I have sworn to indulge myself in a MSM-free day. It's a luxury, I know, and I'm feeling just a wee bit guilty. But I owe it to myself, damn it. I've earned it. And what's the harm in giving into temptation occasionally.
You can call me selfish. There are some desperate and pressing issues which reasonable adult people simply must address without delay. After all, our young people are being corrupted at this very moment because Miley Cyrus bared her back for Annie Liebowitz. And how could a responsible citizen and a good Christian possibly rest when our whole social fabric is being undermined by a retired preacher from Chicago's South Side, who has taken a hiatus from his subversive agitation of feeding the hungry and clothing the naked in order to ridicule our ideal system of social justice in America. And surely only a simpleton could avert his gaze from our desperate need to declare a moratorium on that absolutely onerous twenty-cent Federal gasoline tax which is the only obstacle standing between our happy populus and their imminent prosperity.
Indeed, now that you mention it, I'm just an absolute scoundrel!
But the truth is that we DO have real problems, and most of us will never learn about them so long as we allow the MSM to frame the political debate.
When is the last time we heard anything from Chris Matthews (or Olbermann or O'Reilly, for that matter) about any of the following: food riots in African and SE Asia, the rapid and intense decline in Icelandic glaciers, the fact that a majority of scientists and economists now believe humanity reached a tipping point two years ago where our capacity for agricultural production was exceeded by population growth, the absolute fact that the Era of Cheap Energy is over -- the first casualty of Tom Friedman's "flat world", and the overwhelming probability that a fairly significant percentage of the six billion people currently residing on this planet will live short and desperate lives of unrelenting poverty, devastating hunger and debilitating disease, if they are fortunate enough to escape bloody tribal and ethnic and religious wars.
And it's all coming to a town near you, if not soon then at least by the time your grandchildren would be entering college, assuming they could afford the privilege.
But let's not burden ourselves with this depressing stuff. There are plenty of circuses in town right now on MSNBC and FoxNews. We can whistle away our cares (and assuage our impotent egos) by listening to Hillary's eternal swan song or McCain's all-brass marine band. It's not like we've lost 4000 of our best and brightest in a $2 trillion imperial war with no end. And who can bother with the 47 million uninsured people in our country when we don't know if Lindsey or Brittany will ever get out of rehab?
I'm as guilty as the next guy of buying into the "bread and circuses" which our politics have become. But just for today, I'm giving it a rest so that I can concentrate on some adult problems.
It may be the very last chance I ever have to actually make a difference.