by Gila Hayes
In my daily accounting of things for which I’m thankful, the diminishing number of days before the first Tuesday in November and the general election leads the list. With about five weeks before the 2024 presidential election, the end is finally in sight. I generally consume little-to-no network television, but the political debates drew me to ABC and CNN for the first time in years. Both were disturbing for a variety of reasons. I won’t regale you with what bothered me most; you likely have your own list.
Each campaign season becomes more painful than the previous one. The more distasteful political campaigns get, the greater becomes the temptation to boycott the whole process.
Please don’t do that. Please vote.
The Network stays politically neutral, despite profound personal beliefs about which candidate would do more to destroy our remaining freedoms. I recognize that individual members may have priorities that are different than my own, so far be it from me to invade the voting booth where each citizen weighs in on how he or she thinks things are going nationally and asks for more of the same or demands a new direction.
Conversely, apathetic citizens, disconnected Americans who don’t think their vote will make any difference, or people who fail to foresee any personal benefit and are too self-centered to worry about bigger issues, empower the very ills that led them to stop voting. Don’t be that person.
You really, really, really don’t want either candidate to serve as President of the United States? OK, have you thought about nominations for Supreme Court justices in the coming four years? Have you considered which vice-presidential candidate will be casting tie breaker votes in the Senate? Have you thought about what happens in Congress because of the outcome on “down ballot” races in which you really should have voted for a local representative?
The winner of the presidential race who’s sworn in on January 20, 2025, stands to appoint several Supreme Court justices. Closer to home, the races further down on the ballot will absolutely decide which political party has a better chance to push through or be able to frustrate legislation that affects every single citizen through spending and taxation, energy policy, inflation, price controls, restrictive regulations of all kinds, national defense, crime and punishment, and a host of other concerns we face daily. Your vote for senator or representative is important, if nothing more than to notify entrenched politicians many view as unbeatable that the locals are disgusted and are rising up against politics as usual.
We vote to let politicians know that a growing number of Americans are badly dissatisfied with their actions and intend to hold them to account. We vote to tell senators and representatives that their actions matter far more than whether there is a D or an R designation next to their name. I’m generally leery of third-party candidates, but the Green Party’s entry in the presidential election, Dr. Jill Stein, did have the right idea when she was challenged to explain why she would “risk another Trump presidency” by siphoning votes away from the Democratic nominee. Stein asserted that the nominee had not earned the Green Party’s vote and she was described as “defiant” when she stressed that no one but each individual American owns his or her own vote.
The abject lack of reliable news makes the upcoming presidential election even more difficult. I was impressed last month when Richard Epstein, speaking on the Hoover Institution’s The Libertarian podcast (https://www.hoover.org/research/russia-love-and-lot-rubles), addressed propaganda masquerading as news. He recommended “a steely kind of skepticism about what’s going on.” He worries that people committed to countering false news become zealots for their own persuasions, “and then you have two organizations that are vaguely rogue instead of just one.”
Turn off the news sites that promote extreme stands, Epstein urged. “I don’t spend any time on TikTok” he said with what sounded like a grin, as he went on to seriously ask his listeners to exercise self-discipline and stay away from what he called “the wrong kinds of media.” He encourages, “If you turn that stuff off, it is not going to take your life over.”
Log off the Internet, turn off the TV. Go out in public and do good – whether that is taking a friend shooting, volunteering as a range safety officer at your gun club, offering to help re-shelve books at the local library, or pick up litter or join a community improvement organization. You may find that the world is a better place than you thought it was and almost certainly discover that you are less the victim, when you are more the participant.