PROBLEM SOLVED!!!!!

Just a quick note.  Have you ever wondered what happened to the old fashioned problem solving nature of the American public?  The attitude that no mountain was too high and no valley to low.  The resolve that made our country eternally optimistic and willing to believe in the motto: "Work hard and you shall be rewarded."

When was the last time the media dared to declare a problem was solved?  What would you do if the evening news began with a story with the headline "PROBLEM SOLVED!"  Is it possible?  Have the passed thirty years, thirty months, thirty days and thirty minutes been without any success?  Have we turned into whining, snivling, problem finders or are we still ingenuitive problem solvers?

I suggest Americans are worthy of more credit than the media would ever be willing to give them.  Moreover, I believe if one is only looking for problems, that's all they shall find.  That said, the mindless twenty-four hour reporting of actual and potential problems seems counter productive.  In fact, this endless search to uncover problems is even less productive than the endless stream of "news analysts" that are paraded in front of the general public to interpret the facts.  This behavior is literally story telling for adults and permission to create facts out of conjecture.  

Funny as this sounds, CNN created a word cloud to illuminate on the President's speech last week.  Love President Obama or hate him, he is direct, clear and unambiguous when he speaks.  There is no need to interpret.  That said, assuming news sources needed to fill empty time by rewording the speech, a contemporary illustration made up of all the words used in the speech with the words used most frequently appearing in the largest font is simply silly.  The analysts dissecting the word cloud to find the greatest sense of meaning was even more outlandish. Is this productive?  Is it genuine? What happened to simply listening to the source to figure out what they meant? 

With the news transitioning from informative to entertaining, it dangerously borders on being purposely misleading.  The largest worry is that many Americans believe news sources are bound by certain protocols to report facts.  The media has wandered astray and with it so has the focus of America.  The news has created fear in every man, woman and child in a torrent of problems.  They have changed the lending practices of banks and the willingness of people to invest by the constant bombarding of negativity and their endless search for troubling data, potential problems, and what ifs.  While the media is free to write and broadcast as they wish, a greater sense of common good and Country demands the reporting of our numerous achievements in at least equal frequency to our shortcomings.  After all, wasn't America a better place when Mickey Mantle was a hero and  American companies were the envy of the world?