Editorial: Stay sane and active in crazy season

Hold on to your hard hats.

This bumpy ride is going to get bumpier.

With September’s arrival, sweet summer 2024 is swept away, replaced by an autumn that’s bound to be far more frenetic than usual. 

You’re not wrong. Fall is meant to be a time of long walks on cool, breezy days, of sojourns on a multitude of paths all leading to educational advancement, of quiet, peaceful evenings when the sun heads off to bed a little earlier and then wakes up a little later every day.

But today we unofficially begin an every-fourth-year cycle that you won’t find on any meteorological map.

For the next two months, the usual gentle transition marked in subtle glory by every leaf you see will instead be billboarded by campaign signs and PAID FOR BY advertisements everywhere you look. 

Whispers and normal talking voices will be drowned out by shouts and screams. 

You’re entering an autumnal twilight zone where competing camps will spend many millions trying to convince you that the other guys are paving a path to oblivion. It’s almost enough to make you rue the day August surrendered to September. 

But surrender it has, and you know what? It’s OK. Maybe even better than OK.

Just as 100-degree days make summer miserable but you endure knowing that they, too, will pass, so this election season will test your ability to keep smiling, to envision society on an upward trajectory and ponder your place in the human race. 

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Help create those better days. Don’t be a victim. Don’t stop paying attention. Don't shirk your responsibility.

Take your soul-expanding walks under color-bursting canopies but don’t run away from the work ahead. Staying informed and civically engaged is work, but it’s work worth doing because your family, your neighbors, your community, your state and your nation depend upon that work being done.

Especially this fall.

You can do it. That’s why you were given a brain and a hard hat to protect it.