David McElroy

She was a young college student. He was a lawyer who worked in the office of the state attorney general in Montgomery, Ala. They met at a college-related function and he immediately started showering her with attention.

Although she was very attractive, she wasn’t accustomed to this kind of attention from a man in the “adult world,” especially someone with his sort of position and power. She was flattered to have someone like that notice her and think she was worth taking seriously.

He asked her on a date and ended up taking her to his apartment. Very soon, he was trying to sexually force himself on her. It wasn’t just a request. He was physically trying to take her clothes off against her will. She realized that this important man was trying to rape her.

She was able to escape that night and find another way home.

Afterward, she felt shame and humiliation. She didn’t tell a soul, because it felt shameful that such a thing could happen to her and she couldn’t imagine trying to make someone believe her word against the word of such an “important man.”

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It was late at night when I got the emailed threat about five years ago. A suicidal friend sent me a dramatic picture — an obvious cry for help — with a knife poised against her wrist. She lives hundreds of miles away, so there was little that I could do to help, but I wondered where her husband was.

After I sent a reply trying to talk her into ending the threat — at least for that night — she sent back a sarcastic reply to my attempt to help her deal with this existential crisis.

“It’s not your job,” she wrote. “It’s the man-child’s who’s off playing computer games.”

I knew this was a continuing issue in her marriage. Her husband — about 30 years old — spent pretty much all of his non-work time playing computer games. As a result, they had fallen into living parallel lives. Although he knew she was depressed and suicidal, he chose to live in a fantasy world with gaming buddies instead of in the real world he had chosen for himself.

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I was getting frustrated with the interview Sunday afternoon, but I wanted to keep things civil and polite.

I was a guest on an Internet radio show and I’d been brought in for a political discussion about Donald Trump. One of the hosts is a woman who lives in England and isn’t fond of Trump. The other host is a man in Ohio who’s a big Trump supporter.

As we got started, I first tried to find out why the man supports Trump, so I asked him to outline what he likes about Trump’s performance as president so far. It seemed like a reasonable place to start, but things went downhill from there.

The man has a lot of opinions, but when I tried to narrow down why he believed those things, he frequently had to admit that he didn’t know the facts about the subjects. He was opposed to “illegal immigration,” for instance — and insisted he wasn’t opposed to immigration overall — but he finally admitted he didn’t have any idea how U.S. laws determine who’s allowed to immigrate legally.

On subject after subject today, most modern Americans have opinions which are not based on any reality. This man had firm opinions, but his opinions weighed his mind down so much that facts weren’t necessary. He hadn’t thought through the things he believed — and it seemed to surprise him to have someone pointing this out.

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