First, take a deep breath. We’re all tired.
If you are reading this, the election has passed and someone is the new president. One side or the other is upset, and mourning a loss but all of us are sharing one common emotion, fatigue.
American politics has become such a toxic environment that any time spent tending our civic duty makes us feel exhausted, and sometimes a bit hopeless. We’re made to act from our fight or flight panic buttons at each pivotal election, and even in the in-between elections, we see our politicians spinning their wheels on important issues that could improve the lives of our citizens.
They haven’t been up to the job, and we need to turn our attention to setting new rules for elected officials.
The fatigue prevents us from having the same energy to fight to get our politicians moving in the right direction. We elect them to do a certain number of jobs, they fail to do them, and when the next election rolls around, the finger-pointing begins.
Perhaps instead of letting politicians lead us, we need to take the lead, and keep a scorecard of issues that matter to us, ignoring whatever noise they are making on our televisions and internet feeds. If their scorecard or grades don’t match up to the job we assigned them, then we should vote them out.
That’s a simple solution, and there are political scorecards we can use.
Basically, it seems time to simplify the process of picking our leaders to those that are really doing the jobs we task them with, and removing those who don’t, especially those who stonewall the progress that helps real people.
It also feels like a great time to remind ourselves of the reasons that the separation of church and state came to be. We shouldn’t be voting on a small set of values shaped by a small set of people. Values can differ, and we should be voting with common sense instead of dogma.
If it medically, scientifically, economically, and equitably makes sense, then that should be our measure. It’s not difficult, but religious-based “values” voting has corrupted the potential for a system of solutions backed by evidence.
We’ve overcomplicated ourselves into madness.
We can blame Nixon’s Southern Strategy. We can blame Reagan for his attachment to the evangelical voter, but more than either of them, we can blame ourselves for letting this mess go as far off into the weeds as it has to produce the destruction of a decent discourse — to produce the nonsense that is a Donald Trump.
Our politics is stressful to us, as the voters, but the only people who should be feeling the tension should be those who fail to perform the roles for which they were elected.
Perhaps finding a way to simplify this process, including the elimination of the electoral college, could bring a bit of peace to voters knowing that each vote would matter, and that we are actually keeping score of the things politicians do instead of what they claim during an election cycle.
It’s time for new rules, and the American people need to be the ones to set those rules. We’re too tired to keep living through elections like this, and we’re too vulnerable not to make real solutions for bad politicians.
This article appears in Nov 4-19, 2024.
