It would be way too easy to say I picked the perfect time to suspend my "Con Games" show on local radio, and it would be easier still to insist, despite all evidence, that I have done so because (a) I am disgusted with politics as we now know it; and (b) I'm no longer willing to spend five days a week swimming in pig slop.
That's the easy way out, but the truth is I've stopped swilling moonshine at the perfect moment by complete chance and happenstance.
How do I know? Without any planning, the minute I stopped doing my show I also stopped listening to the very medium which I had so happily inhabited. No more talk radio for me, podners -- and no more cable news/balk while I was at it. Not only did I deep-six the empty calories, but I had an immediate hankering for long-form nonfiction. I went to the Basalt Library and checked out both books and books on tape -- including an audio lollapalooza from Ron Chernow about George Washington.
The point, I suppose, was nutrition: like a starving man I became gluttonous at the sight of fact instead of endless opinion (including my own). In a very real way I was happy again, satisfied and satiated, because suddenly I was again learning about the Founding Fathers from a biography, discerning the fault line between the Muslim and Christian world in The Tenth Parallel, not to mention the foibles of Spileberg, Katzenberg, and Geffen in The Men Who Would Have Been Kings.
I'm doing my walkabout at a time when news as we know it is always turned to The Sarah Palin Channel with the empty calories that implies, when real discourse has been discounted all the way down to zilch.
I'm not saying I'm better than the people on the airwaves plying their trade much as I did because I'm not. Now -- off the air for the moment -- I feel that you and I deserve much better than we're getting. Sure: as a liberal host I'm more than happy to blame the conservatives for this fine mess, but liberals and "progressives" (a dirty word in my world) are complicit in these crimes against humanity. I know because I've been there, done that.
Where does this leave us? In a ditch to be sure, and the way out a ditch is surely not to keep digging deeper. Talk show hosts will always say what sells, but that doesn't mean the rest of us (including me as of last week) need to buy what they're all selling.
On a basic level, people like you and me can stop listening and the infections will begin to abate. But that's not enough. Every person who is disgusted with our politics and wants it to change needs to become the embodiment of what most of us would like it to be: thoughtful, intelligent, responsive, and willing to galvanize around problem-solving instead of cat-calling.
It's that simple. As the conservatives like to say, take responsibility for who you are and what you personally bring to our politics every day. This is on you, and me, and all of us.
The most important takeaway for me is the plain truth that we all bear responsibility for what has gone down, and the only way out is through. In a country born of children of the Enlightenment like George Washington, we need to find out stuff about things that matter, and know enough to know all the things that don't.