David McElroy

Six months ago today, I had surgery to remove cancer in my left breast. It was an episode so far out of my normal experience of life that it almost seems as though it never happened. And now, six months later, one of my best friends is going in for major surgery today, too.

When I had my brush with cancer, I didn’t think I was going to die, but I knew it was a possibility. As my friend goes in for some serious surgery, I don’t expect her to die, either, but I know that she could die. We all react differently to the idea of death. Some people get depressed. Some people think of others they’ve lost. It has a different effect on me. It makes me think seriously about life.

(If you weren’t around for my cancer scare last January, here’s the article in which I first discussed it. And here’s what I wrote as I was going in for surgery that day.)

I don’t know about you, but I have a terrible habit of taking life for granted. There have been certain chunks of my life when I’ve absolutely wasted my time, simply because it seemed as though my time was almost limitless. When I’ve done that, I’ve felt bored and unfulfilled. I think that’s one of the real causes of some people turning to various kinds of drugs or other addictions. (For me, the addiction was sugar. I’ve written before about feeling like a “sugarholic.”)

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Cleaning out the notebook…

I was in a restaurant a couple of days ago when one of the news channels showed a Mitt Romney speech live. I quit watching political speech long ago (even before I quit working in the field), so I’m not subjected to these things very often. It was brutal.

First, I can’t imagine why anyone would intentionally force himself to listen to such self-serving nonsense. From the way he talked, you’d think Romney believes he could just walk into the Oval Office and magically make anything possible, maybe by spreading pixie dust around the place. I found myself thinking that he sounds like a man who believes he’s running for king instead of someone running for president (at least in the constitutional sense).

Barack Obama is just as bad, of course. The sad reality is that people today seem to want that. They want someone to promise them everything, even if it’s not even remotely possible that the candidate elected can deliver. It’s disturbing.

It was a year ago this past week when I woke up to find that the hits on this site had already tripled the previous daily record by about 7 a.m. Unknown to me, one of my stories had been linked that morning by Instapundit, one of the most popular political blogs among libertarians and conservatives. The story was picked up by many other major blogs and even national radio talk shows, and by the end of the day, my story about an Alabama coal mine operator “going Galt” at a public environmental hearing had been read 30,000 times.

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One of the persistent myths of modern civic life is that well-meaning people can always work out disagreements if they’ll just sit down and talk about things. There’s this odd notion that as long as we have free speech, there’s a “marketplace of ideas” and the best ideas will win through high-minded discussion among intelligent people.

That’s sheer fantasy. It’s not how the real world works and it never will be.

The idea seems to be that intelligent, rational, well-meaning people are naturally going to gravitate to the same answers, because … well … there’s obviously one right way, if we’ll just be smart enough to find it. That’s an idiotic idea, and it leads people to be angry with one another and think other people are stupid. We all think our ideas are obviously right, so if other people don’t agree with us, they’re clearly stupid or dishonest. Right?

I’m reminded of this again because of a flood of people here on the site from the Christian Left who ran across an article I wrote recently about them. Starting Friday night, thousands of people were suddenly reading that article from a couple of weeks ago and it was suddenly hit by dozens of comments, some polite, some angry, some disparaging, but all vehemently disagreeing. A few people with views more similar to mine responded, but there wasn’t any real dialogue. I was writing at the time and didn’t have time to try to engage, so I mostly observed. It was interesting. (You might want to take a look at the article and especially the comments as context for the rest of what I have to say.)

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