David McElroy

Regain your sanity by focusing only on things you can control

By David McElroy · March 28, 2020

Can you distinguish between things you can control and things you can’t control? If so, do you have the ability to focus only on what you can control? Can you treat what you can’t control as simple environmental reality?

I’ve started noticing over the last week or so that there are different sorts of fear. Yes, there are a lot of specific fears, but I’ve suddenly become very aware of one basic differences between the types of fear.

Almost everybody who is aware of what’s going on in the world is afraid right now. We have just entered a dangerous time, so it’s rational to be afraid. But some people seem paralyzed by their fears and other people seem energized by their fears.

And these wildflowers in my back yard taught me the difference Friday afternoon.

Briefly: Join me for a relaxing 60 seconds of springtime in the South

By David McElroy · March 26, 2020

If it’s not yet spring where you are, you can at least enjoy 60 seconds of spring in the South with me. This was just outside my office late Thursday afternoon. Don’t you need a relaxing break today? See it on YouTube by clicking here.

In the face of hazardous times, some still driven to be helpers

By David McElroy · March 26, 2020

What if you‘re a helper, but the coronavirus crisis that’s going on in our world today means you can’t be with the ones you want to help?

Johnny Russell was driving by an abandoned K-Mart shopping center near Lewiston, Maine, Thursday morning when he saw this vehicle with a lone woman and a hand-lettered sign that said, “I miss you.” As he slowed to read the sign, the woman smiled and waved, so he stopped to chat.

The woman told Russell she’s a teacher for a school in Maine School Administrative District 52 in Turner, Maine. He asked her how she’s coping with schools being closed — and being away from her students.

“With great concern on her face, she told me how she was listening to the news this morning and for the first time in her life she had heart palpitations,” Russell reports. “She said she knew she had to act immediately and in a positive way to help her grief subside, so she reached out to her students online and asked them to meet her at the parking lot and pick up some gifts she had for them.”

It hasn’t happened yet, but there’s a possibility that I might be taking in a fourth feline. A couple of months ago, a cat-loving neighbor asked whether I’d seen a “tuxedo cat” hanging out in the neighborhood. I hadn’t, but this guy eventually wandered past my house a few weeks later — and we haven’t been able to find evidence that he has a home. I’ve been giving him water and food for the last week and he finally let me pet him two nights ago. He’s purred for me two nights in a row and he let me take a low-quality selfie with him Thursday night. Tonight, though, he let me pick him up and bring him inside to look around. This went surprisingly well, as you can see from this photo. I don’t know whether he’ll be joining the family, but I’m certain that Alex, Oliver and Sam would vote no, at least until they get to know him. I’m trying to make certain he doesn’t have a home, but if he does join us, what do you suppose his name will be?

It turns out that the radical far left has been training “Antifa cats” to sabotage anything important to Donald Trump. Everything he did was perfect. Honest. It was all the cats’ fault. Arrest all the cats! This is the latest of my ridiculous satirical shorts. Please go watch it. Then “like” it and subscribe. Please. I’m begging you. (Too much?) Although a couple of the previous videos have had views in the hundreds, most have still been seen by fewer than 20 people. So I seem to be having trouble letting people know that page exists.

Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

The Republican Party is dead. It still exists in name, of course, but it’s nothing but a shell. All that’s left are idiots and stooges and con men of the MAGA party. When Donald Trump is gone — which won’t be long — those populist idiots and pragmatic fools will have no one to follow. Democrats will thrive. They will take more power than ever and they will push the federal government further to the radical far left than ever. When that happens, don’t just blame Trump if you’re a conservative. Blame every person who has claimed to be a conservative and has given up on principles, character and everything else that Republicans once claimed to stand for. As someone who worked as a GOP political consultant for many years, this is disgusting and disturbing to me. Those who have enabled Trump to have almost unchecked power are going to be shocked when they see what they will unleash in the long run. It’s been plain all along what this narcissistic con man is. It’s your fault that you chose to pretend not to see what he really is.

We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.