After a late night, I woke up Nov. 6 to a stream of text messages from friends and family with one basic message: “I did not think this is who our country was.”

Let’s not delude ourselves anymore.

This is exactly who our country is.

A big majority of Americans voted to elect a convicted felon as our president, a man who makes the lives of everyone except white men more difficult and dangerous.

Those voters want to blow up the systems. Now they can, and we can all see what happens.

To my fellow white women, who for the third time in a row gave a majority of their votes to Trump: I’m trying to understand how you could listen to a campaign so steeped in hatred and misogyny and fill in that circle. (Black women voted 92% for Harris.)

To the blue bubbles across our country: We see each other, and recognize each other’s pain and exhaustion. All we really know now is we have to persist.

We thought we could rest. We thought politics could become blessedly boring again, a background whine to our busy lives. Now, we have to be outraged (again) and start marching.

You had a plan to vote. Do you have a plan of what you will do when people start getting rounded up into camps for deportation?

Are you ready for when the Department of Education is abolished and children who receive free lunches don’t get them any more? Are you ready for when Obamacare is overturned?

It will be exhausting. And demoralizing. And maybe dangerous. Certainly unpleasant.

But we have to keep going. We have to keep volunteering in our schools and food banks, worrying about the “least of these,” loving our neighbors, and being kind and patient to everyone, even if we’re feeling anything but that right now.

We have to protect the rights of our Black and brown and LGBTQ friends and family, who will almost certainly be under threat.

On Wednesday morning, I read a few things that spoke to me, and maybe they will to you, too.

Writer Rebecca Solnit said: “Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love. … There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it’s sunny or raining.”

And David French, a former conservative turned Never Trumper said: “Protect the vulnerable, speak the truth.”

We have to give ourselves a few days. But we will feel better.

And nevertheless, we will persist and keep moving forward to a more perfect union.

Because in this maddening, wonderful, bewildering country of ours, that’s the only thing that’s ever worked.

Linda Blackford writes columns and commentary for the Lexington Herald-Leader.