What's Tony Thinking

Too Much Politics

The Georgia Senate run-off elections are today, January 5.

During the pre-November 3 election cycle I contributed early and often, not only to the Biden/Harris campaign, but to various senate campaigns in other states. I gave money and time (writing letters, making calls).

Since November 3 I have been blitzed with demands for donations from the Democratic senatorial candidates in Georgia, and from various Democratic PAC’s telling me that the world will end if the Democratic candidates are not elected. Pretty sure the same message is going to Republicans.

I have unsubscribed to as many of these outfits and appeals as I could. Why? Do I not know that Senate “control” rides on the January 5th Georgia run-off. Yep, I got that. Do I not understand that the fate of justice and civilization rides on this run-off? Really?

I would like U.S. electoral and party politics to diminish in my consciousness.

I think we all “deserve a break today” and for a while from electoral politics and the struggles for power and from the claims that this is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING in the world and human history. And that if we don’t win this election, the world will end. Give me a break. I mean really. Take some time off, you people. Even football and baseball, play for a season, then they are done.

After the 2016 election a pastor asked what I thought of it all. “Our politics,” I said, “has gotten too religious; and our religion too political.”

By which I meant that politics and political power had become all consuming, had become everything, had become matters of ultimate importance while religion (ostensibly about ultimate matters) had put itself in service of politics and power, both on the left and the right. “Who would Jesus vote for?”

Politics and the quest for political power is sucking all the oxygen out of our lives, out of our society.

Count on it, as soon as the results of the Georgia run-off are more or less determined, our sights will be turned to the 2022 Congressional elections and the 2024 presidential election. Will the Republicans recapture the House? Will the Democrats gain the Senate? Will Trump run again?

Someone observed that Washington D. C. is Hollywood for the people that aren’t that good looking. Very hungry egos.

Will you people give us a break? Just kind of do your jobs, as in legislating and governing, for maybe a year before we have to think again about who’s running, who’s winning, who has the largest “war chest,” and what the polls are saying.

Politics and the quest for power have become a kind of malignant tumor, constantly growing, sucking blood (and money) from every other organ of our collective life and from American society, leaving us distracted and desiccated. Zombies of the American political apocalypse, we stagger from one election to the next. What’s the latest at 538?

Friends, regular readers, you know that I think politics important.

Important but not ultimate. Important, but not everything. There is more to life than politics.

Please God, could we stop the interminable fund-raising, dire predictions of the end of the world if the other party wins, and never-ending campaigns for like maybe a month, a season, possibly even a year?