Please say it isn’t so.

Please, dear God, tell me that we are not headed for a 2024 presidential election that will be more of the same.

If you are not one who believes in a deity, then please touch a lucky object or indulge any superstition to which you turn in search of a desired result.

But do something – anything – to change the trajectory on which we find ourselves as a body politic.

By all indications, America is headed in two years to a rematch of Donald Trump versus Joe Biden. It is hard to imagine a less imaginative or more destructive course. Or one more emblematic of a broken political system that virtually precludes any serious resolution to the challenges facing this nation.

First off, there is the issue of vitality and outlook. Accuse me of being ageist, if you wish. I have been called worse.

When November 2024 arrives, Trump will be a full and not all that healthy 78 years of age. Across the way, Biden will be just two weeks shy of his 82nd birthday. His fastball is already a slow-pitch blooper. What will he have left by the time he reaches the middle part of his ninth decade?

Spring-chicken status long ago passed for both of these warriors. Heck, both received their AARP cards in a previous millennium.

Age is indeed more than a number. The effects of it are not entirely predictable. But the era during which we matured shapes much of our worldview.

America has lost a good deal of the vitality and dynamism that once defined it. In 1960, the year a youthful, dashing John F. Kennedy was elected, the median age of the U.S. population was 29.5 years. In 2020, that number was 38.6 years, a difference of nearly a full decade.

Between the aging of the baby boomers, immigration restrictions and a birth rate well below the statistical replacement level, the country is not getting any younger.

Some might suggest that our aging leadership reflects an aging nation. The argument here is that it underscores the need for a new generation to take up the reins.

It is not just at the presidential level that a gerontocracy has taken hold in America. In the Senate, the longtime Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, is 80. Across the Capitol in the House, the Democratic leadership troika of Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and Jim Clyburn are each 82.

It would constitute a generational shift even for them to give way to boomers.

California Sen. Diane Feinstein is 88 and in evident cognitive decline. Yet no Democrat of standing dares to suggest that she step aside before the end of her term more than two years off. While Iowa Republican Charles Grassley, also 88, is defying mortality in running for another six-year term.

Enough. Their day has come and gone. At a minimum, give those in their middle-aged prime a shot.

If a Trump-Biden grudge match is to be avoided, other contenders are required. On the Republican side, there is no shortage of wannabe possibilities. Most of them have taken stock of Trump’s hold on his base and made or remade themselves in his pugilistic, populist, faux working-class manner.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is presumably at the head of that pack. He is full-bore, full-division Trump with even less warmth than the original commodity.

It is on the Democratic side that the bench seems threadbare. Presumably, the torch would be passed to Vice President Kamala Harris. Pity any aspiring Democrat, part of a party in which identity is everything, who takes on the sitting veep who happens to be the first woman and minority to hold that post.

But good luck in finding a smart Democrat who is bullish about her prospects. She is tailor-made for the party’s most fervent voters but with little appeal beyond.

The other name in play who would clearly represent a generational shift is that of the infrastructure czar, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. His time may come. But are Democrats willing to risk everything on his ability to carry Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and other such states?

Beyond that, whom? It is hardly an embarrassment of riches.

The contradiction is that a country clearly not wanting more of the same may well lock itself into a dismal, grim choice between the very same.

If not equivalently, both parties have radicalized and moved toward their respective poles – the GOP starting with the Tea Party movement in Barack Obama’s first term and Democrats in their outraged opposition to Trump.

Republicans of the Trump period seem less animated by ideology than by militant resentment and a harkening for the good old days that may have been more old than good.

Democrats, conversely, appear determined to indulge every inclusive reflex and to reject any notion of the moderation that led the party back from the political wilderness not that many decades ago.

Poll after poll point to a public deeply dissatisfied with both parties and both extremes. Forced to choose, a thin majority sometimes tilts one direction and sometimes the other. But there is a craving and huge, pent-up demand for something different.

America seems locked in an endless cycle of constant, repetitive, non-stop political battles over issues sometimes real and often manufactured.

The noise machine sustains itself. In a way, the most ardent in both parties prosper in this sad context. But the nation loses. As the vast, too often unheard core of America seeks some semblance of civil discourse and refreshed, common purpose.

None of that will be had by straight-line politics than end in another existential faceoff between two tired warhorses, Trump and Biden. That yearning shared by most of us and on which our country’s future depends requires a bending of the curve.

Eric Sondermann is a Colorado-based independent political commentator. He writes regularly for ColoradoPolitics and the Gazette newspapers. Reach him at?EWS@EricSondermann.com; follow him at @EricSondermann.