The political parties in Congress have retreated to their respective corners while they wait for the bell to ring and another round to start in the pitched battle over our country’s financial future. Meanwhile, Americans are streaming to the oceans and beaches in droves. As regular readers will have noted, this column missed its last edition while I joined my fellow beachgoers to take advantage of cool ocean breezes and escape the torrents of hot air cascading down from Capitol Hill.
What stood out to me during my “research” on Cape Cod and at Saquish Beach off the south shore of Massachusetts was that on its surface, the ocean looks pretty good. I taught my son to build drip castles in the surf—the sand and water were clean. We went swimming at night and when we dove in, the surface exploded in underwater fireworks of bioluminescence. My neighbor pulled his boat up on the sand early one morning after a 90-minute fishing trip and hopped out with a 34-inch striped bass and stories of the three other keepers he had caught and released because he only needed the one for supper.
While all this made for a spectacular vacation, it revealed, somewhat counterintuitively, that the ocean has an image problem. Only it’s not a problem in the typical sense. When we think “image problem,” we think Charlie Sheen. Or high fructose corn syrup. Or Congress. (The remarkable thing isn’t that Congress has a 14 percent approval rating; it’s that 14 percent of Americans actually think it’s doing a good job.)
Read the complete opinion piece from American Progress.