You and I cannot affect a presidential election – We can, however, create positive change in our own neighborhoods, even on our own blocks. Let’s start there and show the country what happens.

Human beings tend to get the most worked up over issues they can affect the least. Millions of sports fans have habits, routines, even specific tics they are convinced, in their heart of hearts and against all reason and rationality, can affect the outcome of a fourth and long situation in the fourth quarter of a Super Bowl. When Tiger Woods putts for birdie on the 17th hole, a million fans lean this way or that on their sofas, telepathically guiding the ball to the hole. Personally, during NBA games I used to cough whenever an opposing player took a crucial jump shot or free throw, on the chance that the resultant vibrations of molecules around my head might somehow open a portal hundreds or thousands of miles directly into the player’s inner psyche and cause him to miss. Hey, it worked during Game Eight of the 2008 Finals, and I’m sticking with it.

Of course, the average fan’s ability to affect the outcome of a single shot, much less a game, hovers somewhere between our ability to flap our arms and fly from Los Angeles to New York and our ability to perfect cold fusion using common household items. But that doesn’t stop us. If anything, our impotence makes us try even harder, to the point that the effort can affect marriages, careers, even basic personal hygiene. It’s a form of madness.

Over the last few decades Americans’ relationship with national politics has come to resemble nothing so much as our fervor over this or that sport’s championship game. It is to be granted that the consequences of a presidential election are far more consequential than the consequences of, say, the Seahawks-Rams game in Week 9 of the NFL season. The individual who occupies the White House impacts every Americans’ life to some degree, not to mention the lives of a substantial number of people on the planet. Though, when you think about it, not nearly as much as we tend to assume.

Consider: Is your life, personally, really that much different at the cusp of 2024 than it was a decade ago? Not in the context of family or career, which by definition are dynamic throughout life. Rather, the various components and actions that make up what we might think of as your life’s mis-en-scene. The phone in your pocket operates a bit faster than the one you had in 2014, and it has far more doo-dads to distract you from life. The quality of image on your TV screen probably is a bit better, the car in your driveway is a bit safer and gets slightly better gas mileage than your old one. Probably the single biggest difference is that you do more of your shopping and errands online. Which, while not insignificant, is hardly up there with the advent of internal plumbing, mass electrification, or a world war.

For that matter, life hasn’t changed all that dramatically since 2004, or even 1984. Again, we spend a lot more time staring at and tapping on screens, but basic life routines – get up, shower, eat, get the kids to school, go to work, have lunch, complain about management, drink too much bad office coffee, sneak a doughnut you shouldn’t, spend more time than you’d care to acknowledge procrastinating, slog home through traffic, retrieve the kids, help with homework, argue with your spouse about something that isn’t worth arguing about, have dinner, watch something on the tube, go to sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat.

And yet.

Every three years, when presidential election season starts heating up, for 12 months we lose our collective minds. It’s scarcely an exaggeration to say that the pundits and talking heads and assorted other cretins who make up the modern media and political classes verily scream from the rooftops that This Is The Most Important Election In Our Lifetime And Very Likely Ever. Even when it was the desultory George W. Bush running against the somehow even more banal John Kerry, it was The Most Important Election Ever In History Don’t You Dare Turn Off Your TV Or Log Off Your Online News Feed. Then, Bush was reelected, the country continued slouching toward whatever fate awaits us, and Americans went on with their lives. Bush continued two disastrous wars, while Kerry, likely relieved, took to circumnavigating the globe on private Gulfstream jets to lecture normal people about their carbon footprints. See? Back to normal.

So it is as we approach 2024. The pundits and talking heads and cretins already are gnashing their teeth and rending their garments over the looming presidential election, with both the political Left and the political Right screaming hysterically that if the other guy wins it will be nothing less than The End Of Democracy As We Know It.

Me, I’m not convinced. In fact, from out here in the American Political Wilderness  I’ll wager my last dollar that when the sturm und drang subsides and the dust settles sometime in November or December 2024 (depending on how long it takes to count the ballots — which is a whole other, completely bonkers, issue) life will look pretty much the way it does as I type this words. Granted, there may well be a few more burned out local business districts or shattered glass in various government buildings. But, again, for the 99.9% of us who are just trying to make it through the day without screwing up too badly, life will proceed unmolested and unaffected.

None of which is to say the next 12 months will be calm. They likely will be anything but. No, we are likely to see political discontent and unrest the likes of which the country hasn’t experienced since the generational temper tantrum known as the Sixties. It will be intense at times, and occasionally overwhelming, as both legacy political parties fall increasingly in thrall to their worst elements and impulses. They will be egged on by both establishment media and social media, cesspools whose narcissistic residents have an insatiable appetite for animosity and an unhealthy affinity for the hazards of what the Founders referred to as faction. So in that regard, buckle up, buckaroos.

It will be furious and thunderous, to be sure, but it will signify next to nothing.

