I could have sworn we had an election in November 2012. I remember voting. I remember the installing of a president, was it Obama? I remember complaining about how long the campaign season was in 2012. I must be losing my mind. We seem still to be in campaign mode, if the ads on television are saying what I think they are.
I looked it up and found that 2013 is not an election year. I’m not slipping – politicians are just rushing the gun. As far as I know, only one candidate has declared to run next year. That candidate is the perennial Mitch McConnell, who seems to be demolishing in advance the people who might have the temerity to talk about maybe running against him.
Not only must we put up with this campaign for senator a year too early, the campaign against Hillary for president in 2016 has already begun. I understand thinking ahead, but this is ridiculous and very wearying to the electorate.
Meanwhile, who’s running the store? Congress is working its regular three days a week between vacations and nothing is getting done except a lot of votes against and vituperations delaying the business of the United States.
This situation makes a cynic out of me, whose earlier life was spent believing that good things happen if the people want them to and that we have the duty as citizens to make those good ideas tangible. For most of my life, that happened. Life got better for most people and many wrongs turned into rights. Since we now have 24-7 news cycles – and maybe because we are bombarded with news – it has become impossible to believe in good things being intended and coming to pass. So I, the eternal optimist, am now a cynic.
That’s a fact of life, but more disturbing than my disillusionment is the cynicism of young people. I had dinner last week with my children (son and darling daughter-in-law and her daughter, my 35-year-old granddaughter). I’m deleting “step” from my vocabulary. She and her sister are now my granddaughters and Marsha’s grandchildren are my great grandchildren. The nomenclature is less clear but emotionally more satisfying.
Anyway, I was surprised to find my granddaughter even more cynical than I am. There’s something unfair about that. She and her generation should have some years of believing before they have lost their illusions – or maybe they haven’t been allowed to have any illusions.
The subject for this column is a little different from the one I had in mind until last Friday night. I was beginning to have that Watergate feeling (the “don’t trust anyone” wariness) and coincidentally (maybe) on the TV was shown again that excellent movie about Woodward and Bernstein who reported the Watergate mess. Thinking I was ahead of everybody else with that feeling, I was intending to use it for this column. Alas, the Friday night political shows on KET made the same comparisons even better than I was doing. I was scooped. Watching those programs was reassuring for me: other and better informed newspeople arrived at the same suspicions I had.