It’s everyone’s favorite biannual and quad annual time: Election season!
This is the time we all get together, enjoy each other’s presences, and calmly agree on how everything in our society and politics should be run.
In reality, we are constantly bombarded with rhetoric, half-truths and fear mongering. These things are everywhere: television, radio, online ads, the newspaper, mail, yard signs, billboards, bumper stickers, text messages, calls, and I’m sure I’m missing some. Over the past week, I’ve kept track of every contact point in my life. In one hour of television, I saw an average of 10 political ads.
On YouTube, it was one ad every commercial break. I received two ads and one politically slanted paper in the mail. I received one phone call and two texts. I’ve seen countless billboards and yard signs around Helena. In an hour of radio, I heard five ads. It is so much. It’s stressful. It’s all encompassing.
People are also reading…
What can we do to counter this?
Even if we try to ignore it, we can’t.
When our phone buzzes, we can’t ignore it. What if it’s our father, mother, brother, sister, friend, a client or someone else we care about trying to reach us? When we see a billboard, we can’t take our eyes off the road. When we’re listening to radio or watching television, we can’t quit our project to mute the volume and often can’t find the television remote in time to mute or change the channel.
Those television remotes are always disappearing into the black hole that are couch cushions, anyways. It seems like we’re stuck. It seems like the villainous corporation IOI from the movie “Ready Player One” is taking over our lives and shoving advertisements in our face at every moment of every day, just like they desired to in the movie. It would be one thing if every commercial was happy or gave us joy, but we see the previously mentioned malevolent messages instead.
While I haven’t discovered a perfect solution to escape all the advertisements and political messages we see every day, unfortunately, I can offer thoughts on how we can focus our minds, hearts and attention away from the divisiveness and back to our faith.
Our faith is often the base for our lives, our morals, our joys and our inspirations. It should provide a moral compass for us to work with, steering us to being the best person we can for ourselves and others.
The “Catechism of the Catholic Church” calls humanity to seek God, know him and love him. If we strive to do that, we will naturally be the best person we can possibly be, as we are attempting to live a life of boundless love. If we are living a life where we strive for this love and joy, even though we may experience setbacks or troubles along the way, it is normal to want this for others in our lives and community, whether we personally know them or not.
In this election cycle, focusing on being the best person we can can give us the strength to benefit and unify our homes and neighbors, instead of dividing them as this political season seeks to do. We can take that time to pray that many of us so often forget about, start attending services again, volunteer for or donate to an organization in our community doing good work to serve others, help our neighbors with a chore, focus on speaking to our family members in a nicer and more patient way, stop gossiping about rumors at the office, or any other positive change that you could think of in your life.
As you do this, you can also think about what is important to you, your life, your church and your community.
As Election Day approaches, determine which candidate or legislation best serves the betterment of society, the dignity of life, and the care for our neighbors in need. Determine the values that will promote the world you wish to live in and vote for the best possible solution accordingly. At the end of our mortal lives, when we are judged on how we lived and consequently the lives and decisions we affected through our actions, will we have done the best we can to be worthy of entrance into the blessedness of heaven?
I would hope we should all desire that entrance into heaven. For many of us, me included, we still have many election cycles and divisive political advertisements to suffer through, but let’s keep it simple and focus on what we can do to better this world, not divide it. It takes each and every one of us to better this world, even though it may be burdensome or overbearing, just like every political season.
If we endure, we can strive for what Timothy is talking about in 2 Timothy 4:7-8, “I have competed well; I have finished the race; I have kept the faith. From now on the crown of righteousness awaits me, which the Lord, the just judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me, but to all who have longed for his presence.”
Let us endure this political season, often dark world, and difficulties of life to create the best world we can for our family, friends and neighbors.
Scott Held, executive director for Catholic Social Services of Montana
Scott Held is executive director for Catholic Social Services of Montana, a nonprofit service agency that serves the Helena Valley and Montana statewide with adoption services, mental health counseling, education and suicide prevention services, disaster relief aid and diaper bank services.
