Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein, (attributed) US (German-born) physicist (1879 – 1955)
I’m not sure how we expect things to get better when we aren’t doing anything differently. We have to understand a problem before we can fix it. Unfortunately, we aren’t giving current problems enough attention to actually fix them, so they come back to haunt us.
What you’ll see below is our child-like ability to be easily distracted by the next big news story. Let’s step back a few years and look at the news stories just before 9/11.
In the year 2000, we were watching a million moms march to protect us from gun violence, but that lost news coverage.
If you recall, that summer prior to 9/11 was the summer of shark attacks. Did we ever figure out what prompted the attacks?
That is until the search for missing former intern Chandra Levy focused the spotlight on U.S. Rep. Gary Condit. Did we ever figure out who killed Chandra Levy?
The mystery with Chandra Levy’s disappearance was dramatically overshadowed by the 9/11 attacks; also know as the day the world changed. Did we ever find Osama Bin Laden?
In more recent news we had a series of child abductions where both 13-year-old Ben Ownby and 15-year-old Shawn Hornbeck were found at an apartment in Kirkwood, miles from the rural locations where the boys disappeared 4 1/2 years apart, but we still don’t protect our children well enough from predators.
That story was overshadowed by a diaper clad Lisa Nowak, a Navy captain, accused of accosting Air Force Capt. Colleen Shipman, 30, in the parking lot of Orlando International Airport early Monday and spraying her with pepper spray.
The astronaut story was overshadowed by the death of Anna Nicole Smith which took over the headlines for a very long time.
Which was then overshadowed by Don Imus’s comments about the Rutgers Women’s Basketball team. These were not new comments or new problems – just news. But we are distracted once again, and won’t stop to resolve the root cause of the Imus comments or racial tension that still exists.
Because the Imus comments were overshadowed by the shootings at Virgina Tech which just seem to bring us back to the first line of this blog – protecting us against gun violence.
We certainly qualify under Einstein’s definition of insanity.