A Great Story We Mostly Missed

Ponder what the 'news' has been of late. Seriously.

When is the last time you watched the news and didn't see a story about Michael Jackson? We are still on Michael Jackson overload and, as of yet, he has not been raised from the dead giving us a truly interesting story to cover.

The story of the Harvard professor and the police officer and a President who used the word 'stupidly' at a very bad time has dominated the news. We even got to watch them drink beer and eat pretzels together.

The health care debate has been on talking points and commercials. Our two parties are busily disgracing themselves by their antics instead of actually working on something constructive. They WANT to disagree with each other and WANT the other party's ideas to fail. This isn't about fixing health care; it's about making the opposition look bad. Both parties are totally guilty of this. This has been reported a great deal.

Some amazing lunatics, for whom facts mean nothing, and I use the term lunatic intentionally, are still debating over where Barack Obama was born. This foolishness is on the news. Nightly.

Missed was this:

WISE, Virginia — They came in their hundreds, America's uninsured and working poor, descending on this coal mining town in Virginia's southwest corner in search of the medical care they could not otherwise afford.

Some slept overnight in their cars in the grass parking lot in front of the Wise fairgrounds, where some 1,700 medical professionals had set up dental chairs, mammogram stations, panoramic X-ray machines and more, ready to diagnose maladies, numb mouths, pull teeth and take pap smears for Americans down on their luck and battered by economic realities.

And all for free.

Remote Area Medical (RAM), a travelling collective of volunteer medical practitioners, was set up in 1985 by British expatriate Stan Brock, who wanted to take medical care to those who were too poor, or live in areas too remote, to otherwise access it.

"The appearance of a RAM team means an opportunity for poor folks to get some real treatment free of charge," Brock said.

RAM has been doing this and their venture in Wise, Virginia was a huge effort. In a day and age when health care reform is being debated and all sorts of options are being laid out on the table, one group is doing amazing work.

And their work has gone virtually unnoticed.

This is a major media failure. We are fed a steady stream of nonsense and, the major media is feeding us this nonsense because it is what we want to watch.

More people want to watch stories about Michael Jackson than they do getting down to the nitty gritty on the economy, two wars, and health care reform.

More people want to know how they forged Barack Obama's birth certificate and got people to certify it in Hawaii, and even put birth notices in the local newspapers, when they claim he was born in Kenya in 1962 with a major plot to overthrown the American government. (His father even cleverly left his family and died to keep suspicion off of him. His mother, shiftily developed cancer at a young age and died so no one could question her. Devious people!)

I can go on, but you get the point. We want to listen to garbage, we crave garbage, and so it is what we are given.

But be reminded that there is a great story we missed. Great people doing a great thing for those who have less than they do. It's not only a good story, it's a holy story, mostly missed by the vast majority of people.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j8w9zX_4NeT2B2qNQnjCic-g6Pxw