Post-inaugural blues

A friend of mine told me he was taking a sabbatical from political news. I'm starting to really see the wisdom of this. The amount of focus on Obama's first few days in office is beyond anything I've experienced. It reflects both the hopes everyone has pinned on Obama and the dreadful mess his predecessor left. There's so much damage to undo that everything takes on an added urgency. The hardest thing has to be deciding what emergency to tackle first.

And so if you follow the political news you're automatically drawn into the intensity of it all. Economy, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Hamas, stem cells, climate change, torture (however did we come to debating torture?) Guantanamo (oh yeah, another nice touch by the Republicans to not keep records on the prisoners), and we haven't even touched health care yet (what are you waiting for, it's been almost a week?). And I'm already burnt out. Most of the direction is good, but I think I need to take a break.