More than 600 health care town halls have been held, and while hosts and attendees have shown fiercely different opinions, they all agree it’s the media’s fault.

Every summer the news media struggles during vacation season, and people of all political ideologies have blamed each media outlet for bringing their own bias to about President Obama’s efforts to reform health care by focusing on sensational outbursts at town halls.

I attended one such meeting at a community center in Germantown, Maryland, where Rep. Donna Edwards – a Maryland Democrat – addressed diverse concerns on the bill but stressed the need for people to research the legislation for themselves to create a productive debate.

“Do me a favor, don’t rely on talk radio or cable news for information about all this, instead decide for yourself,” Edwards told the crowd. “Afterwards I’d be happy to have my staff help you look over particular parts of the bill.”

The crowd seemed to have made up its mind before it got there. In predominantly Democratic Maryland, many had support Obama signs that they printed up from the Obama for America listserv. On the other end of the spectrum, supporters of economist and conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche passed out brochures of Obama shaking hands with Adolf Hitler and Dracula.

Rep. Donna Edwards talks to town hall attendees. (Photo: Tom Risen)

“We’re not going to change each others minds, but it’s important we have this debate on such an important issue,” said Edwards. “There are a couple of things I heard tonight that made me think. Like this one tonight, most of the town halls my colleagues have told me about were civil. But then you get a handful of outbursts that they play over and over on TV.”

Reflecting traditional Republican concerns that public health care will create too much government control, some debates at the meeting spilled over into privacy protection about electronic records, services for illegal immigrants and government controlled job qualification.

Outside the meeting, an illegal alien watchdog group called Help Save Maryland, was concerned that Obama’s health care plan would drive up hospital costs and allow services for illegal immigrants.

“I think the situation here is that everybody is looking for a platform – protesters and politicians of both parties,” said Scott Stockton of Germantown, Md., and a member of the group. “I think news is too often controlled- they release information to distract from the issue, but coverage of these events is bringing the issue of socialized medicine to the forefront.”

Across from them were members of CASA de Maryland, an advocacy group aimed at equal opportunities for low-income Latinos. Help Save Maryland has pushed the state legislature to remove CASA’s public funding, but they protested peacefully in their own spaces outside the event.

Along with official groups, media coverage of the events has fueled suspicions among some, like Ned Leone a civil rights lawyer from Washington, D.C., that partisan officials are sending operatives into crowds with planted comments.

“The media coverage has been irresponsible focusing on the outbreaks of people with guns instead of the contents of the bill,” said Leone. “This is a very important time in our history to revamp health care and then you see these town hall meetings where the meeting is framed by G.O.P. operatives.”

When Leone said this, a group of women next to him started arguing with him. We were cramped together at the back of the auditorium and I was caught sandwiched in between a shouting match.

“Oh, G.O.P. operatives are behind all this,” said a group of women including Anne Oswald, a small business owner from Olney, Md. “If Canada’s health care system is so great, why do they keep coming down here for surgery? We have the best system in the world; this is the best country in the world… Pay your bills if you want health care. Go to hell!”

After the meeting a group of medical students from Johns Hopkins University interviewed some of the speakers to catalogue the issues in the bill that concerned them, such as how an American public option could benefit from experiences in Canada. One of the students, Shiva Gandhi, said the media should have been more selective on giving nationwide platforms.

“Covering these town halls, reporters have given a disproportionate voice to a vocal minority and legitimized them in the process,” said Gandhi. “Some of the people who spoke today about Canada’s health care didn’t give the right facts. The media needs to do a better job as gatekeepers of information and not let it devolve into a contest of screaming heads.”

The Woodstock Arts and Music Festival of the Millennial generation is no doubt the Burning Man Festival. People gather every year in the Northern California desert and to celebrate freedom by creating Black Rock City-  a commune for art, music and various endorphin rushes. Burn culture has created a communuty year round that is very welcoming, holding values of peace and unity passed down from the 60’s youthquake.

Being  a true commune, people bring their own tents and shelters with their friends and operate on the barter system. Water for food, artwork for beer and what have you.

They even keep one rule Woodstock never achieved- Leave no trace and clean up your mess!  That means that like the Neon Man that Burns, Black Rock City is born from dust, and to dust it returns each year. When people return home each year, the tight friendships they formed at Black Rock blossom and they gather for concerts, art shows and to support each other in regional chapters nationwide.

Woodstock made the music festival a rite of passage for youth all around the world, and while Woodstock’s yippie promoter Michael Lang didn’t make a dollar off it in 1969, corporations have gotten pretty good at giving a good time. Lollapalooza, Pitchfork, Coachella, take your pick, they’re all great.  I was at the 2006 Lollapalooza in Chicago’s Grant Park, which is a superb site for multiple stages of fun and gave Lolla a permanent home after its years on the road.

While people can still get experienced, I think something has been lost with the increased corporate power that makes festivals less nomadic, along with the loss of local radio that keeps music festivals dynamic and human. Here in D.C., we had the HFStival, run by the now defunct 99.1 FM WHFS rock station. Beginning as a Fourth of July Festival in 1990, it took off and became the biggest event of the year that people would camp out for days in advance. It’s most memorable venue was the now also defunct RFK Stadium, with multiple stages of electronica, rock, hip-hop, even the Blue Man Group and gave small local bands like Good Charlotte a shot at the real venue. There were booths galore, where high school girls got piercings and tattoos for the first time while high school guys could meet their celebrity dream girl guests invited by WHFS. But in a common tragedy befalling rock stations, WHFS was replaced by a Spanish language station and festival faded.

