The debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump last week was hard to watch. It left residues of fear, anxiety and disbelief stored within my body and mind. As an immigrant, I felt scared and violated. As a woman, I felt muddled and angry. As a mother, I felt panicked for my young children. As an educator who teaches Latin American studies and gender studies, I felt unsure of what to say to my young and hopeful first-year college students in my class on social justice. What can we say? How have we gotten to this point?

This presidential election is no longer about Democrats and Republicans and the persistent polarization between these two parties. We have moved beyond our differences in economic policy, taxation and even immigration. This election is about humaneness, dignity and sanity. I am an optimist, and as one, I do believe in the powers of human empathy to shape the world for the better. Empathy, for me, is a muscle we need to strengthen during this election by listening to one another, volunteering, speaking out, standing up for one another, and reminding ourselves that our humanity should bind us together, not tear us apart. My optimism waned last Tuesday, as I couldn’t recognize Donald Trump as someone capable of empathy, of humanness. Like all dictators I have lived through, studied and taught in my classes, he evokes terror.

Trump’s refusal to look at Harris during the debate was not an act of masculine power. It was an act of dehumanization showcasing not only his inherent lack of empathy, but his inability to take the first woman of color presidential candidate seriously. To see Harris shake his hand at the beginning of the debate, as well as the next day during the 9/11 services, sent shivers through my body. She demonstrated a powerful agency, an action that generated dignity and illuminated a lightness he tried (yet failed) to darken during the debate.

This week has been taxing for many of us. I keep feeling my emotions shift from feelings of rage to feelings of sadness at the state of this country, one that I am a citizen of, yet one I can hardly recognize anymore. We should talk more about how Trump’s words and gestures make us feel. How they made women who have lost children in childbirth feel. How they made a Venezuelan migrant feel. How they made nurses and doctors who have provided humane health care for women feel. I remember being in high school in 2000 and watching the Bush/Gore debate with my parents to learn about the democratic process. It never occurred to me that a presidential debate is something we need to protect our children from watching. Until now. Tim Walz’s configuration of the Republican Party and Trump as “weird” was quite catchy; however, the debate demonstrated something beyond “weird.” It demonstrated a level of inhumanity and utter hatred. This is not weird; it is terrifying.

Trump’s villainization of migrants and immigrants is truly baffling and conveys a level of racist inhumanity that I have only read about in 19th-century texts condoning enslavement. The hate speech spewed through his ideas that migrants take over “American” jobs, eat cats and dogs, and bring the crime rates up is not only factually incorrect, but also scary. These are the ramblings of a man unhinged, as Harris herself claimed. Perhaps he truly is “confused.”

Perhaps, then, he deserves our empathy. To exercise our empathetic muscles, we should vote on Election Day, we should volunteer, we should make calls, we should step up to make sure that he does not rise to power, not due to his political party representation, but due to his inability to assume the role of president with dignity and clear mind.