David McElroy

I caught myself acting like an angry jerk the other day. I don’t like myself when that person comes out. It reminds me too much of some things I grew up with — and of things I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to escape.

It really wasn’t a big deal. It was just a few seconds. Nobody else would remember it. Few would have noticed when it happened. But it’s stayed with me since late last week, almost taunting me like something from the past that I thought was dead.

I was driving down a busy road near my house last week. I think it was Thursday afternoon, but it might have been Friday. There was a car trying to turn left out of a business, so the driver had to turn across a lane of traffic to get to another one. Instead of waiting for a time when traffic was clear in both directions — or turning right and then turning around — he instead pulled out and blocked one lane of traffic completely while he waited for the other lane to clear so he could pull out.

What he did was rude and against all traffic rules. He ended up holding up quite a number of people for 30 seconds or so, which seemed a lot longer while it was going on. But in the scheme of things, it wasn’t a big deal. I wasn’t in the hurry. It didn’t affect my life one bit.

But I was angry. He was violating the rules. He was cheating. He was holding me up. I blew my horn in righteous indignation.

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The people of Bessemer, Ala., are finally free of the dangers of an old man and his friends playing the blues in an old back-yard garage each Saturday night. Police raided the “juke joint” known as Gip’s Place Saturday night, shutting down one of the last of the old-style musical roadhouses still surviving today. I know I’ll sleep better with this terrible threat gone.

Police are only saying that Henry Gipson’s place was an “illegal business,” but this strikes at the core of business licensing. Why does a man need permission from a city or state to transact business with willing customers. His place was known far and wide as a great place to listen to the blues, one of the last remaining places to hear authentic blues in a raw setting. A couple of years ago, NPR called Gip’s place “a blues lover’s dream.” And here’s a three-minute piece about Gipson put together by a local photographer.

But after letting Gipson run his informal performance space every Saturday night for decades, the city of Bessemer decided this weekend to shut him down, according to a post on the Facebook page for Gip’s Place.

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Cole Withrow is an Eagle Scout who was on track to graduate with honors this month from Princeton High School in Princeton, N.C. (That’s Cole with his sister in the photo.) But he’s also a fallible teen-ager who made one small mistake Monday morning — and that mistake led to his arrest and expulsion from school.

In a sane world, Cole’s mistake wouldn’t be a big deal and nobody would even know about it. But in the world of “zero tolerance” in schools, his small mistake has become an absurd tragedy.

When Cole got to school Monday morning, he realized that he had an unloaded gun in his vehicle. He had been skeet-shooting the day before and the gun was still there. It wasn’t until he picked up his book bag that he noticed the weapon was there. He would be late for school if he left campus to return home, so he locked the gun in his car and went to the school office to call his mother to ask her for help.

But someone in the office overheard his conversation with his mom and things quickly escalated. Police were called and he was arrested. He was expelled from school and banned from school grounds for one year.

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As 15 teachers sat in a meeting last Friday at their school in Halfway, Ore., two gunmen suddenly burst into the room with handguns. The assailants wore hoodies to hide their faces, and they immediately started firing. Within moments, almost every teacher was dead — or would have been if it hadn’t been a drill.

I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to scare these teachers by making them believe they were being killed, but some of them claim that it was an effective teaching tool. What’s interesting, though, is that these teachers had already received training from the local sheriff’s department about how they could react in the even of an active shooter.

It apparently made no difference when they weren’t expecting an attack. For me, this brings to mind several points.

First, these are teachers, not a team of armed security guards. Just as those on the progressive left are completely unrealistic about the effects of taking guns away from law-abiding citizens, those on the conservative right are just as unrealistic about the effectiveness of arming teachers. I’m sure there are the occasional teachers who would be effective in a firefight, but I’d say they are few and far between. Trying to turn them into security guards isn’t going to work. It’s not their job and they’re probably going to panic if a real shooter shows up. That’s Halfway teacher Dollie Beck in the picture above. Does she look like someone you’d hire as a security guard?

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A Bartow, Fla., high school student was arrested and now faces felony charges after she mixed a couple of household chemicals together in a plastic bottle and put the top on one morning last week.

Kiera Wilmot said she thought the combination would make smoke, but it actually produced a tiny explosion. The girl did her experiment about 7 a.m. while she and other students were waiting around for the school day to start. A nearby student described the explosion as sounding like a firecracker. Nobody was hurt or threatened. Kiera stayed where she was and explained to school employees exactly what had happened.

Then this student with a perfect record was arrested and taken to a juvenile jail and charged with the felonies of “making, possessing or discharging a destructive device” and “possessing or discharging weapons on school grounds.” In today’s schools, there can be zero tolerance for mistakes born of teen-age bad judgement.

Everybody agrees that it was just an experiment that went wrong. Although Kiera called it a science experiment, it wasn’t an official school experiment of any kind. It appears she was just curious. So she did what many of us did as children. She tried it to see what would happen.

The school’s principal told WTSP-TV news that Kiera isn’t a troubled teen.

“She is a good kid,” said principal Ron Pritchard. “She has never been in trouble before. Ever.”

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When I was a student at the University of Alabama, I never seriously asked myself why I was in school. It was just understood that I was there to get a degree that would prepare me for a career. My parents both had degrees and it was just an assumption in our family that everyone gets a university degree.