Yet the biggest Woodstock “were you there” moment of our generation is the inauguration of Barack Obama. Not just the freezing morning with the throngs of millions crowded on the National Mall or trapped in the Purple Tunnel of Doom, it was a week where the world cam to Washington, D.C., like never before.

I grew up in D.C., and I never saw anything like it, even during New Years Eve 1999. But U2 played at both events, coincidence? Even before that shared struggle of wading through the streets to get a view of the Jumbo-Tron united 2 million people, the clubs, coffee shops, museums and streets were filled with people united in excitement- the kind of moment when there are no strangers.
Moments like that are what made Woodstock and why we want to take the trip again and again.

I can’t wait until one of the two major political parties implodes.

Let’s face a basic fact: there never was such a thing as a red/blue division in the United States, only a lack of options. The idea that our future as a country is visible only through 3D glasses – one red lense, one blue lense, and a choice of which eye(s) to keep open – has always been misleading.

In decades past, keeping both eyes open didn’t necessarily give one a three-dimensional view of the world. Only so much information could be given in a daily newspaper or news programming, especially when there was no such thing as a cable news network, let alone the Internet.

As the world continues to evolve, the Internet continues to decentralize everything. With very few legal boundaries and the most accessible databases in the world, the establishment is being torn down, sometimes rapidly and sometimes slowly. Look no further than the music industry, which no longer has the same ability to manufacture hype around artists that it did in 1999, when it’s revenues were nearly twice as much as they were in 2008. Independent record labels and artists can now promote themselves without a corporate marketing machine by selling music on iTunes, Amazon and MySpace, skipping a distributing middleman altogether.

Admit it. You’ve downloaded a song (legally or illegally) more recently than you’ve bought a CD, you’ve watched a YouTube video more recently than you’ve been to a movie theatre, and you’ve read a blog more recently than you’ve read a newspaper.

The power to create information is in the hands of more people than ever before. The amount of information in the world is now much larger – and gets dispersed much faster – than fifteen years ago. In one year, the amount of new information discovered or created is 37,000 times that which resides in the Library of Congress. The possibilities for fifteen years from now are mind-boggling.

That sheer abundance of information is what will eventually lead to a party implosion. Copious amounts of information leads to copious amounts of different opinions, which leads to Republicans who can’t find a figurehead to rally around and Democrats who can’t decide what to include in a health bill that may or may not even get passed, despite a heavy congressional majority.

It’s pretty obvious that political parties have struggled with the increased visibility of the American thought diversity, as terms like “conservative Democrat,” “pragmatic Republican” and “libertarian” get thrown around a bit more often. And with more partisan news sources than ever before, people have no reason to listen to people who disagree with them. There have always been alternative views, just no way to express them to a large audience until the Internet (namely, blogs) came along.

Blogs have done far more to spread and support both logical and illogical propagandist information from the right, left, old-fashioned and just plain dumb than any medium before.

And it’s tearing us apart.

In a good way, of course. There are many well-educated people out there whose views lie somewhere in that blurry area between acceptable Washington fare and lunatic delusions, ideas that most of American society understands but voters in some of those key demographic categories don’t, thoughts that would enrich American life if it weren’t for a small number of power players in Washington.

With an increasingly complex society comes an increasingly complex set of issues. Many of these issues will have more than one justifiable side to take; we’re already seeing it in issues like social security, healthcare and energy. And with a rise of new leaders and new modus operandi, a third or fourth party offers us something that Barack Obama – who turned out to be just another Democrat – couldn’t quite follow through on: Hope that there was someone in Washington that would help us do it our way.

One mistake we too often make is associating the label ‘conservative’ with Republican and ‘liberal’ with Democrat. In reality, a person can be a fiscal conservative while still voting Democrat or socially liberal while voting Republican. Who knows, maybe they even consider themselves members of the Libertarian, Constitution, or Green parties. A person can be a member of any party and find themselves identifying with the adjectives ‘moderate’ or ‘progressive.’

In today’s era, television media is often following news on the Web. TMZ.com broke the news of Michael Jackson’s death, and CNN’s Rick Sanchez makes Twitter his co-host. So as those conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans mingle online with those libertarians, those progressives, or those moderates, we’ll see something that has been promised to us for a while now: change.

It’s inevitable. The people will demand a new party sooner or later, and it will most likely stem from one of the two that already exist. I’m not saying it will be the Libertarians or Greens – it may be a party that doesn’t exist yet. I’m not saying that they will take over Congress or win the presidency. But one of the many subgroups of American politics will see its voice grow to a degree that the District of Columbia will have no choice but to respect it.

Emanuel said,

“The Republican leadership has made a strategic decision that defeating President Obama’s health care proposal is more important for their political goals than solving the health insurance problems that Americans face every day,”

The New York Times reports.

Though democrats will still need to compromise among themselves in order to utilize their majorities in the House and the Senate and pass the bill, this new approach could accelerate the process. The debate on health care may get even more heated if Democrats do go forward with the bill without heed to Republican concerns. A compromise that Republicans are okay with on health care would no longer be the health care plan that Obama promised to implement, and if the president’s plan is to succeed before he leaves office, there isn’t time to wait for Republican leaders to agree on a bill that most of them will always be against.

Williams was in jail from July 23 until August 13 because, as the judge told Williams when he was released, the way he yawned “was offensive to the court.” The maximum sentence for being in contempt of a court is six months, so apparently Williams got off easy for his offense. I didn’t hear the yawn, but in my opinion the nature of a yawn, even when accompanied by stretching, as Williams’ was, prevents it from being contemptuous enough to warrant jail time. Clearly Williams was making a statement with his yawn, and I have no doubt that if he was sent to jail, he was being disruptive. But wouldn’t simply removing him from the court room be a more reasonable reaction?