Ready to Turn on, Tune in, Drop out

As newspaper people, by necessity we’re political junkies, whether at the local, state, or federal levels.

When it comes to national news, we try to read as much as we can from reputable news sources to learn as much as we can about the issues and the candidates.

So it’s always been a bit of a surprise when we see polls indicating that public interest in the upcoming election is at an all-time low.

We realize that this is a result of many factors, chief among them that we have two candidates for president who are old enough to be the great-grandfathers of the youngest voters and that neither candidate provides inspiration to any of us. In addition, with their surrogates and spokespersons feeding us the same banal “spin” night after night, trying to convince us not to believe what we see and hear with our own eyes and ears, we all just want to tune out the mind-numbing noise.

We want the truth, but all we get is something far short from both sides.

We were listening to the Classic Rock station on our Sirius Radio the other day and the haunting sound of “For What It’s Worth” by Buffalo Springfield came on. The song was written in the mid-’60s, but it’s as timely today as it was then with lyrics perfectly capturing today’s political climate:

There’s battle lines being drawn

Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong

Singing songs and they carrying signs

Mostly say, “Hooray for our side”

In the wake of the fiasco of the first presidential debate, even we are ready to throw in the towel — we give up.

Or, to put it another way, in the famous words of advice espoused by Timothy Leary (the Harvard professor-turned-guru of psychedelic drugs) at the same time that For What It’s Worth was playing on the airwaves, it just might be time to, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”