David McElroy

It wasn’t a big deal when I first noticed my ankles and feet swelling. I’m not sure if it started the middle of last week or over the weekend. It didn’t seem like a big enough deal to pay attention to at first.

But by Monday, the swelling was painful. My shoes felt as though they were about two sizes too small. It hurt to walk. I still didn’t think it was a big deal, but it was irritating enough by Wednesday to go visit a friend who’s a doctor. I just wanted him to tell me how to make the swelling go away.

My friend took a look at the swelling and pressed his thumb into part of the skin on each ankle and he timed how long it took the “pit” to go away. It was taking far longer than it should, he said, and that made it a “pitting edema.”

“Is it going to kill me?” I asked jokingly.

“Well, pitting edema is a classic sign of possible congestive heart failure,” he said. And he wasn’t joking.

For just a minute, I felt as though I was in another doctor’s office 18 months ago when a specialist told me that I had breast cancer and needed immediate surgery. For that minute, I relived what it felt like to experience the worry and loneliness I’d felt then. (I wrote about the experience of surgery this past January, on the one-year anniversary.) It felt as though someone was waving a red warning flag at me.

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Every time there’s a national controversy in which race plays a part, there are calls for people to come together, be reasonable and agree on “common sense solutions.”

“Can’t we all get along?” was the line from the late Rodney King that I always associate with this sentiment. The people who say different forms of this line mean well. They think that if we’ll all just “play nice” and love each other, the world will be a better place. But the bad news is that, no, we can’t get along. The delusion that we can get along — by agreeing to “one best way” for everyone — leads us to lie to ourselves and sets us up to be disappointed again and again.

So am I saying there’s no hope for race relations? Actually, I’m saying something far broader. This point isn’t really about race. It’s about intelligent and well-meaning people who disagree about fundamental principles — in ways that are never going to change.

No matter how intelligent and well-meaning people are, they’re always going to come to radically different conclusions about what’s true, what’s right and how society’s rules should be structured. Even before you factor in all the people who aren’t bright and don’t have goodwill, there’s no way we can all agree.

This is why the “one size fits all” nature of majoritarian political systems is always going to leave many millions of people angry and feeling oppressed. Even if you don’t understand the moral case for self-sovereignty, consider this the pragmatic case. As long as the majority have the power to give you orders and take your money, you are going to end up in a minority which doesn’t get its way at some point.

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I don’t really want to create things. Honestly, I don’t. In one way or another, I’ve fought it all my life. Creating is difficult. There’s tremendous risk of failure and embarrassment. There’s frequently not a lot of money in it (if at all). And it’s hard to explain to people what you do and who you really are.

I don’t want to put up with any of those things. I hate them. I’d rather be something easy to explain. I’d rather do something that other people were more willing to pay for. I’d rather do something that more readily gives me the money that a future wife wants.

But I don’t have any choice. I have to create things. When I don’t, I start dying.

As with so many creators, I struggle with the question of whether I’m an artist. Honestly, I’m afraid I am, but I feel like a fake to say so. Artists are those who paint or sculpt or do something that’s displayed in galleries. My work these days is mostly for myself or friends on Facebook or something for readers here. But am I actually a writer? Am I an artist?

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