Spring has sweeter scent than our campaigns

This glorious, fragrant, flowering spring is just the antidote we need for a nasty presidential primary season. Why turn on the evening news when we can step outside and smell apple blossoms?

Longer days mean lovely evenings — evenings meant for strolling along trails and tree-lined neighborhood streets to greet new leaves, smell blooming lilacs and marvel at how quickly our little corner of the world is being transformed by this great awakening of new life for plants, insects and birds.

And then of course there are the mountains on blue-sky spring days, still clad in winter white. When we round a corner and see Rainier, the mother of all our mountains, it feels as if the rest of the world skips a beat. When we luck into the right place on a clear day to see the whole panorama of wild, adolescent Olympics, we nearly swoon.

At least some of us do.

However, we know many others are less enthralled by these predictable and therefore less-than-newsworthy events. And spring comes every year, unlike presidential elections.

Theoretically, presidential campaigns only come once every four years, but to some of us, this year’s campaign already feels perpetual. For months already, the presidential campaign has been our national news media diet’s main ingredient. And it may very well contain GMOs.

Granted, choosing the next president of the United States of America is a very big deal. We should pay attention, we should think about the issues, we should be informed citizens, yada-yada.

But we know perfectly well that if, say, a quarter of our news diet is coverage of the presidential campaign, it means we’re learning 25 percent less about everything else that’s going on in the world. We know less about Syria, less about climate change, less about what’s happening to whole continents of people — less about our own neighborhoods.

And when the campaign news is really juicy, the coverage can hit up to 40 or 50 percent of the evening news. During the week of the Republican convention, we will probably have to watch the BBC to find out what’s going on in the rest of the world.

Which, oddly, brings us back to spring. It may not be newsworthy, but it is overwhelmingly and wonderfully important, and it should not be missed because we are distracted by delegate counts and the undemocratic tendencies of our two major political parties.

In fact, we submit that going outside, feasting our senses on the natural world and taking in the nourishing loveliness of spring — and the coming summer, too — may be the only way to preserve our sanity and good judgment as the tension and anticipation build toward November.

Spring is fleeting; the campaign, alas, is not.

This story was originally published April 18, 2016 at 12:30 PM with the headline "Spring has sweeter scent than our campaigns."