Bill Maher made a valid point tonight: if you don't nip the Birther BS in the bud, it will metastasize like the Whitewater deal into impeachment hearings. Same with "health care reform is socialism." Or whatever nonsense the Right come up with next week.
The problem being: the media, at least the little part of it that most of us can affect, doesn't do well with complex subjects.
For a small, and timely, example, let's talk health care. Rather than follow factual, subtle subjects like expenditures vs. patient care, a Letters to the Editor editor will pick out a submission that hits one or two buzzwords like "socialism" or "rationing" and further the simplistic (and wrong) common knowledge.
Which brings us, the people who actually sweat mental bullets over the minutiae of policy, to our biggest problem.
How do we boil our understanding down to the two-paragraph (maximum) level that can not only reach print in the few outlets we can reach, but actually become talking points easily transported by often small and overburdened minds? How do we, to bumper-sticker it, bumper-sticker it?
Humor certainly helps, whatever your subject. Still, a good yuck is no guarantee that your message will be broadcast, let alone understood. Neither, god knows, is having the truth on your side.
Following are four basic propositions that I assume most readers of this blog agree with. My challenge tonight is simple: how dow you boil these "truths" down to a (maximum) two paragraph message that is appealing enough to get into print and simple enough to penetrate the skulls of you less-than-wonky neighbors?
In 1950, health care was 4% of GDP. In 1966, it was 6.6% Today, it's over 17%. If we don't find a new model to replace private-insuranse-or-nothing, health care inflation will bankrupt America in less than 40 years.
Human-caused climate change is the most predictable, if not the most severe, threat to national security we face. No guns, bombs or planes can help us defeat this enemy.
Every pot smoker in jail means a murderer walks free. The War on Drugs has failed.
Better educated children will be better qualified caretakers of a rapidly aging society.
There are other issues on which we could concentrate, but those four examples, boiled down to sound bites that the most unsubtle, most reactionary of our neighbors could understand, would go a long way to making our already bumpy ride through history a little smoother.
How, in the name of at least fifteen minutes of future, can we reduce these (or your own favorite) complex issues down to the sort of bite-sized morsels that our local LTE editors will print, and our hurried, harried, suspicious neighbors will pause to consider?
The floor is yours.