Tales from a unhappy American.

With this scene, Jeff Daniel's character Will McAvoy provided a tone that would stand in the history of television. The NewsRoom is Aaron Sorkin's (writer of SportsNight, WestWing, and The Social Network among other projects) venture outside of network and cable television and into HBO. Sorkin is very much one of my favorite television writers, and I've followed his career since I was 18.

What does this have to do with what we've talked about? I've held this theory for years (or at least around the time I could comprehend what was going on in this country) that we are stuck in the "if it's not broken, why try to fix it? That mentality alone destroys any real productivity in this country. Matthew Sheppard is just a larger hump in the issues this country is affected by.

As a member of this country, I find that we stuck in this system that we don't need to improve things that aren't damaged. That's wrong. That's wrong because if you wait until things are needing repairs, you will cause more damage. 9/11, Sandy Hook, or Virginia Tech are examples of incidents where the reason change came (or tried to) was due to death or some other painful incident that left the country in struggling momentum towards trying to fix things.

So where does Matthew Sheppard play into this? Sheppard's death and lack of action from this country comes down to the lack of attention and desire for change that can help move this country in a god manner. To paraphrase Will McAvoy, This country isn't the best in the world, it isn't, because we are afraid of drastic change, but it can be.