Is there a chance I’m wrong? Of course. Maybe Donald Trump really is a budding dictator and tyrant who will destroy democracy as we know it and join Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping in a horrific global fascist love fest. Maybe Joe Biden actually is owned by the Chinese, Russians, and Ukrianians and is selling out our democracy to the global military industrial complex via his derelict son, one hit of crack at a time. There are a whole bunch of reasons I don’t believe either is the case, starting with the fact that both sides are using the same boogeymen (sorry, boogeypeople) to smear their opponents. I believe Trump will go down in history as a curio and warning, and Biden will be all but forgotten.

Seriously, America, this is pathetic. Do better.

More to the point, even if either or both worst case scenarios are true, there isn’t a thing you or I can do about it. Sure, we could contribute a few bucks to this or that cause, candidate, or party. We could volunteer some time, do some phone banking or door knocking. At the end of the day it won’t amount to anything.

Which brings us to the lede, which I helpfully buried a dozen paragraphs into this post.

What we can do is get engaged in our neighborhoods and communities. You and I will not get so much as a meeting with a staffer of either presidential campaign. We very likely cannot get a meeting with our state governors. We can, however, get to know our city councilmember. Depending on the size of our city or town we can develop a relationship with our Mayor, City Attorney, or Chief of Police or Fire. We can advocate for positive steps that will have immediate, tangible impacts on our neighbors.

Be selfish: Doing good in your community feels good. Hit that dopamine!

That’s not resignation. The fact is, country starts at home. In fact, a majority of issues we attribute to failures at the state or national level can be addressed, if not rectified, in our own backyards. You’re not going to affect state homeless policies, for example, but you can launch an effort to clean up your local park and connect the truly deserving with local services to help get their lives back on track. When it rains you can bring panchos and dry socks to help get some folks through the night.

The hippie used to say, “Think globally, act locally,” but like so much from that unfortunate era, it was wrong. A better way of phrasing it is, “Act locally, impact globally.” Even before the advent of social media local “feel good” stories often went national. The human interest story on the nightly news about a group of local school kids doing good in their community, the story of neighbors who came together to clean up that local park. Just as negativity begets negativity, positivity begets positivity. It causes other people to realize they can have a similar impact in their communities. Better still, it doesn’t depend on government or corporate largesse, just human beings being human beings.

And best of all, doing good in your neighborhood or community is almost always a nonpartisan effort. The old saying is, there are no atheists in foxholes. Likewise, there are no partisans in soup kitchens. Doing good is its own reward, it releases those dopamine hits people otherwise tend to get from ethyl alcohol and TCH these days. There are better ways, and it’s so very simple.

This isn’t to be Pollyannaish: Even local involvement can be an uphill battle these days. The last half century has seen relentless assaults on the institutions that bind neighbors and communities together, from religious institutions to the Scouts to traditional fraternal organizations like the Rotarians. To be sure, there were plenty of good reasons that these once venerable institutions came under scrutiny, but as a nation we threw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. To paraphrase E.J. Dionne’s observation in his masterful book, Why Americans Hate Politics, the Boomers in particular conflated opposition to specific ideas and policies with hatred of entire institutions, which in all too many cases metastasized into alienation from country. As we have seen, that way be monsters.

The best thing we can do for ourselves, our communities, and our country is to reinvest in some of those institutions. Suffice it to say, with notable exceptions most have progressed. Even the Catholic Church is slowly being dragged – albeit kicking and screaming – into modernity.

As the Beast of 2024 bears down on the American Political Urban Jungle, let’s fan out into the Wilderness and do some good. Let’s resolve to spend at least an hour or two a week involved in our immediate communities and neighborhoods. Volunteer at a food bank, join a local community group, or establish a connection with your local electeds.

Heck, take a risk and go back to church or synagogue. The last time I went to church I met the founder of a new homeless veterans nonprofit. Every Sunday for two months we would converse and get to know each other over coffee and bagels after services. I ended up joining the board for a year and helping secure a quarter of a million dollars in seed money from one of L.A.’s biggest philanthropies. Not a bad result from a few Sunday mornings spent sitting reflectively in the pews of a progressive Episcopal church in Santa Monica.

By “not bad,” I mean this: We would have our board meetings in the tower of L.A. City Hall, where another board member worked. Sitting in that historic building I could see the little notch in the San Gabriel Mountains where my first ancestors arrived in Southern California, in the 1840s. Arrayed at the table were the founder, a black man in his 80s who was a Korean War veteran and grandson of slaves, our City Hall connection who was the first generation son of Mexican migrants who originally arrived undocumented, and the deacon from church, a lesbian Ph.D. who works at the Rand Corporation. You couldn’t create a more diverse board in the most intense DEI session ever, yet there we were. And we’d met at church.

Great things can happen when you re-engage with your own community. So in 2024 let’s resolve to do just that. Let’s show the country – hell, the world – how right the great former Speaker of the House and Boston College graduate Tip O’Neil was when he famously observed, “All politics is local.”