As world descends into madness, back away and guard your heart

By David McElroy · July 8, 2016

I fear the devil has lit the fuse on a long-dormant stick of racial dynamite.

And now the shadowy figure with a red suit and a tail is in the shadows chuckling as outraged people on both sides of an ugly divide prepare to go after each other — completely uninterested in why the other side sees what it sees.

As the anger builds, more and more people are pulled into the maelstrom. Everybody is suddenly an expert. Everybody knows who’s to blame, but they all disagree with each other.

I’m no different. I have my own narrative. I place the ultimate blame on the idea that any group has the right to use violence or threats of violence to achieve their purposes. But even though I have my favorite explanation, I know it’s complicated and there are many historical factors — and that other people see things in very different ways.

Many books could be written on how we got here and who’s to blame, because the causes are tangled and go far back into human history, even though almost everybody tries to oversimplify the problem. I think it’s a tangled web of centuries (or more) of wrong thinking involving race, class, slavery, tribalism, populism, fear and the continuing desire of some people to control other people. (No matter what I include, I’m failing to include other factors.) They all blend together in a toxic stew — and whichever part happens to be nearest and dearest to you, that’s the part you tend to see and assume is the cause.

But I’m not here to draw a conclusion about the cause or to place blame. First, I’m not capable of coming up with an objective answer. Second, it doesn’t matter what I could come up with. We’re not all going to agree, especially while there’s so much anger and hate on all sides.

For me, the correct path is closing my mind and heart to the hatred and anger as much as possible. Giving voice to those things or even harboring those thoughts — even though many of them might rationally be justified from different reasonable points of view — won’t do any good. It won’t do society any good and it certainly won’t do me any good. The only thing that can change the world — and the only thing that can change me — is learning to love better. (That’s not an easy task. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for weeks and trying to write about.)

Selling love and reconciliation in this country right now is about as easy as selling snow blowers in Miami. Most people just aren’t buying something they don’t believe they need and that they don’t believe solves the problem they see. People would rather feel anger and lecture “the other side” about how “those people” should take the steps necessary to change things.

That’s a perfect way to stay on the path that the devilish figure in red has laid out for us. It leads to a mad descent into a hellish conflict that no one can win.

I can’t change the world. I can’t change you. I have no intention of trying. The only thing I’m capable of doing — and I struggle even at that — is changing myself. There are now billions of us on the planet, and I’ve come to believe the only thing that can possibly save the human race is each one of us deciding to transform ourselves through the power of love.

The only thing I can possibly do is work on myself.

As I’ve become more and more convinced that personal transformation through love is the only way to change the world — and that political action is counterproductive — the world actually seems to be getting more hateful. I feel as though I’m standing in the middle of trench warfare while screaming people lob bombs at each other — and I know the only way out of the carnage is for each individual to unilaterally and proactively love the people he’s been trying to kill.

That’s a very different perspective — a radical perspective which trusts that God isn’t yet finished with us — one which would seem like madness to those who don’t understand the ultimate power of love to change people.

I’m not telling you my answer is easy. In fact, it’s very difficult. Following the rest of the world is easy — and that’s what most people will do.

Most people will continue to keep their eyes glued to television screens that sell them hate. Most people will continue to assume they know who’s right and who’s wrong. Most people will believe in a narrative that absolves them — and their kind — of any blame. So they will sit in front of violent images they invite into their homes and they will silently scream, “You people are responsible for this, not me!”

As the hotheads spread their hate and ratchet up the violence, the red figure with the horns will slip back down to his fiery home, gleefully saying, “These people will do the rest for me.”

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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