David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

David McElroy

THE McELROY ZOO: Meet Henry, the tiny kitten who was dumped with a broken leg and a big heart

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Henry came very close to dying before I ever even met him. In fact, if a neighbor had had the least bit of compassion, he might have been dead. But because his suffering wasn’t worth anything to her, he became my problem — and he ultimately became a great source of joy for me.

It was sometime in 1992, and I hadn’t been living where I live now for very long. I didn’t know many of the neighbors yet, but I knew a number of the neighborhood kids. As I was coming back from a walk, one of the little girls came running up with a breathless story about a kitten under a porch who needed help. Here’s the story that I pieced together from talking to various people who were involved.

A woman who lived on the street found a tiny kitten who was injured, apparently after a dog attacked him. She took the kitten to a nearby vet clinic, where she found out that his right rear leg was shattered into a number of pieces. The clinic recommended putting him to sleep as the most humane option. The woman agreed, but then found out she would have to pay for it. She refused. So she brought the little lump of life and fur back home — and left him outside to fend for himself … and to die.

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Experimentation produces beauty that won’t come from slavishly following One True Way

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about monopolies. We’re told that monopolies are bad when most people choose to use a particular company for a certain product or service, but few people realize that the biggest and most abusive monopoly of all is whatever government claims authority over people against their will.

I’m a big fan of blind experimentation, so I do a lot of things just to see what will happen. As an amateur photographer, I take a lot of very random pictures — exclusively with an iPhone 4 lately — so a lot of them are very bad and very useless. But sometimes a result comes through that surprises me and makes something beautiful that I didn’t anticipate.

Friday, I wanted to experiment with shooting directly into the sun, one of the most useless experiments possible in photography. For whatever odd reason, the lens flare that I got happened to create this lovely pattern — quite unexpected, quite unplanned, quite serendipitous. Things like that don’t happen when everything is planned and ordered and there’s only One True Way.

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Correcting an old error: there’s no such thing as ‘We the People’

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With apologies to the men who drafted and adopted the U.S. Constitution, I have to point out something that’s not especially popular: There’s no such person or entity as “We the People.”

I frequently see political groups — from every orientation — claim to be “We the People.” Democrats used it to attack the Bush administration. Republicans do it now to attack the Obama administration. (The “tea party” groups seem to especially love the phrase.) Libertarians and various fringe groups do it at times, too.

In all cases, these groups are trying to claim that their views are the legitimate will of “the people.” The problem is that “the people” don’t speak with one voice. For instance, activists demanding gay marriage in the name of “We the People” have a very different thing to say than a religious group demanding recognition of the traditional definition of marriage, even though they also claim to speak for “We the People.”

There isn’t one big unanimous voice. There wasn’t one when the Constitution was adopted. There’s no such thing as a collective will — and there’s no moral way to impose One True Way on everybody in the name of “We the People.”

The truth is that “We the People” is an emotional phrase that’s been used to mean many different things to many different people, frequently by demagogues preying on people’s ingrained prejudices. But we need to quit looking to vague and misleading collective phrases such as this. We need to realize that we’re all individuals, with the right to go our own different ways. If we’re going to get to work on the serious business of finding peaceful ways to accomplish that, we have to give up on the emotional fiction that any of us — or any group of us — speak for “We the People.”

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