David McElroy

The woman appeared to be in a world of her own. That was my first impression. I sat down to eat lunch by myself Wednesday at a small place in a part of town where I hadn’t been for awhile. She was beautiful. Around 28 or 30 years old, I’d guess. But the longer I sat there, the more something about her just wasn’t right.

She had papers and folders spread out on the table where she sat. She was intently studying something, but I couldn’t tell what. She would sometimes pick up a small mirror and look at something closely on her face. Then she’d look back to the papers. She wasn’t aware of anything else.

She finally looked up and stared out the window for a moment. Then she turned in my general direction and said, “Do you think my chin looks wrong? I’m afraid it’s too wide. Or maybe the angle isn’t right.”

She could have been talking to the wall, as far as I could tell, but I was the only other person in the place. Besides, she actually looked as though she expected an answer. The question was a little too odd for me to know how to respond. My initial thought was to tell her — honestly — that her face seemed absolutely perfect to me, but I didn’t know what was really going on, so I just stuck to saying that her chin looked fine to me.

“Are you sure?” she asked. She came over to my table, bringing one of the brochures she had been looking at. It was filled with pictures of close-ups of faces. “This one looks better than mine, doesn’t it? I look so ugly.”

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Now that Barack Obama has been elected to another four years in the White House, some people around me are in denial. Mitt Romney has gone down in flames, much like John McCain did four years ago. (Remember him?) And standing on the sideline are various libertarians saying, “If you had only nominated Ron Paul, we would have beaten Obama.”

Four years ago, a lot of people were upset with the election of Obama. Some didn’t like him because he’s black. But most who opposed him did so because they deeply disagreed with him about the direction for the country. A group of people loosely calling themselves the Tea Party emerged to say that the direction had to change. They were going to organize and march and demand lower taxes and smaller government.

Four years later, how’s that working out? That conservative backlash has helped the Republicans to hold onto the U.S. House, but that’s about the extent of it. Democrats hold the Senate and the White House.

What’s more, the Tea Party is a weird mix held together only by a hatred of the progressive left. Although the Tea Party had libertarian roots, it’s more of a mainstream social conservative group now. Yes, they still talk about economically conservative ideas, but social conservative ideas have taken more and more prominence in places where the Tea Party groups have been successful in gaining influence.

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I’m worried about the mental health of some of my friends at this difficult time. Some portion of them are bound to be in deep depression by tonight.

Considering how polarized most people have been about the presidential election — and considering the fact that each side of the mainstream honestly believes that it’s Armageddon if the other side wins — there are going to be a lot of potentially suicidal people tonight.

Are the supporters of the losing candidate going to be jumping off of bridges? Are they going to be slashing their own wrists? I’m worried about them, because they don’t have experience dealing with this kind of crushing loss.

If you believe that the future of your world depends upon getting Mitt Romney or Barack Obama elected president, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. In this case, I figure it will probably be the Romney supporters on suicide watch, assuming that the projections hold up. But you never know.

I have a solution to this problem, though. They need to talk to libertarians and anarchists.

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