Don't Panic, It's Just An Election

When did we get so angry as a nation? Seems like the breakdown in our political life has reached such a low point that people are predicting doom, gloom, death and destruction if President Obama is re-elected and I want to know why. It's just a Presidential election. Presidents come, Presidents go and by and large the country survives. For crying out loud, I got enough of this from the Left when Bush The Younger was doin' his thing for eight years. Does the Right really need to follow suit?

Muslim conspiracies, socialist gulags and the inevitable 'he's coming for our guns' it's all so tiresome and frankly, it's exhausting. And now that the Republican Convention is going on in Tampa, we're getting the chorus lines of 'I hope Hurricane Isaac hits Tampa and drowns the bastards' from the nutters on the Left.

Really? Really? We're hoping a Hurricane wipes out the Republican Convention? Have we sunk that low? (Just to update: the Hurricane missed Tampa and hit Louisiana. What does that mean? Does the Almighty have poor aim? Or, Heaven Forbid is he endorsing Mittens for President? I'm sure the Twitterati will come up with something nicely offensive.)

Facebook is even worse. It's getting to the point where I rarely update my statuses if at all because anything you say that's remotely political collapses into a stupid argument far too quickly. People on my friend list are either wildly left or ragingly right and there's really no room for compromise in the middle. This tendency is worrying and makes me wish I had paid more attention in my political behavior class as an undergrad.

And the hell of it is, there's no obvious solution. I can preach all I want about the failures of the two party system (many) and how it's produced an entrenched political class that's grabbing whatever it can while the rest of us scrape along as best we can (true on a bi-partisan level) and I can exhort y'all (all twelve of you reading this, hahahahaha!) to take to the barricades and start the revolution and demand something better out of this amazing country we live in but people won't.

Maybe that's OK. But we've got problems aplenty and if we can't calm down and have a rational, thoughtful discussion about 'em, we're probably screwed.

(P.S. I've been trying to avoid this for years now but as a poli-sci nerd, I just can't anymore. I'm going to have to read 'Bowling Alone' by Robert Putnam- and you should too.)

UPDATED: See what I mean? I may not agree with Mittens or his policies and I'm certainly not going to vote for him but when people are this unhinged, you start to wonder what's gone wrong at the Fair, you know? And this rage is to be found on both sides of the aisle, so it's not a partisan thing with me. It's just exhausting how negative everything is getting.

Cheer up, people. It's only an election. The Republic will endure.