Amid all of the presidential announcements, we are bound to start seeing more and more political ads interfering with our Tuesday night programming, our upbeat Pandora music and even our Thursday morning commute to class or work. And when we start seeing and hearing the seemingly omnipresent attack ads from presidential hopefuls, we’ll have the same reaction: turning it off.

And that’s what a majority of people in this country have done during the past few presidential, and even midterm election years. We’ve silenced the negative 30 seconds to a minute of how Candidate A is a terrible human being because they voted no on such and such bill. Or how Candidate B allegedly falsified documents, making them too inept to fill the position the two candidates are battling for.

Attack ads, slash ads, campaign ads, negative ads, smash ads, whatever you want to call them, they’re all feeding into a deteriorating American psyche that will only prove to do more harm than good down the road. We’ve already seen voting numbers drop. PBS Newshour reported in November that voter turnout was the lowest it had been in 70 years. Seventy years. Let that sink in. In an age when we tout progressivism and equality, we have record low numbers on actually voting on the lawmakers who make these decisions.

It’s because when those campaign commercials roll around or we hear the word “voting,” it’s immediately equipped with a negative connotation. And a majority of that problem lies in the hands of the campaign committees and political action committees (PACs). We’ve become so used to seeing hate and negative ads that it has carried over to how we perceive the very institution of voting. It doesn’t make us think less of one candidate and more of the candidate that PAC is supporting. It just gives us this cutthroat idea of what American politics has become.

Instead of funneling billions of dollars into attack ads, why don’t PACs spend those dollars building up a candidate’s image, rather than trying to tear down the image of his or her opponent? When candidates spend more time attacking one another’s weaknesses than promoting their own strengths, qualifications and credibility, it becomes apparent that not even the candidates themselves believe in their ability to be elected on the merit of their own principles and policies.

Hopefully, in 2016, the American people will see through all the dollar signs and negative campaign ads that have consumed their daily lives for the past 16 months, and will be educated on the candidate of their choice. Because the only way we can move forward in society is by trumping the power of money with the power of education.