David McElroy

Why do I pay for 1,450 square feet of space to live in? I think about that frequently, and I don’t have a good answer. I live alone, with just the cats and a dog to keep me company. (They mostly hang out close to wherever I am.) I basically need a desk for my computer, a place to sleep and a bathroom. So why do I waste the money on space that could house four or five families in some parts of the world?

I’ve been thinking about this more and more lately. That makes it sound as though it’s just a rational thought, but it’s more than that. I’ve been feeling something I can only call a compulsion in my heart to get rid of almost everything I own and move to a much smaller place.

Do we really own the things we own? Or do they own us? I don’t have a tremendous amount of stuff — certainly not compared to most people I know — but the stuff I do have is making me feel weighed down. I don’t know why. I just know I don’t like it.

We live in a society with certain expectations of what’s acceptable, especially for those of us in the middle class or higher. We’re supposed to have a home that looks a certain way. We’re supposed to fill it with socially acceptable furniture. We’re supposed to care what other people think about what we have. We’re supposed to want the things that other people have. And most people believe they do want those things.

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What if the whole system of college education in this country is mostly a scam? What if it’s a system that sucks untold billions of dollars out of our pockets, but provides very little in tangible value?

I felt that college was an absolute waste of time and money for me. There were a very few classes in which I learned things that felt worth the time and effort. (Thank you, Dr. Pound.) For the most part, I was jumping through hoops that didn’t matter. I learned almost everything that mattered (and absolutely everything I ever learned related to journalism) by doing the work, not by sitting in a class.

For a long time, I wondered if it was just me. Everybody else seemed to assume that a college degree was great and gave them a golden ticket for life. In the years since then, though, it seems as though more and more people are questioning this system.

Zachary Caceres has a new article at the Radical Social Entrepreneurs website that should make you question the value of traditional colleges — even elite colleges. It’s about how a Google engineer and ex-Stanford University professor is shaking up the world of higher education. (Read the article. It’s worth it.)

Last year, Sebastian Thrun was teaching a graduate-level class at Stanford about artificial intelligence. (Thrun is the man behind Google’s self-driving car, so he knows a thing or two about the subject.) He became frustrated that he was only reaching 200 students in one location, so he did something unprecedented. He sent out one announcement that he was offering the same lectures, quizzes and tests to anyone, for free. His simple offer found 160,000 takers.

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For more than 30 years, the Christian Right has been vilified for forcing its socially conservative views on the country. Starting with Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority and then moving along to Rev. Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition, these groups had a tremendous influence on getting conservative Republicans elected, both nationally and in countless GOP primaries where the candidates were forced to fight over who was most conservative.

All along the way, Democrats and those on the political left have bemoaned the mixing of politics and religion. For more than 20 years, I’ve agreed with them at every step along the way on that point. I hated the way the Religious Right tried to use government power to force everyone to behave in their personal lives according to their own socially conservative agenda. And I hated the hypocrisy of fighting battles for allegedly Christian motives, but with tactics that would have sometimes made the devil blush with envy.

After years of telling the Christian Right how wrong it was to force its views on other people, the Christian Left has a new tactic. They’ve decided to organize politically to force their religious views on the rest of us, too.

The political organization is called Christians for Change. (You can see their promo video below.) They’ve been organized as a “Super PAC” by a group called The Christian Left. They’re not about saving souls or personally helping anybody. The group is unabashedly planning to try to force a progressive left agenda on the country.

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