Jeff's Commentary - 3/13 - March Madness

This Thursday thru Sunday, more people will stop working consistently throughout the day to catch a few minutes of NCAA’s March Madness. Statistics show that there are more non-productive work hours this Thursday and Friday than any other regular working days of the year.

So millions of Americans have more than a slight interest in their office pools and teams than any other issues this week. I’m one of those participants.

But as I was watching some clips last night on who’s stronger and who’s got an edge on various games, the news kept interfering. 16 dead in Afghanistan by a rogue American soldier. Women and kids included in that death count.

I’m saddened by the deaths but more saddened that more American’s take greater interest in a college basketball weekend than what is going on in Afghanistan. If all the millions of people who are involved in office pools would take the same amount of time to research what is going on in the war vs. what is going on with your teams, we might find that we’d all stand up and demand more from our government in ending this mess in Afghanistan before 2014.

There is no good answer for any of it.

They don’t like us there, both sides are corrupt and when we leave, they will go back to killing one another instead of us. We’ve done our job rooting out and killing al Qaeda soldiers there. Now we need to leave. It’s already a longer war than Vietnam but who’s counting the years.

Clint Eastwood said “It’s Halftime in America” during the Super Bowl. While I’m picking my brackets and worrying about whether my teams will do well this weekend, I’m hoping that when the second half starts in America, we will be long gone from fields of Afghanistan. I’m just hoping some of us take more interest in getting that done like we do with our picks this weekend.

Jeff