Ihre Geburtsschein bitte

I haven't paid attention to the news much lately. I've been in Germany. It's a practical country filled with generally practical people who care very much about the state of the world, Europe, the economy and politics. The Germans are actually a very political people, as befits a very serious people. I generalize, of course, but it seems to me with my albeit limited knowledge of Europe, that the Germans are the adults of the continent, building an economy on which the Euro is, at this point, essentially based, and silently and thanklessly keeping Europe afloat while the French turn over cars because their five-hour workday is too long.

I like the Germans. I like them because they don't screw around (unless they're partying, of course, and even that can be pretty organized). I like them because while their politics can be brutal, they wouldn't be stupid enough, as some countries are, about trying to claim that their chief executive has no legitimate right to his position because he was born outside the country.

I'm almost glad I haven't been following news in the United States, because it's pathetic. Donald Trump is a candidate for president? And he's bitching over Obama's birth certificate? Seriously? I admit my grip on this story isn't terribly strong (I only skimmed the CNN article) but Obama is the president. He has been the president since 2008. If he ceased to be president, all that would happen is that Joe Biden would be president. Donald Trump (why is he a potential candidate again?) is not actually concerned with any of this of course, because he's looking for one thing: attention.

What exactly is wrong with us as a country? We are in the middle of a pointless war that the current president has only half-heartedly ended in a shamefully cowardly, middle-of-the-road kind of way, our economy is crashing around us (did I mention that I was in Germany? The money in my account is in USD and it is worth less here every day due to the increasingly bad rate of exchange) and we're concerned with this circus?

Obama produced the certificate of course. Is anyone surprised he was born here? Did anyone actually care? If he had been some kind of foreigner it wouldn't really have made a whole hell of a difference. He still would have been raised here and his policies would remain essentially unchanged.

Or have we forgotten about his policies? Obama has helped to institute a crappy healthcare plan which callously disregards doctors and private companies, has arguably made the economy worse (though he is not responsible for its crash as some would claim) and has no connection with the average American. And we're beating up on him on the question of a scrap of paper, which, it has been proven, he actually possesses, making the whole "issue" a moot point?

I don't want to say we should be more German, because frankly everyone staring at each other all the time and hiding in their rooms like vampires is not something I'm prepared to live with my entire life, but weird as Germans are, they are a damn sight more serious about their political atmosphere and maybe we can take a lesson from them there. Let's stop screwing around about whether our president, who will remain so for the next two years and, given the Republican candidates offered so far, the next four after that, is a citizen - because he is, and let's start paying attention to what we can do to put the nation back on track. Media circuses are fun and all, but they won't solve our problems and if we continue to be distracted with whether or not someone was born on this bit of land or that, those problems will only grow. Get serious America. Stop paying attention to people's birth credentials and start paying attention to their politics. If we do, we have a small chance of fixing our problems. If we don't, we have no chance at all.