With the 2016 presidential campaign slouching toward the party conventions in July and the election still five months distant, I’ve concluded based on observation, conversation, rumination, speculation and no social science research whatsoever that there are three kinds of people in the United States:

• One category comprises those who regard politics as phony, fatiguing, insulting, disconnected from reality generally and disconnected from the reality of their own lives. They try to avoid political material as much as possible, but there’s only so much they can do. They tend to know more than they let on, if only to avoid encouraging further blather about it.

• Then there are cursed souls who carry a deep-tissue, antibiotic-resistant infection of political fascination sustained by a steady stream of meaningful and nonsensical information about candidates, issues, strategies, tactics, controversies, scandals, ever-shifting competitive standings and more. This includes the members of the political class, but the group is made up mostly of civilians who simply can’t get enough of the stuff.

• Finally, there are those folks — honest, earnest, engaged and intelligent — who sometimes get to the point when their heads and hearts start aching when they try yet again to sort truth from pandering, who just can’t take it anymore and have to take a break. It’s the smart move. There will be time enough to catch up before Election Day.

It’s possible to slide from one category to another. In a column I wrote a few months ago, I was all worked up that the Democrats were still dithering over Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. They needed to settle the matter and start acting like they realize how hard it will be to beat Republican Donald Trump in November.

Trump, meanwhile, was clumping across America, violating with impunity even the low standards that pass for rules of engagement in politics, to say nothing of the elemental norms of human interaction. If the supposed leaders of the Republican Party really wanted to stop him as they said they did, I wrote, they needed to get on the stick.

Three months later, I think I got too caught up and too worked up. Clinton is still going to be the Democratic nominee, notwithstanding Sanders’ increasingly cringy clutching at the fading spotlight and kvetching that Democratic rules are stacked against him and cheating him out of the nomination. Not so, found a detailed and compelling analysis by the fivethirtyeight.com team.

And Clinton still doesn’t seem to recognize the need to come up with effective new strategies and tactics to take down a freakish candidate like Trump. The Clinton playbook that worked twice for Bill in the 1990s but failed Hillary in 2008 will not cut it.

On the Republican side, Trump swatted away the impotent threat of the establishment and nailed down the nomination with remarkable ease. He is still spewing baseless boasts to rabid rally fans and still swinging an anti-fact, anti-knowledge, anti-science and anti-decency meat axe. It’s all attitude, but it still resonates with many Americans who feel disillusioned, disrespected and disregarded (and with the racists and neo-Nazis who support him, too).

Here’s the good news: For anyone needing relief from the ongoing political melodrama, there’s an opportunity to take a break. Once past the California primary on June 7, which should end the Democratic contest once and for all, it’s almost a month and a half until the Republican convention in Cleveland and then the Democratic event in Philadelphia. It could be the perfect time to let go of politics for a while and refresh our sensibilities. 

The bad news is that we also could use the time to really start worrying about the most important question of the campaign: What will those of us who consider Trump unacceptable but who have reservations about Clinton, most especially including dejected and even angry Sanders supporters, do in November?

Of course, qualified and properly registered citizens of the United States may vote for whomever they want for whatever reasons they want, and they don’t owe anybody any explanations.

But it seems to me that we may be losing perspective.

Do we need a political revolution, as Sanders says, to correct some deeply ingrained systemic problems in our society? Maybe we do, but you don’t get a political revolution by electing a president, at least not in this country.

You create a political revolution by doing incredibly hard and frustrating work for years between elections. You organize groups of people in your community who work together for a shared goal and slowly become a potent voting block. You join together to elect people to town councils and state legislatures and governorships and the U.S. House and Senate. You gradually accumulate majorities of elected representatives who want a society in which everyone is treated fairly and has a fair chance to fulfill their human potential. You work to ensure that they forge coalitions and build electoral leverage to enact ordinances and statutes that make genuine progress toward the kind of society you believe in.

In the meantime, we have a president to elect. If nothing else, I know that the next president will place at least one and possibly more justices on the U.S. Supreme Court and that the decisions of that newly constituted court will echo for generations.

The act of voting isn’t about the voter. It isn’t an act of personal expression. It’s not something to do to feel good about ourselves, so we can tell ourselves that we stuck to our principles, damn it, no matter what the consequences.

By voting, individuals participate in a collective expression of civic responsibility, the responsibility we share with each other for each other and for our society. We vote for people whom we honestly believe will do best job for all of us while they’re in office. There are always consequences to our choices.

Would 11,501 U.S. military men and women have died in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars between 2002 and 2008 if Al Gore and John Kerry had been president instead of George W. Bush during those years?  I don’t know the answer, but I know some things would have been different. The consequences always matter.

We don’t vote in a free-floating time frame. We’re voting this year to elect a president whom we believe will do a better job for all of us for the next four years. Might that come down to picking the lesser of evils? Yes, it might. Tough. Suck it up, and make a choice.

There are always consequences. They always matter.