This video is making the rounds on the Internet today, but with just six days until Election Day, it perfectly encapsulates how we’re all feeling. The noise from the 2012 presidential election has gotten so extreme, it’s making small children burst into tears.
Elizabeth Evans, a resident of Fort Collins, Colo., was in the car yesterday with her 4-year-old daughter, Abigael. Like many suburban parents do, Evans tuned the vehicle’s radio to the local public radio station for the latest NPR broadcast.
Well, Abigael couldn’t handle it. As soon as the newsreader made mention of the latest development in the race between President Obama and Mitt Romney, the kid turned on the waterworks. And, like any modern parent, Evans pulled out her smartphone and turned its camera on her crying child.
“I’m tired of Bronco Bamma [sic] and Mitt Romney,” Abigael said through a veil of tears.
“Don’t worry,” Evans replied. “The election will be over soon.”
However, Abigael’s frustration will live on. Evans uploaded the video to YouTube and shared her daughter’s sadness with the world. But setting aside the questionable parenting technique of broadcasting one’s child crying about the news, Abigael did what many of us forced to follow this election have wanted to do.
Like Abigael, we live in a television market where the Obama and Romney campaigns are spending bales of cash to reach swing-state voters. Amid all the incessant campaigning, nonstop ads and cable news bravado, who among us doesn’t want to have a nice, long cry?
Seriously, though, putting video of your crying child on YouTube—no matter how adorable—is kind of messed up. (Unless Jimmy Kimmel puts you up to it.)
But what did Evans do to calm Abigael down? She told a television station in Denver that she switched off NPR and turned on Neil Young. Because kids love Neil Young!
NPR, however, understands young Abigael’s plight. Though the election is less than a week away, this campaign has been just as painfully interminable to the news media as it has to their consumers.
“I think the collective cry is, ‘aren’t we all?’ ” an NPR spokesperson says. The network also issued a formal apology to Abigael on its website.
