There’s nothing I enjoy more than going into the elementary school about a week or so into the school year and seeing the work of our 7-and 9-year old kids and hearing from their teachers what the class is like.

They are eager to learn, they are happy to be there. They share. They are kind. They want to do what’s right and they don’t care what the other kids look like or where they come from.

In the classroom, they’re all equal. They just want to learn about the world.

But as adults, we realize how scary that world is – and how desperately it needs to change. At least this is true for America.

As the most recent horrific event unfolded this week – the assassination on live television of two Virginia-based TV staff – it occurred to me that many Americans are living in entirely different worlds.

Geographically, ideologically, racially, economy, we are divided. Perhaps even more so than ever, because there are just so many of us and we’re filing into categories, marketing profiles of who we are.

For instance, I live in a small city that just graduated from a town, with some racial diversity, but mostly well-to-do. My roads are a mix of heavily traveled commuters to the bigger downtown and back country roads that still wind around cornfields and cemeteries. People are generally friendly, our police do well to protect us, are kind and it’s a big deal if there is a bank robbery.

Then, I see that in Missouri, just outside of St. Louis, there’s a place where my experience is not relatable. It’s like opposite day, every day. There are inner cities and rural towns and places in between all over the United States where customs, rituals, emotions and norms are completely and wholly different from each other. Not one is necessarily better than another, just radically not the same.

And we ask that everyone come together to make decisions that apply to the country as a whole. It should not surprise us – yet somehow does – that we cannot agree on a whole heck of a lot. From gun control to abortion to gambling to gay marriage, we’re trying to yell the loudest in order to sound the strongest and most convinced that our way is the best way.

Except that our way is our way and we’re there’s really only about 25 percent of our society that agrees completely on a certain issue. Think about it: we’re subdivided constantly into these groups, these regions, these states, these cities and towns, so no wonder our primary concern is us and where we live and how we perceive the right way to do something is.

Yet what is good for Baltimore might not work in Chicago. What is good for Racine, Wisconsin might not work in Little Rock, Arkansas. What needs to happen to roadways on the North side of Indianapolis may not apply to the South side of Indianapolis.

We’re so busy coming up with solutions that we’re neglected the root of the questions.

Meanwhile, the big machine believes it has us pegged. Search for something on Google, it shows up for three weeks in your Facebook ad space. It thinks it knows you.

We barely know ourselves. And we don’t apply all our norms and customs accordingly when it doesn’t serve our needs.

Some of us have jobs in a corporate type setting where it would be impermissible and grounds for firing should we use personal e-mail accounts to conduct business. Yet Hilary Clinton can do it and those who support her make outlandish cases why it was OK, why it was justified and why those who question it are out of line and risking national security. Why? Because they want her to win the presidential election in 2016.

There’s no accountability of our officials, so why then would we ever think there is accountability for us in similar serious situations?

Republicans have spouted for years about having a viable, reliable and diverse candidate for president. So naturally, Donald Trump leads the preliminary polling. And naturally, his favorability increases with every outlandish, racially tinged and gender biased thing he says.

Seriously? You’re going to woo swing voters by nominating someone who calls a female anchor on known right-leaning TV station a “bimbo”- and he’s likely running against a woman? Good luck with that. Trump didn’t like questions in the first debate – questions that he dodged and did not answer – about all kinds of real issues.

“How do we expect you to handle X or Y, when in the past you’ve done the complete opposite?” generally sums it up. Trump’s response? Name calling and mockery.

Hardly professional, hardly becoming and hardly convincing, Trump’s “throw stones in glass houses” approach has landed unceremoniously well on a generation of people who use social media in much the same regard.

Don’t agree with someone? Comment and bash them! Are they calling you out? Well, no sir, you shall call them out!

If you haven’t noticed this before, just scroll past the auto-playing videos of live TV murders and cats falling off couches. You’ll find it eventually.

Is this what we have become? Have we lost our collective minds? Is it possible that we take too much seriously and not enough seriously at the same time? We overreact about that which could use some level-headedness and underreact over those things which seem, at least to me, appalling.

Despite all our differences, I would think there is a baseline of acceptability out there for how we act, how we treat each other. But seeing that someone – actually many someones – believed it wise to post a replay of this week’s events in Virginia in the hours after, perhaps now it has become clear that we’ve our baseline has been not just misplaced, but is nowhere to be found.

It’s been wiped away by the need for followers and likes and having something “go viral.”

That’s all it is though.

A fleeting moment for you, a lifetime of hurt for the loved ones who lay down each night knowing that hundreds of millions have seen the grotesque manner in which their friends, family or colleagues died.

Despite my numerous pieces on our fallen angel of American society superiority, I remain hopeful for a better and brighter future. I cling to my personal reality, my world, my roads and my family. I try not to let my mind go down a dark path where I fear every moment for their safety in a world gone truly mad.

I keep hoping that we wake up, snap out of it and start trying to work through the underlying issues first, before we try to take on policies and procedures. I do this not in the hopes that 300 million others in this country agree with me personally, just that we agree that we’re going to disagree, that we can’t get what we want all the time and begin a road of compromise.

Look, I just don’t see 300 million Americans getting together for a large-group therapy session. So, in the absence of such an event, it could be a collective identification of who we are, what we stand for and what we believe.

The groundwork was laid with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But since those early days, Americans have constantly looked for ways to subdivide ourselves in order to find the majority on an issue that will allow them the right to impose their beliefs on the minority.

So perhaps instead of questionnaires and surveys – short of a census – that ask for gender, race, age, ethnicity, religion, city, state, marital status and income ranges, why don’t we just start responding that we’re Americans?

It just might be simple enough to start there and just be a little bit nicer, think of others first from time to time and share, and not care where we came from.

You know, kind of like first graders.