MITCH ALBOM: Our country depends on your answer

And this from a SPORTS guy of all people...

February 1, 2004

BY MITCH ALBOM
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

Shrugging is not an option.

You can blame the CIA and demand an investigation or you can blame President George W. Bush and demand his accountability. But you cannot shrug. You cannot walk away. You cannot say, "Oops." Not unless you're the kind of person who sees a dead man in the street and steps over him.

That's not the kind of person I am. And that's not the country I live in.

The most stunning sound in America last week was silence -- an echoing silence after chief weapons inspector David Kay, a man put in charge by the president, announced that he could not find any of the biggest reasons we went to war in Iraq -- weapons of mass destruction.

He used four simple words.

"We were all wrong."

That sentence should have brought down the walls. Wrong? You can be wrong when you project interest rates. But when your intelligence says bombs, vials, gasses and poisons, and the truth is a lot of empty holes, and you kill thousands of people and lose hundreds of your own and cost this generation maybe the next hundreds of billions of dollars, well, that's not a small mistake.

You don't just shrug it off.

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simply put...
"There is no middle ground. If we can simply shrug over a war, then America is not the country we thought it was."

What's wrong with people? Wake up America!

(I believe Mitch Albom is the author of "Tuesday's with Morrie" & "The Five People you Meet in Heaven"

...where I live. Not many really care. Sad.