If you had asked me why I was in school, I might have struggled to answer. I might have wanted to say that the purpose was to be an intellectually well-rounded and thoughtful person, but if I’d been honest with myself, I would have admitted I was there to get a piece of paper that marked me as acceptable as socially acceptable for employment. (The photo above from a UA graduation two years ago suggests to me that students still mostly see graduation as a ticket to employment.)

As much as I love learning, I’ve come to have serious doubts about the way the university system works in the United States today. (For readers in other countries, “college” and “university” are used interchangeably for practical purposes here in most usages.) I’ve come to see college as a long series of expensive hoops to jump through — which mostly just show that someone has the tenacity and willingness to stick to a plan and follow orders.

On Monday, a friend posted a link on Facebook to an article questioning the value of getting master’s degrees in library science and suggesting that some sort of apprentice program would be more useful. My friend is a librarian and a very bright woman. She’s decided to get a master’s in “library science” — which in itself as an odd name — but it’s not because it will help her do her job better. It’s because she’ll be paid more.

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In the 1970s, we were regularly being told to worry about a coming ice age. I can remember reading about it in Weekly Reader. Time magazine ran this story, right, in 1979. Here’s the introduction to a 1978 documentary warning us about it. And here’s a whole boatload of other predictions from the ’70s assuring us that we were facing serious cooling.

Then everything switched. The popular theory was suddenly that we faced global warming. We were told over and over again that the science was settled and decided. The Earth was warming up — and it was the burning of fossil fuels that was responsible. We must change our standard of living and quit using so much energy.

Those who dared to question the “scientific consensus” were labeled “deniers” in order to shame them by lumping them in with Holocaust deniers.

The only problem is that reality hasn’t matched the predictions. Climate scientists — still wedded to their dear theory — are struggling now to explain why warming isn’t happening as their models predicted.

And now Russian scientists are claiming that we could face a cooling period for the next 200 to 250 years.

I don’t have a clue what the climate is going to do. I really don’t. But I do know that the people loudly telling us what’s going to happen have no credibility, as far as I’m concerned. When predictions change this much over a 40-year period, it’s impossible to have confidence in the people making the predictions. It’s not necessarily that they’re bad people or that they have poor intentions.

But it does mean that they’re making predictions with a level of certainty that just isn’t possible.

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Only 10 days after the bombing of the Boston Marathon, ugly partisan politics is taking the story over. Some in Congress are starting to openly blame the Obama administration for not keeping the country safe. The head of the CIA quickly fired back, essentially saying, “Hey, don’t blame us.” And there’s NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg saying we’ll have to give up more individual rights (and add more surveillance cameras) to make everyone safe.

The truth is that perfect security is impossible. Even in a totalitarian society, attacks can happen every now and then. But in a free society, we have to tolerate even more risk. It’s just part of the trade-off of remaining mostly free.

You are going to die one of these days, and I am, too. Every one of us will. I might live to be 120 years old or I might be killed in a car accident later today. We just don’t know. We can take reasonable steps to minimize the dangers we face, but we can’t eliminate risks. It’s literally impossible.

So if perfect security is impossible, why are politicians arguing about it? And why is the media filled with so much news of terror that it scares so many people?

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Five years ago. Barack Obama was running for president for the first time. George W. Bush was president, and Obama was running as the anti-Bush. Everything about his pitch to voters was essentially, “Bush has messed everything up, so I’m going to give you hope and change by doing everything differently.”

Five years later, what’s really different?

Bush supporters would protest that Obama is far worse than their man. They have a visceral hatred for Obama, because he represents everything they hate. They see Bush as tough-minded and patriotic, whereas they see Obama as a weak peacenik who’s giving everything to welfare recipients.

Obama supporters also protest, because they are certain that Bush was far worse than the man they saw as a savior. They saw Bush as stupid and war-like, whereas they see Obama as smart and kind-hearted. They see Bush as hateful to minorities and immigrants, but Obama is generous and is a leader who represents the country’s best values.

When it comes to actual governing and results, both groups are wrong. If you ignore their rhetoric to their own parties’ voters, you find they have much more in common that you’d think. I’ve been saying this for years, but people in the mainstream of the political system are now saying the same thing.

In a new article from the Associated Press this week, there’s a look at how these two men who are so different in ideology, personality and so forth have ended up with such similar policies.

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I live in a middle class suburb about 15 miles west of downtown Birmingham. It has nice subdivisions and a collection of middle and upper-middle income families. It’s safe. I frequently walk the streets after midnight and don’t have a concern in the world. It’s a great place to live and a great place to raise children.

This past Sunday, I visited a different world for a few minutes. The contrast was scary. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

We all know there are parts of just about every city where “everybody knows not to go.” But even expressing the idea that way reveals a terrible bias. “We” know not to go there, by which we mean people with the money, education and the ability to live anywhere else.

Just before noon Sunday, I headed to downtown Birmingham because I wanted to catch Amtrak’s Crescent passenger train coming through, because I’d been wanting to shoot video of it. By the time I got to the station, the train was already in, so I needed to find a place just west of the station to catch it as it started leaving town.

I don’t know that part of town well. The part just to the west of the train station is industrial and the streets are cut up. Many of the buildings seemed abandoned, so it felt a bit like an industrial ghost town. I had to turn down confusing and cut up streets to find my way past the area. Using my iPhone’s GPS, I was able to see that if I’d head about six more blocks and then turn and head in another direction for four or five blocks, I should get to a railroad crossing not far from the main line after it left the station.

I was quickly scared. Nobody looked like me. The cars they drove were different from mine. They looked at me as though I were an alien.

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