Learning to Pay Attention

The walls are closing in or, if not the walls, then the groundwood sheets of newsprint, the pixilated screens of the news that never stops. Maybe this is the way we should feel at the end of eight years of presidency/puberty. It’s bad enough having teenagers in the house, but when the house is the White House…

(The Internal Editor is not happy with the presidency/puberty metaphor. “Far too mild,” he says, peering over my shoulder. “Don’t even associate the word ‘presidency’ with this miscreant. Compare him to an autocrat, a tyrant – Vlad the Impaler, something like that.” I think I’ve got a fine metaphorical theme about to unspool, but to placate the Internal Editor I agree to include some of his thoughts, at least parenthetically.)

The price of oil and therefore gas and therefore everything else, is running out of control. The economy crashes through one floor after another. On the news this morning, a couple of former Bear Stearns execs, accused of tripping the first in the series of fateful dominoes, were perp-walked through the streets of New York, the modern equivalent of the stock and pillory. Eighty years ago, at least stockbrokers had the moral fiber to throw themselves off ledges and crash into the streets below. Now they either wind up in rehab, church or a country-club federal prison. Or just pay a $50,000 fine after they assault flight attendants and take a crap on an airplane drink cart. (Yes, Gerard B. Finneran of Citibank and Trust Company of the West, we remember you.)

(The Internal Editor looms again, telling me I’m digressing. He may be right, but what truly bothers him is he thinks I’m being traitorous to the fifty percent of my blood that is Irish. He noticed Mr. Finneran’s ethnicity. “It is not bad enough that eejit brings shame on us all, but you have to be reminding us of it?” he says. I maintain the late Mr. Finneran’s problem was not his Irish blood, but the money in his pocket. The Irish only become obnoxious when they get rich. Now I’m really digressing.)

We have wars in two distant nations and surveys say Americans aren’t thinking about Iraq and Afghanistan, either because we’ve got too much to deal with on the home front or we’re “fatigued.” Maybe we’re subconsciously trying not to think about the wars, because we spent several years thinking about them, wondering why we got into them in the first place, wonder why the hell we haven’t gotten out, why our government doesn’t represent our best interests. It’s understandable that people would want to stop thinking about a topic that only leads down a blind alley.

This is where people like John McCain pop up and say, “We have to deal with the reality that this is where we are, whether we like it or not,” which is his way of saying “I’m keeping our troops there for a thousand years.”

I get it that people don’t want to pay attention to this stuff, but not paying attention is how we get to Mr. McCain’s “whether we like it or not” impasses. It really doesn’t take all that much attention paying. Every nation on the face of the Earth and most of the American public told Pubescent George W. Bush not to go to war in Iraq.

Same with the mortgage crisis. There were plenty of people saying we shouldn’t deregulate the banks and let every Tom, Dick and Enron get into the money-lending business, but oh no.

(“The point! The Point!” the Internal Editor is now screaming. “Get to the point!”)

The point is this: now is the moment when we have to pay attention. Dick Cheney, for all his evil ways, put his finger on something significant four years ago when he said, “We had an accountability moment. It was called the election.”

The election is now. While Election Day is November Fourth, it’ll be too late by the time you roll out of bed that morning. It’s almost too late now, four and a half months out. Now’s the time to go to the town hall meetings, write your letters to the editor, talk to your friends and neighbors and family. Now’s the time to pay attention.

© Mark Floegel, 2008

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