There comes a time in every election cycle when all the ads and TV commercials — and now Facebook posts, YouTube videos, and TikToks — become numbing and do nothing more than make everyone count the minutes until results start rolling in.
This year, that point was, what? Three months ago?
Yes, this has been another exhausting presidential campaign in which we’ve hit new lows, including “You said no fact checking,” and speaking, at length, about legendary golfer Arnold Palmer’s…length.
Please believe, that was as painful to type as it was to read, if not more so.
Palmer, fortunately for him, died in 2016 at age 87, so he only had to endure one of the last three U.S. presidential elections, which, so long as they continue in the direction they have of late, are playing to the public to, at best, diminishing returns.
Not that the public isn’t partially responsible, as political rancor and tribalism have literally torn families apart over the last decade. And it also doesn’t help when Russia and China send their best hackers and bots our way in an attempt to make sure we all hate each other as much as possible.
It can all look and feel pretty bleak.
Two things to remember, though; one big and one small. Small one first: By the time you read this, Election Day will be less than two weeks away and, if you haven’t voted already, you’ll be able to do so that day and then clutch the arms of your couch or easy chair, grit your teeth, and choke down an adult beverage while the fate of the union for the next four years is decided.
Yeah, that was the small one.
The big one is, no matter who wins, we do have the choice afforded to us by the vote in this country, at least for now, and that’s still a very big deal.
Sure, you’ll hear the cynics and the conspiracy minded tell you voting doesn’t matter, than our leaders are installed by corporate and business interests. While there’s no denying such entities have more influence than they should, it is still the vote of the individual (in a few key swing states, anyway) that determines (the electors for) the presidency.
Hmm, this is reading more cynically than envisioned.
Yes, the Electoral College renders vast swathes of the popular vote moot, but there are countries, purported democracies, around the world in which elections are nothing but a perfunctory farce.
In March, Russian President Vladamir Putin won his election with 87.8 percent of the vote, according to Reuters, despite three opponents and a rising level of protest against Putin and his attempted takeover of Ukraine among younger Russians.
Think mass-media censorship and the habit Putin’s detractors seem to have of falling from high places has anything to do with that result?
Yes, campaigns here at home have changed — candidates refuse to debate, they hold 40-minute sing-a-longs for no apparent, or heartening, reason — but Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump have still campaigned in ways suggesting the best traditions of how these things are done…
Lots of travel, lots of speeches of little to no substance, and lots of vociferously negative advertising on every available platform; that’s how we do this.
And it’s understandable if all of the above is difficult about which to get remotely excited, or be particularly proud, but remember what your vote might mean to the millions around the globe who live under strongmen or regimes, like that in North Korea, almost completely cut off from the rest of the world.
That’s worse. Much worse.
As difficult it might still be to believe, the United States can serve as a beacon for how to do democracy, if only we finally figure out how to use the ability our Constitution gives us to change how and over what we govern until we, at last, get it right.
As one of the only nations on Earth still in its impressionable, experimental infancy, we should remain thankful our founding document was made to be changed, and that, even over the course of our brief, often ugly, history, we’ve bent toward more progress, more freedom, and an ever more enlightened view of each other and the society we’ve struggled to maintain.
Or at least that’s what we’ve done to this point, a few recent falters notwithstanding.
There’s one way to cut through all the propaganda and PACs and repugnant fringes. There’s one way to make sure the American Experiment continues to produce results that arc toward a country of which we could all be justifiably proud. And there’s one way we as individuals can, with sufficient numbers, override the cynical intentions of boardrooms and billionaires.
There’s just one way.
Vote.