Let's vote for president now

Finally. October is here, the home stretch. It is now 34 days to election day. Oh my god, still five more weeks till the campaigning ends.

Since almost every one of us is ready to cast our vote for president and, if many of us had our way, we would have voted in January, or the day after President Joe Biden turned the reigns over to Kamala Harris in July, why can’t we vote tomorrow, or next Tuesday?

We can’t because the U.S. Constitution sets the date of national elections.

So, let’s change the Constitution. That starts most readily with petitioning our elected representatives.

Since most meaningful and significant change starts at the grass roots, gains momentum and slowly grows into a movement, it is up to us common folks to reach out to our congressional representatives and advocate that they draft their colleagues into supporting and passing a constitutional amendment. It could be as simple as:

“In any presidential election year when citizens are overwhelmingly sick and tired of suffering the candidates running for president, Congress will be required to set the date of federal elections as early as the first Tuesday in February.”

This is tongue in cheek. It is also completely serious to get us all started in moving toward the massive change needed to drag our federal election rules out of the 18th century and into the present age.

If the United States is the oldest democracy in the world, it long ago lost its vibrancy and verve. In nature, organisms evolve or go extinct. In nature, old organisms ossify and die.

In society, old people are often senile. In a political system built around seniority and controlling and protecting power, change is a threat to the system itself. In the established framework of power here, the rulers defend themselves against change. Our leaders are against the future. In protecting themselves the rest of us are stifled. The system rewards those who keep society from evolving.

What to do? Like the newscaster in the 1976 movie “Network,” we can start with shouting to the world, “I am as mad as hell and not going to take it anymore,” but that is only a start and only momentarily satisfying.

In “Walden” Henry Thoreau wrote, “In the long run men only hit what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.”

It is time to take careful aim, to be patient and keep aiming.