Currently

Screaming at the Monitor Cindy Sheehan is going home. This story is so sad. And if every single person in the world was a student in my classroom today, I'd make everyone read and discuss it, including the liberal and conservative reactions from a variety of quarters, just to check in with how he or she feels about the big and small picture in its context.

And throw in this essay written by an active duty soldier deployed in Iraq now while they're at it. She could be a real jerk for all I know, and I might leave a conversation with her not necessarily wanting to be her friend, or agreeing with her about very much at all, in spite of our shared feelings about Iraq. Since I don't know her I can't adequately make a judgment as to what her motivations were for embarking on this journey.

But I do find it interesting that so much of the negative backlash talks in very angry language about how she was in this for personal gain, and calls her profane names, and questions her humanity on so many levels. This doesn't seem to be a very luxurious road that she's chosen to walk in the past few years at all, and I can't imagine who was throwing money at her to take that less-than-popular road of protest. And if they did, I'm okay with it, because if the public can support Matthew McConaughey while he travels the country in an Airstream trailer and takes a photographic record of his every surfing trip.

..well, we're screwed up as-is, so get out of your glass house before you throw the rocks.

I don't think it's easy for anyone to put herself out there for public ridicule, and to keep on knocking on a door when the leader of the country won't have a conversation with you must have been quite frustrating. That lack of participation was a hallmark of the way things go, lately, though - or so it seems. Wait for the soundbite, friends.

Let the people who symbolize the 'left' and 'right', 'red' and 'blue' that we have to separate everything into these days sit on opposite sides of Scarborough's split screen and duke it out. It is the mark of a civilized, confident, and educated (formally or from the school of life, equal parts) person to question, and not to take the surface of every situation for what it is, particularly when that what is involves the death of a son. I try to remember that all objects might be larger OR smaller than they appear in every case, but especially in cases of politics and religion and other equally difficult stff.

Just ask anyone who's ever ordered anything from a catalog about the powers of optical illusion. And you'd better bet that if I had been in Cindy Sheehan's shoes, I'd have been screaming at the top of my lungs too, once I woke up from numb shock and managed to trudge even a couple of steps out of the first phase of my grief. I'm not a mother, but I cannot imagine how I'd feel if my child were killed at all, much less in this hateful war of alpha-male domination.

I hate it so much anyway, without any personal sacrifice or investment on my own part. I don't have any family members in the active duty military, although many of my male relatives, including my father and grandfathers, served in the Navy and the Marines. I read articles in the paper where the families say how they support their dead son or daughter's desire to serve, and I'm not sure I could be that charitable after the fact, even though admittiing that might get my house spray painted or me labeled an unpatriotic bitch.

Just ask Natalie Maines. All it takes is one sentence of dissent to get yourself on the hook, even if you're many steps removed from the situation. Although rejecting the cause they died in the name of would certainly not call my love or support for my child into question, I would have such a fundamental difference of opinion with the choice to go that I'm not sure I would ever recover fully from the anger that must surely accompany that loss.

And please note that although I don't have a yellow ribbon on my car, I do not condemn or lack support for the people fighting, which is a common empty criticism of liberal politics. God bless them if they're willing to put themselves out there and stand up for their beliefs as I stand up for mine. And also I wear red and blue (not white, so much - ketchup stains, you know) on the 4th of July, and I tear up when I hear the national anthem, and God Bless America .

I know where I was born and I'm glad it's not Afghanistan or Baghdad, and if I really thought for one second that this war was about freeing the women (in particular) there to live a life where they don't have to fear being killed for standing next to a man on a street corner, I might even see the eventual grace in it. It's not about that. It's about subverting a system we don't understand to get at something we don't have enough of, and no good mission has ever been built on that kind of shifting sand.

I'm interested as well in why, at a time when approval ratings (for whatever pittance those are worth) for the president are at an alltime low, when even my conservative Vietnam veteran uncle sits in my living room and says, We need to get the hell out of there. There's no point, there is still this refusal to discuss the opposing viewpoints so inherent in this war without screaming on CNN. The time for rhetoric is so long past.

Even Jon Stewart must feel like he's running out of clips to satirize. And yet there's still no way out, it seems, and a national sense that until this president is done, at least, (and I can barely allow myself to think past that at this point) in Iraq, at least, we will stay. And that, to me, is unfathomable.

Even with my minimal knowledge of military tactics, common sense indicates how getting out at this part would be difficult. It's like a massive hole has been dug, where at some point the sides must be shored up if you're on the bottom or the whole thing will come crashing down on top of you. What I can really get on board with Cindy Sheehan about is that we are a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives, as people seem to care more about reality and mediocre entertainment competition television than about issues of greater consequence to our national and global well-being.

I like Sharon Osborne, but America's Top Talent is actually in the classroom and organizing the Race for the Cure - not balancing ten chickens on its collective head or burping Freebird . But there is a finer shade of meaning here, in this condemnation of the dumbing down of our society, beyond the supposition that human beings are incapable of great concern over huge issues like war and poverty. These things are so impossible to deal with because they are so immense and unmanageable.

People can handle American Idol because it's easy, and they can process it because it's idiocy at its basest, most addictive level. And also it is bright and shiny and it has that same sappy Daughtry song at the end every week, which even I can sing. I mean, wait, Daughtry, isn't that the bald one from this season?

Not the bug-eyed Navy bald guy from this year? Right. Regardless, Randy calls them both dawg , so it's all good, yo.

The fact that Paula Abdul - one of the flightiest relics of a decade whose cup overflowed with flighty. The video with the cat anyone? - a cranky, narcissistic British man and another guy whose vocabulary consists of a total of ten real words plus a few that are made up can command the attention of millions of people for at least two hours every week is a frightening commentary on our societal need to dumb things down, lest we crack under the strain of the real reality.

This season had to resort to a debate on the aging form of beatboxing (which at its highest level can be pretty damned cool, but Blake? Not.