David McElroy

When I was a teen-ager, I used to write my own stories. It actually started when I was young child, but I didn’t write them down until I was a teen. As I went to sleep each night when I was small, I would lie in bed and make up stories. I was always the hero. As I got a little bit older, the hero would have a different name, but he was really still me.

In one of my stories — when I was about 14 years old — I was one of a group of teen-agers who went to Cape Canaveral and toured a real space shuttle on the launch pad. For some reason, the shuttle was ready for launch and they let a group of teens — about five or six of us — alone to tour the ship. Something terrible happened in the country at exactly that moment and we had to take off in the shuttle. It turned out to be armed with weapons. I was the captain, of course. I brilliantly guided my little band of kids to go blow up some bad guys and save the country.

What I didn’t know at the time is that my immature teen fantasy would one day be roughly the concept behind a reboot of the Star Trek franchise.

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It was the blue of the sky that suddenly grabbed my attention. Then it was the various shades of green in the trees around me. I was taking a walk in my neighborhood Wednesday afternoon when the beauty around me hit me so hard that it almost hurt my heart to feel it all.

For this moment in time, I couldn’t imagine being in any place on earth more beautiful. I couldn’t imagine anything more perfect than the stunning colors and shades and smells of my surroundings. It wasn’t just beauty, though. It was an emotional feeling that welled up inside.

It was about being in the place called home.

I don’t understand nationalism or patriotism anymore. George Bernard Shaw said, ”Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it….” I don’t have any particular argument at the moment with those who feel differently. I’m just saying that I’ve come to a point in life when I don’t feel connected to a country or a government. But I understand what it means to love the land you call home.

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For months, Republicans have been trying to use what happened at Benghazi as the weapon with which to mortally wound Barack Obama’s second term. Although it seems clear to me that some terribly bad judgement was used connected with Benghazi (and it’s clear the administration lied about it subsequently), there’s no way it was something to bring an administration down. It was just politically embarrassing.

The brewing IRS scandal, on the other hand, is starting to look as though Richard Nixon rose from the grave and started giving Democrats political advice for the past few years.

You’ve heard about the scandal already, so I’m not going to waste time covering the specific allegations, partly because you can read them elsewhere and partly because it’s still early in the story, so the facts are developing. All we know is that the Internal Revenue Service used agents to give extra scrutiny to conservative groups and also leaked confidential information to media about conservative groups. (ProPublica is a progressive left media group, and it’s the one admitting that it was given the documents.)

Nobody is questioning that it happened. The question is how widespread it was and who directed it. First, we were told that it was limited to just one IRS office. Then it became clear that IRS officials in Washington were involved. How high did it go? Nobody outside the government knows yet.

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On March 4, I got an email from Chris Kahn. We had only been friends on Facebook for about a year and a half, but I’d come to like and respect him. He remembered that I’d had a bout with cancer last year, so he had some questions.

“I have not gotten the results from the biopsy yet, but my gastroenterologist and oncologist are fairly certain the tumor in my esophagus is cancerous,” Chris wrote. He said the doctor was making plans for chemo, radiation and surgery. “I am not really happy with the idea, but there may be no other option. If you have any thoughts you’d like to share, I’d appreciate it.”

Just 41 days later, Chris was dead.

After his initial message about the surgery, I posted the details of his situation and asked others for treatment options. Nothing interesting and viable turned up.

I didn’t keep up with the specifics of how he was doing, but I knew he was getting treatment. On March 12 — just eight days after his initial message to me — he posted on Facebook about the way his situation looked.

“It has started to spread,” he wrote. “The reality kind of sunk in today. This may kill me.”

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I get a lot of mail from people I don’t know very well (or at all). The subjects are all over the place. Some people write to say they enjoy reading what I write. A few send me nasty messages. One woman was writing love messages about me on her blog and then sending me links. A flight attendant based in Philadelphia wrote to say that she didn’t agree with me about anything politically, but she had fallen in love with me from reading anyway.

A surprisingly large number of people make personal observations about me, based on what they read here and what they see of me on my open Facebook page. I got two messages over the weekend, though, that were sort of thesis and antithesis.

“I love reading what you post because you’re always so happy and nice to everybody,” one woman wrote, in part. “You’re smart and tough, but I can tell you’re really happy and love the world.”

Interesting.

“I’m thinking this inbox is a bit overdue,” a man wrote. “You seem angry lately. I actually prefer angry David vs. disinterested David … angry David remains rational in his anger.”

Both messages had additional content, but these parts stuck out to me. One person sees me as happy. Another person sees me as angry. Which is true? And what could account for people coming to such strongly different conclusions?

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It was May 13, 2011 when this site went live for the first time. I didn’t know what I wanted it to be — and I sometimes still don’t know — but I want to thank everybody who’s read and contributed at any point along the way. You know who you are. I appreciate you.

