Your Media Has Been Hijacked

Again I wake up to morning radio news that is focused on Iraq. My president (sigh, yes, he is my president too) spends roughly half of the state of the union speech on Iraq. Politics, media, and even discussions have been hijacked.

It is as thought the neocons have come to the dinner party and no matter which way the conversation turns, they bring it back to their obsession with car wrecks or dissecting frogs.

What is never mentioned about this chosen fiasco is that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has stolen the bandwidth that would have otherwise gone into domestic and foreign policy issues of great import. Not only do we fail to arrive at a consensus about these issues but these other issues don't even get discussed.

Here is my proposal (realizing that writing into a blog is the equivalent of speaking into a mirror). For one week, the American media ignores Iraq. The situation has reached a stable point - bloody, tragic, chaotic but stable. Neither Democrats or Republicans have a clue about how to extract us from it without triggering even worse chaos that threatens to engulf the gulf. The media is obsessed with Iraq but the attention we pay to it doesn't seem to be of any help.

Instead, for one week we get our country back. Stories are about health care, education, transportation, housing, crime rates, the environment, outsourcing, free and fair trade, the political shift in Central and South America, new discoveries in fields like cognitive science and genetics, and the wealth of events that define the modern world. It is worth remembering that there are 300 million Americans and 6 billion people on the globe who are busily living.

One week with no Iraq. Really, is it too much to ask?