How to stay sane in an election year

Simple Ways of Preserving Your Sanity in an Election Year 

By James Terminiello 



 

"This is your captain speaking. We are now at 36,000 feet and making our slow descent to Election 2024. Please fasten your seat belts and secure your oxygen masks. It is going to be a bumpy ride. A VERY bumpy ride!" 

 

The presidential election is now within sight. And if you think the rhetoric to date has been overheated, vulgar, and explosive, consider this accusation... 

 

“Pimp of the White House ...   A man sunk so low we can hardly hate. We have nothing but disgust, pity, and contempt” (1) 

 

Was this said about Trump, Biden, Kennedy? Nope. It was a diatribe hurled at President Franklin Pierce in 1855. Two-term President U.S. Grant was deemed a “drunken trouser-maker” and “as brainless as his saddle.” A bullet prevented Alexander Hamilton from a run at the presidency but not before John Adams labeled him a “bastard brat of a Scotch peddler.”  

 

Clearly, it has been ugly since the birth of the nation, but we today are cursed with smart phones, social media, and 24-news networks who will dig under their toenails to scrape up anything resembling news. Or just sew something up from lint, bubble gum, and old pyjamas. The wash of political rhetoric is as constant and relentless as the waves at the shore. And about as nutritious.  


By all indications, the oozing mass of political invective will metastasize – super funded by vested interests and conducted by people with highly selective and/or atrophied scruples.  

 

What to do to preserve your sanity? 

 

    • Avoid the pundits: They ALL have axes to grind. 
    • Avoid the news shows: Just go for the weather, sports, and entertainment
    • Avoid the podcasts: You already know what they are going to say.
    • Avoid the influencers: Why? Because they are influencers.
    • Avoid the entertainers: They may know how to act, dance, and sing, but it ends abruptly there. 

 

Make it simple. 

 

Just go to the website of the candidate you are considering. Read the platform. Assume it is pie-in-the-sky and laced with untruths, shadings, and utter falsehoods. Then compare it to the platform of the opponent. Repeat the process.  Now, here is the hard part. 

 

Since both sides are engaging in hyperbole, reality twisting, and bogus boasts, just decide which “fiction” fits closest with your world view. 

 

In short. Think: “What’s in it for me?”     

 

That is, after all, what the candidates are thinking.  

 

Then you’ll know who to vote for. And the headaches will stop.  

 

  1. (1) https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/are-presidential-campaigns-getting-nastier-not-really 

 

James Terminiello, author of the social satire The Conscience of the C.O.D. which has just won the Literary Titan Gold Book Award (Fiction) writes from Mount Laurel, New Jersey  

 

https://literarytitan.com/2024/06/07/literary-titan-gold-book-award-fiction-3/ 

 










 

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