It was a line that neatly summed up the long, brutal night of Election Day 2016: “Half of the country is full of hope,” said the dek hed on the Washington Post story. “The other half is horrified.”

I clicked, hoping someone would have something to say that would help make sense of my own frustration and rage. And there, just a few paragraphs in, was this, like a punch to the throat:

In her home in rural ­Rutherfordton, N.C., a 55-year-old undecided voter who chose at the last minute to cast her ballot for Trump spent her morning quietly agonizing over her decision.

Rutherfordton — in a bit of spectacularly lazy Southernness, it’s pronounced “Ruuuuuffton” — isn’t where I grew up, but it’s a place I know well enough. My parents had a home there for years. It’s less than an hour from Asheville, where my sister and her brood were based for a while. I’ve ridden horses through the Western North Carolina woods not far away near Chimney Rock, where the entrancing Broad River chuckles to itself beside one of the prettiest, twistiest mountain drives in the Appalachians.

Seeing the town’s name so unexpectedly in a story about a still-fresh political convulsion left me winded. I felt the flush of fresh anger in my face.

Wait, anger? Good heavens, why?

Of course I’d always felt a little fish-out-of-water in Rutherfordton, at least as an adult. My mother always liked to introduce me to the locals as “my son the liberal from Washington.” My D.C. driver’s license, produced for the barkeep at the dive opposite the county courthouse downtown, had inspired knowing smirks on one particular visit back in 2007. When I drove away after dinner that night, the local constabulary made sure to stop me at the corner, saying I’d failed to signal, and made me walk the yellow line. (This was long before I became an actual raging alcoholic, and I’m pleased to say I passed just fine.)

But why anger at the reminder of the place? Why would I care that some stranger in this pretty little foothills town had pulled the lever, reluctantly or not, for Donald Trump? Especially when the lady herself said clearly that she'd wrestled with the choice?

“I’m very nervous. We’re so divided, and there’s so much hate,” said Cindy Adair, an interior designer. All morning, as she revisited her decision to reject the Establishment, she worried about what that said about her. “I mean, I’m for inclusion. I don’t agree that you can just say this one group of people, like Muslims, you’re not allowed here.”

“I don’t agree,” she said.

That was part of it.

“I don’t agree,” for me, has always been followed by phrases like “with that lifestyle” or “with your choices” or “with the way you live.” Or just plain “I don’t agree with homosexuality.”

“I don’t agree” falls politely, even sweetly, from the lips of the women of the South. But you can see at the corners of so many of those lips the tightness that betrays real disgust.

Maybe not Cindy Adair’s lips. I don’t know her. I certainly can’t know her heart.

But I wonder how far her particular “don’t agree” goes. No, it’s more than that: I suspect, from my experience of the small-town South, that it doesn’t go further than a shake of the head and a well-mannered tsk-tsk.

I found myself itching to send some scorched-earth message to Cindy Adair, 55, of Rutherfordton, N.C. — something lacerating, some righteous outraged sermon that would make her feel a shame equal to my fear.

Wait: My fear. That’s when I realized that I’m not angry. I’m afraid. I am so goddamn afraid of how much ugly there is hiding under even the polite faces of America. I am deeply, sometimes almost paralyzingly afraid that this fear-wracked society of ours really has put a foot on the path that leads to the strongman and the purges.

So I did what I do, now that I’ve staggered down the boozy road and walked it back again drier and humbler. I admitted the crap out of that fear. I wrote it down. Then I rewrote it, with less anger and less ego. Then I put it aside to see how that felt.

And then I wrote it out again, as a letter this time, but with I hope nothing of brimstone or righteousness, and with I hope some honest humility and grace.

Dear Ms Adair —

I’m writing to you because I’m a child of the Deep South, albeit one who’s left the Deep South behind. I’m writing because I believe you when you say that you’re “for inclusion.” And I’m writing because I need you to know that by voting for Donald Trump, you have made me fear you.

I’m gay. That’s one reason I don’t live in the South anymore. I have dated black men and brown men. That’s another reason I don’t live in the South anymore. One of the people I love most is a Louisiana Cajun married to a man from Thailand, and their adopted children are from Guatemala and South Africa. I cannot imagine their returning to the American South from Johannesburg, where they live now.

Dwell on that last thought for a moment, if you will. South Africa seems safer to me just now than does my home. Because I fear people like you.

I don’t doubt that you think of yourself as a good person. I don’t doubt that you are, on balance, a good person. But you are standing on the other side of a cultural divide, and you are standing there with white supremacists and gay-bashers and people who hate Muslims. You are standing there, too, with people who mock the weak, people who think of themselves first and others never, people who derive a sick thrill from hurting others.

And so I fear you. Not because I think you personally are likely to hurt me. Not because I think you would cheer on those people you’re standing among when they say dreadful things. But because I fear that you will stand silent when the day comes — and it will come —that these people, encouraged by your vote and by Donald Trump’s rhetoric to believe that they are right and that you are with them, begin to *do* dreadful things.

I believe in your belief in your own goodness, Cindy Adair of Rutherfordton, North Carolina. But I also fear you. And I am writing to you to beg you to prove me wrong in that.