By the electronic bushel, in thousands of calls and letters, reactions have poured into my office in the past week since I spoke on the Senate floor and announced that I would not be running for another term, and detailing the reasons for my decision. A deeply personal outpouring, the scale of which has stunned and humbled me.

Each letter is distinctive, but all are plaintive, anguished, deeply engaged and urgent. They all have in common a feeling of distress that the country has taken a sudden and caustic turn, that we have a president who seems to take pleasure in dividing us. A president who is careless with the position that has become known in the past century as “leader of the free world,” and that our institutions and maybe even our liberty are in peril as a consequence. Please, the letter writers all said. Don’t stop speaking out. “I’m counting on it,” one person wrote in all caps for emphasis.

I can say that reading these letters has been one of the most humbling experiences of my public life. To be clear, I don’t find them humbling because the people who wrote to me liked the speech. Indeed, some didn’t. I am humbled because until now I didn’t fully grasp the level of anxiety and real pain that exists across the country due to the state of our national leadership.

These writers despair not because of the chaos emanating from the White House, but because of the moral vandalism that has been set loose in our culture, as well as the seeming disregard for the institutions of American democracy.