David McElroy

Do you want to know where bad public policy comes from? Do you want to know why governments keep getting bigger and bigger, despite you wanting smaller government? Here’s how it happens:

1) People consume “news” from media sources which give them no useful context and which lead them to believe scary narratives.

2) People feel intense grief and anger at the negative facts which support the narratives they have been led to believe.

3) Those people then selectively choose which facts to believe and which to ignore — based on the narratives they have been given.

4) Those people increasingly feel a strong emotional desire to “fix things,” because they’re scared and angry and hurt.

5) Politicians offer them simple-minded solutions which accept the negative narratives as obvious truth. Keep Reading

Not everything I believe is rational, but most of it is.

Most of my world is solid, material and fairly predictable. Almost everything has an explanation if I look long enough.

But as much as I hate to admit it, there are things which I can’t explain — and I often find hidden meaning in those unexplained things. Some of those inexplicable things have felt holy at times. Others of them have felt evil. Some have felt ambiguous and baffling. (I have a collection of stories which I rarely share.) But something in me looks for meaning in these unexplained experiences.

I know this is a common human trait. (Apophenia is the psychological term.) I’m rational enough to know I might be looking for meaning in things which are really just random and meaningless noise in some quantum field. But I’ve had two experiences this week which leave me feeling as though someone’s trying to tell me something.

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I can’t write poetry. I’ve tried to write it, but my efforts have always been terrible.

I can’t write music. I love music and I’m deeply moved by its magic — both words and lyrics — but I have no talent for writing songs.

I tried to write poetry and music when I was young. I even have a few samples of my attempts at verse. They’re awful but even through the awfulness of the bad art, I can feel the anguish of what I was trying to express when my pen wrote the words on paper.

For most of my life, I’ve felt a deep sense of longing. A sense of need. A panic. A fear. An emptiness that craved filling.

When I feel that — as I desperately do tonight — I feel an incredible urge to express it. My heart feels as though it’s going to explode in my chest. There’s so much I want to say — to express, to feel, to confess — and words aren’t ever enough.

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