By Steve Brawner, © 2024 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

The 2024 election season can produce many feelings, including dread, despair and disappointment. What if we tried gratitude?

In the coming months, average Americans will again act as the nation’s board of directors. A billionaire/former president and the vice president of the United States will ask voters to hire one of them as the executive branch’s CEO. Other candidates likewise will ask to hold other offices. 

The winners will serve a set number of years. Then, they will have to come before the voters again if they want to be re-elected.

It is an imperfect system to be sure. Voters decide based on wrong and limited information and often elect the wrong people. The nation is divided, and Congress has become so partisan and dysfunctional that it can’t even debate the nation’s challenges, much less meaningfully address them. Traditions like accepting the voters’ will and the peaceful transition of power are less treasured than they once were.

But the American system has helped produce a standard of living and human freedom that people across the world envy, aspire to, and try to copy or escape to. If we need a wall along the southern border, it’s to channel the flood of people desperate to come here, not lock our own people in. That is not the case in some places.

Yes, it could be better, but it could be much worse. In Russia, the main opposition leader to Vladimir Putin, Alexei Navalny, died a political prisoner earlier this year. He had barely survived a poisoning attempt years earlier and then was arrested on trumped up charges. Haiti is beset by gang violence. Sudan’s civil war has displaced more than 12 million people. Twenty-six million North Koreans live in a police state where they basically must worship their ruler. Religious persecution is the norm in many countries.

Still, many Americans have become so disillusioned at home that they no longer really believe in this nation’s democratic institutions. There’s a danger to that. If we don’t leaven all this anger and division with gratitude, we could take a step in the direction of some of these other countries. 

Cynicism is at least as bad as naivety and perhaps worse. That’s because democracy, like anything, depends on faith and a little optimism. I don’t know for certain that a bridge is going to stand as I cross the river. I cross it based on the best information available to me. And the best available information is that America’s constitutional republic is pretty good, and definitely better than the alternatives. 

British Prime Minster Winston Churchill said in 1947, “Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. …”

If we don’t believe that to be true – if we don’t appreciate what we have and work with it to make it better – then eventually we’re going to try one of those other forms. We’ll seek a revolution when what we really need are major reforms.

Finally, apart from all that big-picture stuff, gratitude is good for the soul. The truth is, we are blessed. If we focus on the fact that things are messed up while ignoring that things are also still pretty good, we will become – or remain – a miserable people living in a land of plenty. Frankly, we should be ashamed of ourselves for this.

In the next two weeks, Americans will go to the polls and cast our ballots. Many of us might have to hold our noses and select the least objectionable candidate in some races. We do not have to be thankful for those particular choices. 

But we should be thankful for the choosing itself. Let’s try. There are many worse forms of government out there in this world of sin and woe, and many people live under them.

Steve Brawner is a syndicated columnist published in 17 outlets in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com.