The 2024 U.S. election is not about liberals versus conservatives. It’s not even about Democrats versus Republicans.

I woke up this morning with a nasty lesion on my forehead, possibly from the bite of a spider or some other nocturnal predator. It occupies ALL of my attention and consciousness. Swabbing it with anti-itch stuff doesn’t work, not even a little. Trying not to think about it is impossible. This thing is screaming, “Feel me, look at me, think about me!” It’s unrelenting. Even reminding myself it won’t last forever doesn’t help. This thing brings new meaning to the old cliché about having a “bee in your bonnet”. It’s awful and there’s no escape.

Perhaps this is an apt metaphor for what’s eating at our collective consciousness right now. Since THE VERDICT, the media has exploded with opinions and predictions about what was and is and what might be next. I stopped counting post-verdict news bits at a hundred. I can only read for so many hours a day, and I gave up on TV pundits a while ago. Some of my friends declare they’ve just disconnected and stopped engaging altogether with the crap that’s going on with Trump and the GOP. I’d like to join them, but I am not a head-in-the-sand kinda guy.

It seems to me the media’s recent feeding frenzy reflects a festering, cancerous sore in our nation’s culture, in our National Being, that’s eating us alive.

This “sore” is occupying millions, if not billions, of hours of our time. Most importantly, it’s killing our future. While we’re collectively chewing on this, we aren’t having constructive conversations about how to solve some of our most intractable problems. And we aren’t working to create programs or policies that could improve our quality of life or our relationships with each other and with other nations.

Ken Burns recently gave an inspiring commencement address to the 2024 graduating class from Brandeis University. In it, he offered a powerful and insightful historical perspective. He reminded us of a speech by Abraham Lincoln, in which the 29-year-old lawyer declared our democracy and way of life are inherently resilient and designed for self-correction and self-reinvention in the face of adversity and external threats. However, they are vulnerable to self-destruction should we become complacent or begin to believe our own propaganda or think that we have the divine right to do whatever we want.

Back in 1838, Lincoln called the newly minted American citizens to wake up and ‘own’ this fragile vessel, to exercise their individual choices to take care of what so many of our predecessors fought and died for, this United States of America. This responsibility is, of course, obvious to anyone on the left and, hopefully, to most thinking conservatives.

The upcoming election is not about liberals versus conservatives. It’s not even about Democrats versus Republicans.

It is about concerned citizens who care about our democracy versus a cultish, power-obsessed cabal of politicians, self-interested corporations, and Christian Nationalists who are committed to destroying the American vessel, to destroying the possibility of a democratic and self-governing system, and who are led by a profoundly cynical and dishonest person who has proven, time and time again, his contempt and disregard for the individual, the laws of the land, and the rights and responsibilities of America’s citizens.

Next up…the value of political conversations.

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Originally published June 20, 2024 on Jim Selman’s Substack “At the Crossroads“