There’s so much to be said about the political moment, but is there any point in saying it? Here are a couple of thoughts among many.

Life Must Go On

It’s time to acknowledge that that candidate which you have hypnotized yourself into supporting may not win the election. There’s a 50-50 chance! You should prepare yourself for the possibility so that you don’t feel the need to drive off a cliff when it happens.

Sadly, it seems we are living in times which show the truth of this quote:

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

Abraham Lincoln in dangerous times spoke words which clearly apply to our time. That ought to make us look up from our screens and re-think our personal paradigms.

One of the two will win the election. The other will lose. And when that happens, you will have to go on living. Working, going to school, taking care of your family. The same country you live in will still be here. It will not have become a gulag overnight.

It will be bad. There is no possible way that our nation will prosper and improve after November 2016. And there’s a strong case to be made for our complicity in our own demise. But let’s not set ourselves up for self-imposed ultimatums.

Take a breath. It makes no sense to vilify half of your countrymen and purposely live in hate and fear.

 

Really?

Tale a fresh look at reality. Whichever your candidate, it may be time to admit that yours is outrageously compromised. You don’t have to become blind to his/her ethical failures and political disasters. It is possible to admit that she or he would be an unprecedentedly bad president, and still to concede that you must reluctantly vote for him or her.

I see friends on social media supporting one candidate or the other with a fervor which I can only describe as hysterical. Willingly blind to his/her flaws, their social-media lives are devoted to the utter destruction of the opponent. There are no flaws, and the opposition is both evil and stupid. A few months before, the same people were re-posting memes about the absurdity of their now-darling’s unfitness to hold office.

We have here two candidates who are bad at representing themselves in epic proportions.

If I’m a presidential candidate who’s been a Senator, Secretary of State, and I occupied the White House for eight years only twenty years ago, I’m doing nothing but mention one accomplishment after another. I’m pointing out to you how effective my governance has been and the obvious evidence all around us that I’ve changed our nation, and the world, for the better. If my opponent has no policy experience at all, I’m drawing an unfavorable comparison between his lack and my excellent experience.

This candidate is struggling to give you any reason to vote for her other than that her opponent has an obnoxious personality. It’s certainly true, but I daresay there have been a few successful presidents who weren’t likeable personally.

As for Trump’s debating skills: almost any one of the other contenders for the Republican nomination would have easily bested Mrs. Clinton. It should not be hard to “win” a debate against a person with a history in government as inept, reckless,corrupt and scandal-plagued as she. She is the picture of entitlement, unabashedly piqued at those who would expect her to work for the right to sit in that Oval Office chair.

Such a person presents you with so much low-hanging fruit that it ought to have been easy. How could he have failed to show her up?

 

It’s a Trap

Someone please tell us it’s all been a huge prank.

The race for the presidency of the United States, formerly the greatest nation in the world, has become the contest for the #1 most powerful jerk in history. No decent person with honorable motives can get anywhere near the race for the nomination anymore. And we did that. Let’s be honest. We aren’t really interested in a contest for an honest, disinterested servant of the people. If one tried to run we wouldn’t understand what he was trying to do. That probably happened already.

So we’ve all been drafted into a caricature of a real campaign. Instead of weighing the relative worth and fitness of two public servants, we are actually trying to choose which power-mad narcissist we hope against hope won’t destroy the country in less than four years.

Many of you have managed to convince yourselves that you’re excited about this or that candidate.  But in order to do so, you’ve had to actually become irrational. Don’t do that to yourselves.