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The Painful Sadness of the Election Season
I’m not a sad guy. I don’t think the world is going to hell in a handbasket or that humanity is doomed. I don’t think the world was a better place when I was eleven years old.
But the American election season always brings me down.
As I write, the elections are close enough that the candidates have turned mean. They are making the kind of personal attacks on their opponents that diminish both the accused and the accuser. I don’t want to hear it, be around it, or have it piped into my home. I don’t want to think that any participant in this ugly behavior will end up representing me in the halls of government.
But that is exactly what will happen.
Mostly, people who run for office are the high-achievers in our society. They are ambitious, hardworking, and courageous. It takes courage to stand up and risk the judgment of the voting public. They do it because they want to make a difference. All of them have baggage, personal and political mistakes from the past, and as voting nears, their opponents pounce on those mistakes in ways that cause me, a person who has made plenty of mistakes, to think of my own failures. I feel bad for the accused and bad for the accuser. I feel bad about my nation, and bad about myself.
