Scathing as Joan Didion is here, her words are still as good as the warm October rain outside my window. At least to me they are. I think we've been in a dream for quite some time now. Perhaps, we needed to dream. Perhaps, in our flight to sleep, we thought our dreams were comforting. Awake, maybe we distracted ourselves with stories, rather than acknowledging the wreckage around us. Otherwise, we might feel the kind of mad raging sorrow few can live with, let alone bear. Still, the wrong sorts of stories always and fatally lead to delusion.

In the South, sometimes the word "story" is used interchangeably with "lie". And I think it's those stories we've been hearing and telling: untrue stories. And I think they've made our country sick and weak and fearful.

At some point, and it should be soon, I hope we can look around and ask ourselves why it is so hard, in this culture, to recognize what is real. Why do we find ourselves rummaging through lies and confabulations, believing this detritus tells us anything? Why, like large scared children, must we be entertained?

I am always grateful for Joan Didion's clear gaze. However dark her outlook might be now, she is not conjuring up a fiction. And, as her prose has always shown, a bad truth is more bearable and more necessary than the most hopeful fantasy.

As an American living abroad, I'm constantly trying to reassure people from other countries that Americans are not all like how our media would portray us. To echo sentiments so eloquently expressed by other letter writers, there's the America of pontificating pundits, "hockey moms" and "NASCAR dads", and the true America - a country of individuals. Of course there's going to be some assholes in the mix - any group of individuals will be guaranteed to have them. And these are the people who are often portrayed in media clips and sound bytes because they're simple to explain and easy to mock.

America is far more complicated than that. There are dullards who believe everything they're told, but by and large we're trying to figure things out for ourselves. Whether we're from small towns in the midwest or trendy neighborhoods in NYC, there are thoughtful, insightful individuals who really would like to do what they can to improve the lives of their fellow citizens. But one would never believe this going on media coverage alone. It's easier for the media to say that everyone in California and the Northeast is a flaming liberal, that everyone in Nebraska is a bible-thumping moron, that all African-Americans have the exact same educational backgrounds and goals, that by subdividing people into narrow demographics we can predict their voting patterns than it is to tell the truth.

The truth is far more sophisticated and complex, which is why so much media glosses over it in favor of sound bytes. It's easier, faster and cheaper to just make broad, baseless generatlizations. And it's why so many people of my (the younger) generation have completely eschewed the mainstream media in favor of internet coverage. At least there we can take the time to read at our own pace, look at the raw data as best we can and draw our own conclusions. Television news in particular simply specializes in caricatures of real people. I, and many like me, are tired of it. Americans are more than that, and we deserve better. We know that while this election won't solve all of our problems that it is staggeringly important, and that's why so many people one would never have predicted are taking this election so seriously. It does matter. We do care. And we have thought about it.