Missing the point

I've tuned out the news recently because I've been hung up on one thing I can't get past.

As a society, we're missing the point.

We're obsessed, collectively, with assigning blame and figuring out who's wrong.

We should be obsessed with assigning solutions and figuring out what we can do better.

I really don't care about who was right and who was wrong in Ferguson. I have my own opinions, but that doesn't detract from the fact that we need to discuss why it happened. What happened isn't nearly as important.

I don't care what actually happened in the UVA rape case, because while the journalism might have been shoddy, that doesn't detract from the fact that we need to discuss why the case gained so much publicity and steam.

We don't need to debate whether or not the CIA torture was justified. What we need to discuss are the circumstances that led us - our government and ourselves, to ignore the possibility of these things happening, blinded by the comforting sense of security it gave us.

We're all missing the damn point. "We" includes politicians, the media, and us. We can't keep taking the convenient way out, avoiding the inconvenient national conversations that need to be had.

I just got done watching Colbert instead of studying for finals because I trust him and Jon Stewart more as journalists than anyone else on TV. Maybe we should be talking about that, too.