As I type these words, it is 573 days, 17 hours, 1 minute and 30, no 29 seconds, until the 2016 presidential election on Nov. 8, 2016. That means we have 573 days or campaign advertising, speeches, and, of course, debates.

The candidates toss hats into the ring like folks playing horseshoes. They throw out sound bites seeing which one hits closest to the stake, and if the media says it is a miss, they regroup and change the message.

Now, I don’t want a discussion of which candidate or party I might support or what I think about our current administration. In my experience, that leads to arguing, not discussing.

We do love to claim our sides and defend them to the death with our fingers in our ears so as not to hear anything that might make us think about our choice. I’ll admit I can be as guilty as anyone of doing this and I think that needs to change in our country.

It’s time we stopped competing to prove my party is more right than your party, my party is more American than your party, more Christian than your party, more compassionate than your party, more tolerant than your party etc. Maybe we need to stop the political party stuff altogether and approach it from a more united front.

I wish we could line up the candidates without knowing which party they represent, whether they claim to be liberal, conservative, Tea Party, or anti-Tea Party and simply listen to them without it playing through the filter of their alliances and ours.

Unfortunately, that’s impossible, because we jump into our corners and come out fighting instead of listening. Then you throw in the mix of the media that loves a good fight and loves helping stir one up.

Oh and there are the ad agencies making millions off those campaign commercials, billboards, newspaper spots… I doubt they present a candidate with an ad campaign focusing on embracing discourse.

Nope, they push nastiness. Let’s see how much dirt we can sling at the other guy while he is slinging just as much back at us. That approach gets all of us dirty and does nothing to encourage my confidence in any of them.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is watching America elect its president and all of the others who run for office at the same time. What do they see and hear? I don’t think it is anything that makes us look good in the eyes of an outsider.

Maybe politics has always been this way, but it seems worse to me in the last few years. It seems the focus shifted from issues to personalities and attaching personal beliefs.

Oh and if I one more time I hear that we need to “take back our country” I’m going to scream. If we lost our country, it slipped away while we were arguing over where it was going. And that goes for both parties.

I know I tend to be a Pollyanna, (something some of my Facebook friends are happy to point out) but I don’t think our country is lost and needs retrieving. No indeed. We are not lost; we are blessed, and perhaps in our political separateness we forget it.

There is a law I think works in every situation. It’s the law of attraction and it goes like this — what you send out comes back to you. I think the Bible calls it reaping what you sow.

Now, that’s an interesting concept to throw into a political campaign, but I think it applies. It also applies to us voters who go to the polls and elect these folks.

As I sit here, 573 minutes and 16 hours from our next election, the politicking is about to go into high gear. Let the sowing and reaping begin. I hope unity is what comes back to us because we need that as we prepare to go the polls next year.