The other day I was watching a news segment in which a Fox9 news anchor was discussing the "issue" of Starbucks's new red holiday cup. He was joking with another reporter about how he doesn't like it when he turned it over and ended up spilling a little bit of coffee on himself. Was it funny? Yes. Did he deserve it? Maybe. We have no idea what kind of person he actually is. Was it worth the minute and 37 seconds it lasted? No.

Thinking about the state of our society and our country, it doesn't seem like any news channel should be spending its extremely valuable and budgeted time on stories like this. It's an issue with many news channels. Feature pieces sometimes seem to take an odd priority over actual stories and discussion of current events. Today, I was only on Facebook for about 30 seconds when I realized I had already seen about 12 statuses of people giving their own opinions about the red cup and only one of someone sharing an article about the University of Missouri. I've also been in class discussions where people were quicker to talk about the red cup than the Mizzou issue because they weren't even sure what the latter was.

Our country has experienced a growing issue of not only gun violence plaguing schools (elementary schools, middle schools, high schools and colleges) but also systematized racial inequality that isolates black citizens (and other minorities) and students. In Europe, countries are closing their borders and refusing to grant full asylum to the Syrian refugees -- some of whom have even lost their lives just trying to escape.

So why are we all so focused on Starbucks? I haven't actually seen many people who genuinely believe the idea that there is a war on Christmas, and most of it is just waved off as extreme Christians who apparently want Christmas to stay over-represented.

We are also forgetting that there is no big agenda with this release. Starbucks is a major business simply recognizing the fact that by not taking a side with any particular holiday, they are being inclusive. Being inclusive welcomes more people, which ultimately welcomes more money. As they put it (in a much more customer-friendly way), they are allowing these blank red cups to serve as a canvas on which people can create their own holiday stories. And those stories do not have to be about Christmas.

So whether or not people who are outraged still want to pretend they're going to boycott Starbucks, just remember that Starbucks is only gaining that attention back in free publicity.

So the real winner in this heated debate is not the Christians, the people who don't care, or even Starbucks. The only true winner is corporate America.