A title might be "Our Children"

A title might be Our Children

After the July 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman, during Alan Dershowitz’s assertion of the bulldogged, bullheaded, self-promoting incompetence of special prosecutor Angela Corey and call for her disbarment, I came across the column of Washington attorney and law professor Jonathan Turley. Turley writes old-fashioned journalism style on current events and also publishes informed and intelligent guest writers. Impressed by several, I subscribed to his free email distribution. 

Turley’s column has been, and often is, informative and helpful. Admittedly, I assumed there would be a daily or weekly email column, so have been taken aback to receive several emails a day on a wide range of breaking and unbreaking topics major and minor because Turley seems to react to everything in the news with the urge and time to write about it whether I’m interested or not. So, after scanning the titles, most of his traffic gets deleted unread. Deleting, undoubtedly I miss a lot. Nevertheless, though I know folks who have nothing to do all day but click share on Facebook, I don’t know anyone who has nothing to do all day but read emails. So I miss a lot of what Turley sends. 

This morning, however, Turley’s guest columnist writes about evolving changes in news reporting over the years, into reporting that leaves us uninformed and without analysis for any basis for thinking. What we get is bland, viewless, risk free he said she said reporting that fills a page or column to the publisher’s satisfaction, doesn’t annoy advertisers, and doesn’t help Americans form critical opinions. It’s like imparting knowledge without wisdom. An example discussed is the affordable healthcare act, which is derided and veiled in the epithet Obamacare. Any nation that affords to spend as much as America does on defense, foreign aid and foreign wars should afford at least an equal priority of looking after its own poor, including a concept of national health care of some sort. It makes no sense, for example, to have laws against abortion but refuse to help poor people take proper medical care of themselves and the children they do not abort. Yet all around me, people are shrieking to prevent, disable, cripple, withdraw what they epithetically disparage as Obamacare. Why? I don’t know, but for one, a rabid political fringe that is increasingly fringing itself has made a cause of that and of the shrieking tactic for political influencing and for battering questioners down as socialists and flaming liberals and such, the rallying cry of fools not leaders. But again, Why? I don’t know, I honestly don’t know. I’m probably not going to download the Act itself and read it to see if I can tell what’s supposedly so bad about it, but the press, the media who could help me, haven’t informed me, all they have told me is who is for it and who is against it, the he said she said that fills the column and page by press time. I doubt even my representatives in Congress know, I suspect they are just mindlessly “on side” -- one side or the other -- with their political machines. And with their equally mindless and unknowing “grassroots” whose agenda is against. Whatever, against.

What I do know is that medical care is obscenely expensive. The medical bills for my heart care at Cleveland Clinic ran upwards of half a million dollars, thank goodness for medical insurance coverage, because it would have taken a lot of Saturday morning bake sales and unlicensed lemonade stands to pay that. No, the fact is, I had to show my medical insurance before they would accept me, and if I hadn’t had the right cards and coverage Linda could have gone on that singles cruise afterall. But medical insurance is too expensive for many Americans to afford so they -- “self-insure” -- which means they have nothing, and their health care is minimal at best and they don’t look after themselves or their children, who are our children. We aren’t India or some third world country where it’s common and unnoticeable and acceptable and it’s-always-been-this-way and nothing-can-be-done-about-it naked, emaciated, vacant-eyed children brushing flies off their eyeballs and getting water from mud puddles and ditches. But those children are out there in America anyway. If Obamacare isn’t good, what would be good? I’m not interested in the mindless shriekers. But a decent press, a competent media, might help me understand. 

Or an informative campaign from the White House, published by decent media.

T