Perhaps we are constantly bombarded by Trump, Hollywood, and the media with the message that the end of the world is just around the corner. We’ve come to see doom and gloom both as entertainment and an accurate forecast of the future.

Perhaps we know too much. Through the Internet (Facebook, etc.) we get every dot and tittle of bad news, but everything good that happens seems to get ignored in favor of horror stories. For example, when have you ever read about a wonderful Sunday family picnic?  But you read daily about whole families being extinguished by an overturned ten-wheeler. We take nice picnics for granted but we thirst for tragedy!

Even when we go to the movies to laugh and feel good (try Bridget Jones’s Baby for a wonderful example!!!) we are treated at the outset to at least four trailers that show the world being wiped out in fantastic scenes of explosions and carnage.

We saw Monday night how Trump trumpeted one basic message over and over again—what a horrible mess our country and economy are in, and how only he can make everything great again.

His assertions about some loss of jobs and economic stagnation (exaggerated but not entirely wrong) obviously resonate with that portion of the population who see some real signs of those problems in their lives. But his statements are overwhelmingly exaggerated, as all the indisputable data makes crystal clear.

Trump is trying to take advantage of the country by selling a sham reality. Clinton should hammer home the real story—facts—to enable fence-sitters to see how cynical Trump is in painting such a grossly misleading picture of reality.

It appears more and more that the election is in the hands of those fence-sitters, who for various historical reasons do not like or trust Clinton.

Those people need to see more of what the first debate hopefully showed: a sniveling Trump bobbing and weaving around the truth, smearing and distorting reality, and a poised, composed, and good humored Clinton who was coherent, consistent, and realistic.

If only a small percentage of those fence-sitters could wake up to the harsh reality that either not voting or voting for a third-party option could be the same as a vote for Trump, they would see and understand that, whatever their reservations about Clinton, she is by a wide margin the only real option in this election!

And as far as doom is concerned, all Trump is going to do is bring it about all by himself.