than I’d like, this will be your world. A cursed mess, to be sure, but nothing that can’t be salvaged, repaired, coaxed back from this brink of bitterness and acrimony.

My Lord, you’re so tiny now. You – and millions like you – have not a clue what awaits as you climb out of your newborn bliss and rub your eyes at the enormity of it all.

Yet in you I place my faith. And for you I now pray.

I pray that you will come to know compassion.

I pray that you will embrace not only those who agree with you, but also those who differ.

I pray that you will learn patience and humility and, above all, the power of love over hate.

I pray that you’ll learn from our mistakes.

Sleep tight, little guy. And hold on tight to your dreams.

All my love,

Gramp