A Trump campaign sign on the edge of a hay field at roads 5 and G Northwest near Ephrata, Washington. While rural voters may understand the disappointment of urban voters with the election results, they don't understand the continuing protests.

We have spoken often in this space about the “urban-rural divide,” the differences, real and imagined, that separate people who live in cities and people who don’t.

Nothing illustrates this divide better, perhaps, than the recent election. Throughout the country, the Northwest included, rural areas generally voted for Donald Trump while urban areas generally voted for Hillary Clinton.

Trump has won, and urban voters are distraught. They have taken to the streets in Portland, Seattle and San Francisco. Why would rural voters in their own states reject their candidate?

They lack the perspective to understand.

The federal government holds more than half the land in the West. The economic and civic fabric of rural communities depends on trees cut from the forest, livestock grazed on the range and minerals gleaned from the mining claims.

The government once encouraged these activities in the service of the country’s growing population and in fulfillment of its manifest destiny. Now, policies have changed and that same government seems to be draining the lifeblood of the rural West.

Many in the rural West don’t think their government listens to them and that their concerns are given short shrift. They believe their livelihood, their very way of life, is in the hands of bureaucrats controlled by interests outside their communities.

Displaced workers in the Rust Belt and in the coal fields have similar grievances. Life as they knew it changed for the worse, and they hold the federal government unresponsive, if not responsible.

Trump supporters, both rural and urban, voted their self interest, as they saw it. They do not fit the archetypes ascribed by pundits. They are in the main no more racist, misogynist, xenophobic or homophobic than the average Clinton voter. They want their families and communities to thrive, just as Clinton voters do.

For their part, rural voters understand urban disappointment with the election’s outcome, but not the continuing demonstrations against Trump’s election. They have accepted without protest the results of elections that broke against them.

The division is stark and deep.

As is often the case, we find the words of Abraham Lincoln speak as powerfully to our present circumstances as they did 150 years ago.

Lincoln was the winner of the contentious 1860 election. He wasn’t even on the ballot in 10 states, and failed to win the majority of the popular vote. The country was on a path to a civil war that killed 500,000 Americans, certainly a greater division than created by our most recent contest.

He closed his first inaugural address with a plea for reconciliation that stands today.

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

We are more alike than we are different.