Fighting cynicism in an election year

An off-year presidential election is just around the corner, and can’t you feel the excitement?
Neither can I. But it’s obligatory that voters be encouraged to vote, to do their civic duty, and that they be reminded that the most important thing a citizen can do for his country is to fill out a ballot.
Well, yes. I’m as patriotic as the next guy. I have to differ somewhat with the aforementioned stress on “the act” of voting, however. I’d say the most important task of a voter in a democratic country is to be informed about the candidates. When you’re informed and then you vote, ah, that’s when the act is truly special. Those voters who are uninformed can just as well stay at home, if you ask me.
I guess I am a bit cynical, to be honest. I am reminded of a recent national poll where 58 percent of voters said this country is “going to hell in a handbasket.” It got a lot of attention for a couple of days, and without a doubt the hell-in-a-handbasket assessment puts an exclamation point on the typical majority response that we’re pointing in the wrong direction.
Things are pretty bad, I think. And it makes me wonder about those small fractions of voters who think the country is going quite well. Where are they getting their information from?
You’ve got to be regularly tuned into the news programs these days not to miss the crises we are lurching to and from almost daily. New bad news stories are coming at us so fast that we’ve hardly got enough time to pay attention to each one before it’s replaced with a new one. Let’s see: the IRS scandal is replaced by the immigration controversies, immigration is pushed out of view by the Veterans Administration scandal, the VA scandal is replaced by the Ukraine/Russia dustup, and that’s old news when the Secret Service scandals hit the fan, and that’s not so important anymore when the ISIS problem surfaces, and now that’s eased out of the way by the Ebola crisis. I know I haven’t mentioned Benghazi, the botched health care reform rollout and a few other downers that made the headlines at one time or another, but there’s so much bad news we don’t take the time to dwell on any one of them for long.
You can’t blame everything on politicians, however, or any one political party. But many of us are taking that route, and all it does is make us so demoralized that we tend to believe we’re past the point of recovery.
We tell ourselves that neither the Democrats nor Republicans offer any real hope. That’s defeatism, and Americans always have and always should be an optimistic people. Fact is, Democrats and Republicans have very different views on governance, and it behooves us to take that into consideration in times like these.
I say we should inform ourselves and vote. It still beats defeatism. By a longshot.