Next Christmas, there may be a new game available for parents trying to catch their children waking up too early on the eve of the holiday. The game is called (aptly) “GOTCHA!!!”
If you are a kid, don’t worry! It’s not on the market yet. It’s only being used on an eight month, no obligation trial basis by media giants ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and FOX before it is stocked on toy store shelves in time for autumn.
Here’s how the trial game works: Presidential candidate travels from state to state at a dizzying enough pace to make even an experienced astronaut disoriented. Thousands of questions are posed to him or her from virtually every town in America on virtually every subject known to humankind. The candidate is then asked to either amplify or clarify each answer as hundreds of tape recorders catch every syllable.
The game is never over as the media waits, BEGS for just the slightest slip up to fill a very slow news week. Then, after weeks or even months have passed, BAM!!!......GOTCHA!!! – The poor candidate has failed to be perfect and has made a tiny mistake that news outlets slaver and drool over like wild pigs at feeding time.
I don’t live in a small town. I don’t plan on moving to one anytime soon as I enjoy living in a suburb right across the street from an exciting and growing city. And I am BITTER.
I’m tired of stopping for lunch on I-95 and being begged for money from a talented man that was gainfully employed just one year ago today. I’m tired of watching wonderful fathers go on television and display excruciating, palpable pain as they cry a thousand tears and blast the Bush administration for letting their sons or daughters die in a senseless war in Iraq. I’m extremely bitter every time I drive across New York’s Verrazano Bridge and see the void left from the late Twin Towers; two buildings I saw from more than 50 miles away as a child in suburbia.
I want to viciously punch the next man that attempts to tell me that the war in Iraq is to stop terror when, clearly, the war against terror is being lost in Afghanistan.
As someone that grew up in New York, I’m extremely offended by the knowledge that a band of Washington idiots decided to spend the GDP of the United Kingdom to fight a useless war in Iraq while giving those that bombed my childhood home time to regroup and even prosper!
Do you sense my bitterness? I’m not sure if the anger I feel is really coming through clearly.
If Barack Obama says that small town folks are bitter, then his one mistake is that he left out people like me; those simmering Americans living in large suburbs watching our standard of living drop like a falling piece of space debris. Polling after his “bitter” remark indicates that no one cares about his misstatement because he speaks so well to the real issues Americans deal with daily: Jobs, the economy, education, healthcare, middle class tax relief, and even the Afghanistan-Pakistan border problem that he was SUPPOSED to be so naïve about.
If the media is to retain any semblance of credibility during this period of recession, it had better stop playing the game of “GOTCHA” and start paying attention to the real issues affecting ordinary Americans.
If the news outlets don’t start playing the game of real journalism and not that of tabloids, Americans will not play along in the “GOTCHA“ game in 2008. The stakes are far too high as America stands at a crossroads not seen since the depression.
Instead, we will simply do to the news what we’ve already done to prime time television: Turn it off and tune it out.
Don’t believe me? Just ask Katie Couric.
