Just when does this voyage of self discovery end? By all rights it should have been over by now but apparently it isn’t. I mean several years ago one night I was whining, I guess a little too much, about a divorce and a friend told me to shut up, it was all character building. I looked at him and said, I am 55 years old, this IS my character. That should have been it, but apparently the voyage goes on.
I have always liked Keith Olberman since I first saw him as a sports announcer on ESPN. When he showed up on MSNBC with a news show I made it a point to watch every chance I could. I like what I called news with attitude. I saw the show as unbiased and cutting edge. Then began the vicious attacks on Sarah Palin. And that was when the new discovery came. I am not a big fan of her politics, but I have enjoyed her rise to fame, have been astonished at the attacks on her and have gotten a little defensive about it. She may be a flawed politician, but she is OUR flawed politician. What amazed me was how nasty Olberman got and how petty, and how little he even tried to get at anything like truth. Several times I have had to turn it off. The discovery was that I saw him as unbiased because his biases are the same as mine. Until Sarah. So, now I have some growing to do. But, then, so does he.
The latest was the most outrageous, when he started criticizing her for having a tanning bed in the governor’s mansion. What exactly is the matter with that? Do we want our government people working 24 hours a day? Are they not allowed to find a way to relax? Nixon put a bowling alley in the White House. Eisenhower had a putting green on the lawn. Kennedy had his own recreation, which the press chose to ignore. Clinton with the same interests, was impeached for it. Is it so awful that Sarah Palin has a tanning bed? The governor before her bought that million dollar jet airplane.
Criticizing the tanning bed might have been tolerable, but then someone in state government suggested she might use it to fight depression. Olberman immediately jumped all over that, adding his own diagnosis to elevate the problem to clinical depression. What the aide should have explained and Olberman should have taken the time to find out was that just about anyone who lives in the north suffers some measure of depression.
It is called seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and it affects everyone in the north to some degree. It is caused by a lack of sunlight. When a person does not absorb enough sunshine, the pineal gland causes depression. More in some people less in others but most likely a little bit in everyone. In winter we get a little more than 5 hours of daylight on the shortest day where I live, less as you go north until north of the Arctic Circle whole days, weeks and months go by without a sunrise. I used to feel the effects of it until I learned more. What I do now is try to get outdoors for a while during the brightest part of the day and on top of that most of the lamps in the house hold full-spectrum color bulbs, which also helps. Fortunately the new mini fluorescents are full spectrum so I save a little on electricity, too. There are SAD lights available specifically for it but they are very expensive. When you drive to work in the dark and come home in the dark and stay indoors all day, you are very susceptible and need to do something about it. If Sarah Palin uses a tanning bed to help out, well, good for her. And by calling her clinically depressed, Olberman has managed to slander everyone in the world who lives north of 60.
Let’s see him bring it on north and broadcast his show from here for a couple of weeks around the Winter Solstice. Let him experience some of that depression and see if he goes clinical on us.
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