In those 24 months, I’ve had visitors from 182 countries. I’ve had more than a quarter of a million unique visitors. I really do appreciate all of them. I’ve been surprised — well, shocked is a more appropriate word — that this kind of traffic is possible for one random guy with some decidedly out-of-the-mainstream opinions.

I’ve enjoyed spending time with you, and I look forward to spending more time with you in the future. Maybe I’ll eventually even start making the monkeys work again. You never know.

Thanks for being here, everybody. And a special thanks for the few who leave comments. Whether we agree or not, I appreciate a crowd that’s more likely to think and discuss than to shout and scream.

I hate Mother’s Day and I hate Father’s Day. For many people, they’re sweet and nostalgic days to remember and appreciate parents who meant a lot to them. For me, they’re nothing but emotional turmoil and regret.

If you look in the dictionary next to the phrase “dysfunctional family,” there’s a picture of my family. There were five of us. In addition to my parents, I had two younger sisters. We were born just two years apart, so we were like three little stair steps. (That’s me with my mother around the time of my second birthday.)

My mother was very intelligent, artistic, funny and sensitive. She was a free spirit who didn’t even hear the drumbeat of the rest of the world as she marched to her own. She was oblivious to anything except following her own heart. In college, she had been selected as one of the “beauties” for the yearbook — back in the days when they used to do that — at the teachers’ college where she and my father both went to school. She was wildly popular and widely loved.

My mother was too sensitive to be married to my father. I didn’t understand it at the time, but his strict and controlling nature drove her to a mental breakdown. They were nothing alike in temperament or habits or much of anything else, but he insisted that his way was right about everything. He pushed and manipulated and controlled and cajoled to force her to be exactly what he was.

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Eight years ago, I made a short film. I had been saying for years that I wanted to make movies, but I hadn’t done anything about it. I was scared and I found every excuse under the sun not to do anything other than talk about it.

Then I met a woman. She was interested in film. She was interested in me. I was intensely interested in her and I wanted her to fall in love with me. I wanted to impress her and I wanted her to be proud of me.

So I put aside my fear and my insecurity and my ignorance. I made a film. It wasn’t a perfect film, but it was good enough to get into 20 smaller film festivals and win five awards.

The woman and I did fall in love. In a very real sense, my film was a love letter to her. It never would have been made without her in my life.

I think about this a lot lately when I think about why I haven’t made any more films and why I’m not turning out the kind of art I’d like to be making. I have several scripts in various stages of pre-production. I have a documentary that I’m working with a producer to try to bring to life. I even wrote half of a book last year that I ended up deleting in despair because I didn’t love it enough.

But I’m not finishing things. I don’t have enough enthusiasm for anything. I’m not using the talent that I know I have. Why not?

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If you or I were to murder a police officer, what do you suppose the sentence would be? Death? Life without parole? 40 years? Whatever it would be, it wouldn’t be a slap on the wrist.

So what happens when a police officer murders an unarmed 54-year-old Sunday school teacher and flat-out lies about what happened? If you’re Daniel Harmon-Wright, you get three years for “voluntary manslaughter.”

Why do we have one set of rules for people with badges and another set of rules for us?

Harmon-Wright was a police officer who responded to a report of a “suspicious woman” in a church parking lot in Culpeper, Va., at 10 a.m. on a Thursday morning last year. The woman was actually at the church to apply for a job, and nobody has said what made her “suspicious.” Harmon-Wright claimed that he tried to reach inside the woman’s vehicle to take her license, but she suddenly rolled the window up on his arm — trapping him — and tried to drive away.

There were problems with this story, though. Most importantly, a carpenter working in sight of the confrontation said nothing of the sort happened. He said the officer had his gun in one hand and had his other hand on the woman’s door handle. When she tried to drive away, the officer fired at least six shots, killing the woman.

Pure and simple, Harmon-Wright murdered a woman who tried to drive away from him.

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Many of us have thought that Big Brother might arrive in our homes through TV sets, but what if we had the wrong appliance? What if Big Brother is really coming to control your refrigerator and oven and other very mundane appliances?

In Great Britain, the National Grid — the group that runs the power grid — has proposed that all appliances be required to have special sensors that give the power operators control to shut appliances down temporarily if they need to manage shortages of electricity. (I don’t like to link to RT.com, because it’s a propaganda organ of the Russian government, but this story appears legitimate.) The plan is also backed by power operators across the European Union, who want it adopted all over the continent.

Here in the United States, some power companies are adopting what they call “smart meters.” Who could oppose a “smart” meter? It sounds great, doesn’t it? For a power company, smart meters provide obvious benefits. They can monitor your power usage remotely, so the company no longer has to send someone to your house to read the meter. Just as important to the company, though, these meters give a power utility the ability to shut off your power remotely and “manage” your usage in other ways.

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