American Priorities

It never fails to amaze me on which things the media focuses.  Robin Williams has died; that's sad.  From the coverage, however, one would think that this was the most important event in months.  Now don't get me wrong; I do not mean to minimize the loss to Williams' family or to suggest that there should be no coverage of his death.  He was a well known and popular person, and his death (especially if he committed suicide as is now the storyline) deserves to be noted.  It is crazy, however, that this news has pushed all the rest into the background.  There is just too much happening in the world for our country to ignore it.  But that is what the media is doing.  This morning, the CBS World News on the radio had as its second headline after the Williams suicide, one noting that it is the 75th anniversary of the release of The Wizard of Oz movie.  Really, thousands of people are starving and dying of thirst on a mountain in Iraq while Americans attempt to drop sufficient supplies to keep them alive and ISIS surrounds them to try to starve them to death, and CBS wants to focus us on something that happened in the entertainment industry in 1939?  The Iraqi government in Baghdad seems to be splitting into two warring camps just as the ISIS threat increases, but we are told "ding dong the witch is dead"?  A swath of the St Louis area is in total meltdown with rioting and racial animus, and we are to focus instead on flying monkeys?  I can hear the people at CBS announcing "Pay no attention to the news behind the curtain."

Something is very wrong.