David McElroy

Every time I see suggestions from friends — even bright people who I like — proposing simplistic and ridiculous “solutions” to the current economic crisis, I’m appalled at the level of economic ignorance out there.

We can fix the economy, they say. Just don’t make anybody pay rent for awhile. Banks can let people not pay their loans back for awhile, either. Just put everything on hold. And utilities can keep providing power and Internet service and water and everything else — for free.

See? Just wave a magic wand and decree this. It’s free.

From what I read from such people, it’s clear that they have no understanding of why their proposed magic isn’t possible. And I’ve seen another correlation. People who have to earn enough money to keep their small businesses open are panicking right now, because they know there is no magical Santa Claus who’s going to save them.

But people who’ve never run a business and don’t understand anything beyond getting a paycheck for a job seem to think someone can just wave a magic wand and the economic world can just be on hold for a few months — while they continue to consume resources without paying for them.

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What if the one who got away came back?

Most of us have a love who got away — someone who our feelings turn to in secret moments — someone we still love, who will forever make us quietly ask, “What if…?”

At first, I thought it was just me. Over the last six or eight weeks, I can’t stop my heart from reviewing the past. I can’t stop some internal mechanism from reviewing every old love and giving me revised conclusions.

It’s as though my heart has a brain of its own. It takes all the inputs from the past and then adds the changes going on in the world and renders an updated conclusion about different loves from the past.

Then I realized it isn’t just me. People I know personally are talking with me about making changes to their relationships — ditching something that doesn’t work or reaching out to someone they wish had turned out differently — in ways they wouldn’t have imagined a few months ago.

For some, it’s a time to fix things which have gone wrong or a time to escape relationships which have died or to reach out in vulnerability to love which was lost.

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In February of 1973, a U.S. Air Force C-141A transport plane took off from Hanoi, Vietnam, headed toward the Philippines. As the wheels pulled off the ground, 40 jubilant men screamed with joy and relief.

They were the first planeload of nearly 600 American prisoners of war being released from North Vietnamese prisons, where they had been tortured and abused for much of the previous decade.

I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be one of those released prisoners, but it’s even harder to imagine how these men stayed sane — most for years — while they waited for the end. And since they were tortured and abused, they never knew whether they would survive to return home or if they would be killed instead.

I’ve been thinking today about those men because they offer some clues about how different people handle extreme stress. As I keep hearing people talk about how much stress everybody is under right now — with many locked at home in quarantine with their families — I’ve found myself thinking about ex-POW Jim Stockdale.

He said one thing separated those who thrived in captivity from those who were destroyed. It offers an important clue for us today.

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