David McElroy

It was already raining lightly when I left the office late Friday afternoon. By the time I merged onto the interstate, the gentle summer rain had turned into a gushing torrent of water. Somewhere along I-459 south of Birmingham, I could barely seen the tail lights of the car creeping along in front of me.

Traffic was bumper to bumper in all three lanes of each direction. We inched along dangerously. I was afraid of what I might hit as I kept going forward, but I was equally afraid of being hit in the rear if I didn’t move fast enough.

I simply couldn’t see what was going on — and I was afraid that trying to pull off the road was no better since I couldn’t see anything and others couldn’t see me.

So I moved along blindly — barely moving — as buckets of rain continued to fall from the sky.

And then I saw something that seemed like a faint shaft of light in the sky off to my right. The rain still beat down furiously, but where was that light coming from?

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Everybody knows “net neutrality” is a great idea. Right?

Ask any self-respecting member of the digerati and you’ll get the same response. We need net neutrality to “save our Internet.” That’s what all their slogans say, so it must be true.

But do you know what the real issues are? Do the people leading the pro-net neutrality crusades even understand what they’re advocating? Or are they just going along with what seems like a good idea since it’s aimed at big companies they don’t like?

There are few issues today which are as dishonestly framed as “net neutrality.” Although I like many of the outcomes which its advocates favor, the idea is a massive intrusion on private property — and it sets up government to control the Internet.

Briefly, the idea of net neutrality is that any Internet provider must treat every packet of data coming through the network equally. The provider isn’t allowed to charge more or less for one type of data — video or traffic coming from one particular site, for instance. An Internet service provider isn’t allowed to have plans that give a user all the data he wants from one company but have metered access (or no access) for data coming from a different company.

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Humans tend to hate change. We fight the cycles of change by clinging to the past. We pretend if we hold onto something from the past, the present will make sense — and maybe some internal pain or emptiness or loneliness will go away.

But Nature is all about cycles. Last autumn, I wrote about a lesson of Nature which I saw in the dying leaves near my front door. In those dry and golden leaves, I saw the message that dead things must be cleared away before rebirth has a chance to come.

In late October, death and decay were evident all around me. By this mid-June Sunday evening, the new life of Nature’s renewal is just as evident. The leaves you see above are on the same tree limb — in the same place — as the picture I shared with you last October.

I’d like to briefly suggest two things based on the brilliant green of rebirth that I see today.

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