What in the Hell has happened to us?

It is easy to blame President Obama, but he's just a symptom. For some reason Americans occasionally decide to hate themselves and go into a major funk. We send our economy into the toilet, start firing people and electing well-intentioned incompetents to national office.

Now Americans are either looking for a bailout or loathing those who are. We express an impotent rage by fighting over tax increases or gay marriage, when the real problem is we have collectively drank the "Stupid-and-Whiny" Kool-Aid.

America, we need to get a grip.

The Carter years, which followed the Ford years, which followed the Nixon years, which came on the tail of the Viet Nam years and the Johnson Administration was our last major Stupid-and-Whiny episode. It's easy to give President Reagan credit for pulling us out of that one, but he only showed us the way.

But I remember once hearing someone say "sometimes you need a Carter to get a Reagan". Maybe we needed an Obama to get who we really need to step up.

In the meantime, America and my fellow Americans, we need to pull our heads out of our fourth point of contact. When we do, things will start to improve.

Here is some "Street Talk" for you

Posted 4/12/2009 5:58 AM PDT on The Sacramento Bee
The problem with the Bee in a nutshell, or perhaps an eggshell:

No Happy Easter. Anywhere. So what's up with that?

Going through the paper this morning, the only person to say happy Easter was columnist Jeanne Phillips, a rather pleasant irony!

The Bee is having trouble, just like other papers are having trouble for a number of reasons. But one in particular is that they are so out of touch with their community of readers that they won't even wish them a happy Easter even though they must know most of them celebrate it.

I'm not talking about images of Christ on the cross for goodness sake! They could have the Easter Bunny, or even images of decorated eggs. For heaven's sake (or not), acknowledge the holiday!

The street talk angle here is simple. People do mention it to each other. Personally, I have other things more important to me than getting all hot under the collar about seasonal greetings (remember Season's Greetings?) but a lot of people do, and for every person who mentions something they are bothered by there is a larger number who say nothing.

Happy Easter and Merry Christmas are not going to save you. But recognizing things that are important to your readers, even if they are not important to you will go a long way to bringing your newspaper to its own salvation.

Happy Easter!