When America Jumped the Shark

“She was a sweet, pretty California girl with Palestinian roots who left an arranged marriage only to find love with a man who committed the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.”

So began the lead story on the Chicago Tribune’s website this Wednesday.  I realize many in the media have gone out of their way to try and personalize everything Muslim over the past fifteen years. But has it really come to this?

What’s next? How about: Eva Braun, a sweet, pretty girl from the Bavarian hills who left the bucolic but restrictive confines of her home only to find love with a man who committed perhaps the worst genocide in modern history.

We’ve officially gone crazy. Do I have to note that this “sweet, pretty girl with Palestinian roots” is a likely accomplice in the killing of 49 people? What has gone wrong with America? It seems we have no standards or decency, that gossip and personal innuendo have not just replaced the news but that reporting has become a parody of itself, where all stories are real and valid as long as you tell them with verve. We have become a nation of bullshit artists, in love with the sound of our own words, and an accessory to murder becomes a “sweet, pretty California girl” when it suits the larger narrative.   

This country used to be able to count on its reporters to seek the truth. Wise and strong leaders would guide us in times of trouble, men like Lincoln, like Ike, like FDR, compelling us to preserve the union, warning us against the powers of fascism or the military industrial complex. But I’ve come to think that whatever blessings God has shed on this country since its founding have been taken away, that this nation is now cursed by purveyors of lies and ineptitude.

It is time to hunker down, to take stock, to realize that the people who purport to inform and to lead us are not by and large working in our best interest. It is time to turn off our Facebook pages, to leave our chatrooms, to step back and take the time to be individuals again. It is time to think for ourselves.