You can't handle the truth.

I've received a few online messages in the past few days from well-meaning friends passing on information they got online, either via Facebook or email. In both cases, the information was either completely false or mostly so. One was a fake Amber alert – and everyone, bless their hearts, wants to help find kidnapped children. Unfortunately, few people stopped to check it out on the Amber alert website [http://www.amberalert.gov/] or on one of the other websites [http://www.snopes.com/] that tries to verify email and internet rumors. That anyone would create a fake Amber alert is unthinkable; that we have to verify urgent Amber alerts is just sad.

In this era of intense national politics, I’ve been disappointed to see how many people on all sides of the various arguments are just repeating what they’ve heard about the details of proposed legislation, what some politician has avowed or disavowed, or where the president was born and what his religious affiliation really is.

Information comes at us from a seemingly infinite range of sources, online and off. Some people trust Fox News, some trust talk radio, others trust the NY Times and NPR, and still others look to Jon Stewart. We whack each other over the head with whatever we’ve decided to believe, wielding “the truth” like a weapon. When those ”truths” collide—as they so often do--there’s no winning, and no clear way forward to sort it all out. People don’t want to take the time to find out for themselves. It’s all too easy to be exposed to misinformation, and way too hard to get the unvarnished facts. And even when people on opposite sides of an issue look at the same data, their interpretations of it can vary widely.

So the question is: what to do? I try to do some research on political issues on my own, looking at data from the Congressional Budget Office and tracking down truths/half-truths/pants-on-fire lies at Politifact online. But in the end, there's just too much information, too much to read, assess, interpret, and digest. Way too much.

In Search of the Quick Fix

I’m continually surprised by how short people’s memories are. Watching the "commentators" on Fox as they opine about (and misrepresent) the economic mess, the health care debate, and the president’s deliberations on sending more troops to Afghanistan, I wonder how it is that a lot of my fellow citizens have come to believe that all of our problems should be resolved—or nearly so—by now, one year into Mr. Obama’s term.

Americans believe in the quick fix. From reality TV shows about transformations seemingly wrought overnight with plastic surgery to commercials from pharmaceutical companies that promise relief from intractable conditions to beauty creams that tout instant results, we’ve become a culture of impatience and false expectations.

If you’ve ever had major surgery—of any kind—you know it’s not a cakewalk. The healing process can be long and quite painful. A friend of mine had shoulder surgery this summer; his doctor told him that it could be up to a year before he’ll be completely pain-free. That's reality.

On a long plane flight this summer, I watched an episode of “Make Me a Supermodel” (yes, I know), in which a beautiful young woman with very bad teeth spent 24 hours getting her teeth fixed—drilling, grinding, implants, the whole thing—and was expected to (and did) walk the runway a few hours later, without complaint or apparent discomfort. That’s just not how it generally goes, as anyone who’s had dental surgery can attest.

It took decades to bring the country to its knees economically and culturally. The girlfriends’ rule of thumb for getting over a bad relationship is that it should take up to as much as half as long as the relationship lasted. With that math, we should not expect to be back on our feet for at least 4 years, if we just count the W/Cheney years. And some of our problems go back a lot farther than that.

The people on all sides who are saying that Mr. Obama “hasn’t done anything” don’t seem to understand that fixing problems of this magnitude—and so many of them at once—is an excruciatingly slow and complex process. And it’s not like he’s the only guy in the room. There are a lot of other people involved: one political party that is mostly engaged in making sure that things stay as they are until the midterm elections, one party that squabbles within itself endlessly about everything, and a whole lot of people in the middle who are looking for a quick and painless fix.

It's going to take time. Some things are still going to get worse before they get better. So, fasten your seat belts. And adjust your expectations accordingly.