By JOSHUA THOMAS

C-S-E Editor

Election time makes me just a little bit crazy. I can’t help it. I love the opportunity to voice my opinion and have it counted, but it’s a frustrating time, because as much as I feel I attempt to find out the truth about candidates, policies, etc., it becomes increasingly hard to maneuver around the many deceptions. Attempting to get to the bottom of things often means being savvy of manipulations, half-truths and outright lies.

Watching television this week, I saw numerous attack ads aimed at a candidate from the local area. It’s not so much that the negative nature of the ads bothers me — I get it, and really, it’s our right as citizens of this country to speak freely, and we’re all aware that sometimes negative ads say more about who created them — it’s the fact that no negative ad ever seems to consider context. When you throw context out the window, you underestimate and insult the audience.

There’s a lot that many people don’t know about political processes, even local ones, and some candidates certainly attempt to take advantage of that fact, making bold statements about what their opponent did or didn’t do. But without context, what is the point but to try to throw us off? What good is a fragment of the full picture? Providing choice fragments, in many instances, is more about obscuring  facts and keeping us in the dark.

I wish that more campaigns — some do, of course, but not enough — took a simpler approach. In school, we were always taught to K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Silly, or Stupid, depending on who your teacher was), and that’s some of the best advice I’ve ever received. Really, it doesn’t have to be so hard, and loading details upon details, I believe, just purposefully creates mental clutter. It’s a tactic meant to obscure facts instead of highlight them. At a certain point, it’s hard to remember who said what and when, and the result — that we’re unable to keep track of anything — is essentially what some candidates go for, I believe.

Everybody knows that this is an important election, and the C-S-E is taking it seriously. In the coming weeks, there will be unbiased profiles of candidates. We’re also going to attempt to present an uncluttered, easy to understand profile of the new charter vs. the current system. To be honest, the process of researching candidates with the goal of finding out every piece of relevant information — then presenting the essential elements in an easy-to-understand format, is of great help even to me. This election season we’re all the same boat — attempting to find the truth amid all the clutter.