• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, October 25, 2024

With passions at a fever pitch right now, this year’s election season is no fun at all, but it should be.

Why? Because Americans are a resilient, fun-loving people who appreciate finding the absurdity in their everyday lives and then having a good-natured laugh at their own expense.

But instead, it is 10 days until Election Day, and the heat is on.

Take a look all around. Everybody wears a frown. 

Despite being fed scads of misinformation every day, everybody believes they know it all. Everybody thinks they’re right.

On the partisan news channels, on social media and in the public square, everyone is unhinged.

This season’s campaign commercials are also unhinged. They may or may not be worse than in previous elections, but here we are in the present day and the spots airing on New York TV, and presumably all over the country too, are atrocious.

False accusations and baseless claims about the opposing sides are thrown in our faces like dirty puddle water from a pothole.

There is no salesmanship to the commercial messages, just fear-mongering. None of the messages tell us what the candidates believe in or what they will try to do. 

Instead, the message from our campaign commercials is that our politicians are very good at mud-slinging, but little else.

Turning to our late-night TV shows for entertainment provides no respite. On the late-night shows, the comedy is all politics all the time with most of them favoring Harris and the Democrats and one of them (that I know of) favoring Trump and the Republicans.

None of the so-called “discourse” in our world today even attempts to consider that Election Day in America need not be a day of strife and hate.

On the contrary, it is a day to be celebrated for it represents our opportunity to cast votes and have a say in who governs us. 

Gratitude for our elections is in short supply or no supply. Free Speech is enshrined in our Constitution, but the many people who apply it every day never seem to be grateful for that either.

It is election season in America. It is also fall, and the foliage is in its glory now. Americans are in their local pumpkin patches and apple orchards with their kids on Saturday afternoons.

“World News Tonight” closed a newscast the other night with a montage of ordinary folks picking pumpkins in patches all over America. They were having fun, making memories and pursuing happiness.

Thank you, ABC News, for taking us there and reminding us that there is much more to American life than election-season vitriol.