Leave John and Elizabeth Edwards Alone Already

George Bush has decimated the country, dumped our economy into the toilet, started an illegal war based on duplicitous, purposefully trumped up allegations of WMD's, ordered American troops to bomb, shoot and blow up innocent citizens in Afghanistan and Iraq and we have done nothing. He has eroded our civil rights and trampled on much of what Americans have always held dear and yet still we do little. No impeachment. No taking to the streets in massive numbers. Few demonstrations of outraged indignation, least ways few that have been televised or reported on in the press.

But John Edwards does what countless other husbands have done before him (a conservative estimate by Shirley Glass, Ph.D., has extra-marital affairs running at 25% of wives and 44% of husbands) and the pundits on TV are salivating and creaming in their pants over the salaciousness of the situation. Upstanding, loving, good-hearted and otherwise honest and trustworthy people have affairs. Try as the press might to demonize the likes of Bill Clinton and men like John Edwards, an affair is not evidence of a lack of character. It's just evidence of boundaries that peeled away, leaving the person in a committed relationship open to the lure of an affair.

Focusing on John Edwards is a huge red herring for the American populace, as our cost of living sky rockets, our climate continues its wobbly descent into global warming via serious drought, melting icebergs, wildly fluctuating temperatures and general planetary instability. Our outrage over John Edwards cheating on his plump and dying wife, with a slim blond co-worker, Rielle Hunter, takes our attention off the crap that the neo-cons are pulling as they lurch into the dying months of their last few months in office. Meanwhile, John Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth have a lot of work to do in a short time as they have Elizabeth's incurable cancer to contend with. The task of rebuilding a marriage after an affair is an onerous one. I'm sure that task is not helped by the orgiastic delight with which news shows go over and over the details of the affair, pontificating for hours on end about whether Ms. Hunter's child is Edwards' "love child" and whether he should be allowed to stay in office due to this "serious error in judgment."

Our outrage also distracts us from what we should be doing to protect our own relationships, to have the kinds of discussions in our relationships that draw lines in the sand and define what fidelity means to us, whether we are in a monogamous or non-monogamous relationship. In my experience with couples who are dealing with the aftermath of an affair it feels to both partners like the world has tumbled off its axis. Partners need time, understanding, non-judgmentalism and compassion to heal from the impact an affair has on a relationship.

I hope the Edwards family has thrown out their television sets.