David McElroy

Everybody’s read an obituary from time to time. They generally tell who died and what family the person left behind. Despite how unloving and fractious most families are, most death notices refer to “loving” spouses and children. They’re not the most honest accounts of life.

For one man in a suburb of Denver, that wasn’t good enough. When Michael Blanchard died, he wanted something a bit more truthful to leave behind, so he wrote his own death notice, saying, “Weary of reading obituaries noting someone’s courageous battle with death, Mike wanted it known that he died as a result of being stubborn, refusing to follow doctors’ orders and raising hell for more than six decades. He enjoyed booze, guns, cars and younger women until the day he died.”

The death notice — complete with a notation about which relative can “kiss his butt” — has become a viral sensation since it was published in the Denver Post nearly two weeks ago. (A Denver television station even did a story about the obit.) Here’s the complete text:

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Is the United States heading for some form of race war? I’m getting more concerned about that. I see the convergence of several trends that mean we need to be thinking seriously about what’s coming.

The old estimate was that white people would be a minority in the country by 2050, but accelerating demographic trends mean that might happen more quickly. Demographers now estimate that it will happen as soon as 2042. Already, white babies are in the minority. Blacks are reproducing at a higher rate than whites, and Hispanics are reproducing at a higher rate than either group.

So what’s it going to mean? Conflict between groups over culture and economic resources. White people have control of a greatly disproportionate amount of the income and wealth. I don’t happen to believe that it’s because of racism, but a high percentage of the non-white groups believe it’s unfair and racist that it’s this way. As whites become a minority, there will be increasing political pressure to take more from “the rich” and give it to “the poor” in one way or other.

Many black and Hispanic politicians are going to enjoy the increasing power that’s going to come from representing more people like them. At the same time, a large proportion of whites are going to feel that their country is “being taken away” from them. It’s going to be a potentially volatile mix.

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I have a friend who has a problem with the men she dates. No matter how carefully she chooses, she ends up with men who exhibit the same set of personality flaws — and who have the same tendency to deprive her of what she needs emotionally.

Each time it happens, she thinks she understands how it happened and how to avoid it next time. So she consciously sets out to avoid what she had before and she rationally evaluates what she wants — only to find out that the same essential latent characteristics come out in the next boyfriend. And she has no idea how this keeps happening.

I’ve been thinking about this for several days, starting very early Thursday morning. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 4:30 a.m., I woke up with a thought and I couldn’t go back to sleep. After turning the thought over in my head again and again for awhile, I decided to type it on my iPhone so I could think about it in the morning. As I was about to type it, I decided to throw it out there to Facebook to see if anybody had any thoughts about it. Here’s what my sleep-adled brain typed from bed:

I wonder whether some of us are more frightened by the prospects of good things happening in our lives than we are of bad things. Not consciously, of course, but do some people become so accustomed to disappointment that the notion of happiness is unconsciously scary?

Since it was so early, I didn’t think anybody would see it or comment on it, but I was mistaken. It seems as though a number of people had interesting thoughts about it. And my mind has been chewing on the issue ever since.

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