We have an election coming up this November.

President Obama is seeking a second term, every Representative and one-third of the Senate is up for election, and there are many state campaigns being waged as well.

Now that the basic facts are out of the way, here’s the reminder: Grow up.

This contest is not between President Obama and some abstract concept of perfection in the Oval Office.  It’s between President Obama and a shape-shifting, job-killing, pathological liar named Willard Romney.

Now is not the time for whining about how you didn’t get everything you wanted in January 2009.  Neither did I.  The difference is, I didn’t expect it.

Now is not the time for sitting on your hands to “teach President Obama a lesson” like you did in 2010.

How’d that work out?

Want to ask the folks in Wisconsin about that one?  Michigan, maybe?  Florida, where noted healthcare fraudster turned Governor Rick Scott’s voter suppression efforts have only just been sidetracked by a Federal judge?

We’re on the mend, to the extent that we can get anything at all through the single most obstructionist Congress in living memory.  Sit this one out and you’ll create a monster – a Congress (and possibly Senate) giving Willard Romney everything he wants.  And all he wants, to quote Southside Johnny, is everything.  Everything of yours, that is.  Your job.  Your house.  Your car, what’s left of your pension plan, maybe even your dog, to strap to the roof of Air Force One.

That can’t happen.  America can’t survive that.

Occupy tells us nothing can be fixed.  Everything’s too corrupt to be remedied, they say.

Really?  And sitting in a park or plaza banging on a drum will fix that how, exactly?  Waving signs and chanting solves what problems?  Having no leader or defined goals doesn’t mean you’re a new kind of movement, it just means you’re a crowd milling around wondering what to do next.

Here’s a hint: Vote.  If you’re not registered, register.  If you are, go help someone else get registered.  The regulations are more onerous now, thanks to 2010’s tantrums, but it still can be done.

Here’s why: No movement that accomplished its goals was ever leaderless, and no movement that accomplished its goals ever secured them in the streets and parks.  Not civil rights, not gay rights, not at all.  They secured them in courtrooms and legislative chambers, and that’s where these battles will be won or lost.  It takes time, it’s frustrating, it’s not instant gratification.

It’s still worth doing.

I’ve sat across a table from a very good attorney who’s secured the freedom of people confined in Guantanamo.  Can fauxgressive/Cato libertarian Glenn Greenwald, for all his bleats of concern for civil liberties, claim even one?  Of course not – he’s a clicktivist only, preferring to sit back in comfort in Brazil and pen his screeds from a distance where he doesn’t even have any real skin in the game.

Don’t be that guy.

Don’t be a do-nothing whiner.

Don’t be a clicktivist.

Call people, work to make things better, even if it’s not as fast as you like, and get votes out in November, we need Congress back and we need President Obama back in Washington.