I go on line and check out the major newspaper headlines, and to my delight there is a TSA related headline or two in every one. In the last few days two in every three e-mails I’ve received (and I receive hundreds a day) carry TSA related heads up or action items in their subject lines. The blogosphere has been simmering with the same outrageous issue. Yet the entire thing gives me pause. A long one. The pattern, the order, the intensity, the lingo, the reaction…all remind me of something or some things. It is a bit, maybe more than a bit, like a sense of déjà vu. The feeling that we’ve been here; more than once, actually many times. Make that too many times. I keep thinking of a yoyo. In fact, I can’t get the image of a yoyo out of my head. I am asking myself, and you, the following question: Are we Americans exhibiting yoyo-like and short-lived reactions? In short-lived jerky motions?

Let’s step back for a second and take a look at this consistent pattern:

NSA illegal wiretapping of American citizens is exposed. We, some of us, are outraged. We can’t stop reading about it. We write about, talk about it, and blog about it nonstop. For a while. The media waits a little, then takes the cue, decides to ride the same wave, however selectively and reluctantly. For a while. The Congress follows the fashion. They are into fashion. They wear this particular fashion like a Halloween costume, over the top of their usual long-term clothing, with every intention of shedding it off at the end of the parade, as soon as it is announced out-of-fashion.

Within a few weeks the media goes back to ‘normal,’ and acts as if ‘it’ never happened, or, it happened but no longer carries newsworthiness since ‘it’ has become another ordinary fact of life to live with and forget it is even there. The Congress likes to remain fashionable. When the media stops, the costume is out-of-fashion; to be discarded. Their usual clothing underneath are ‘classics,’ politically that is, the kind that never go out of fashion, politically, that is. So they go back to the good old classics until the next fashion trend breaks in the news. During this phase, we the people gradually stop reading, talking, writing, and blogging about ‘it.’ We are exhausted from over-excitement. Frankly, we are bored with the topic. For weeks we all had run in the same direction; fast and furious. Everyone within our circle had covered the same ‘topic,’ and the topic started getting too familiar, too common, too ordinary, too tedious and too massive to go against. All in a very short time, but nonetheless. Read more È