David McElroy

I had a dream last night about a woman who ran away from me. The more I think about it today, the more I think about a question that a reader sent me last week. She’s heartbroken about something right now and she wrote to ask, “Why is it so hard to find true love?”

Why are so many of us alone? Why are we looking for love?

In my dream, I saw a woman who I wanted to talk with. I somehow knew that I’d love her. How? I don’t know; it was a dream. We were both leaving a grocery store and she was ahead of me. As I sped up slightly to overtake her so I could speak, I noticed that she had lost one of her legs and walked with a prosthetic leg.

As we walked through the parking lot, she sped up when she realized I had picked up my pace behind her. I sped up further, but she started running as well as she could run on a prosthetic leg. Before I could get anywhere close to her, she was gone. She had run away because she saw me as a danger — when all I had in mind was the possibility of getting to know her. Maybe loving her.

I got into my car and drove very fast and very recklessly through the parking lot. I have no idea why. I almost hit a couple of people. It wasn’t anger, but I seemed to have a desperate need to — I don’t know — find something. Anything. It didn’t make rational sense. As the dream ended, I was close to wrecking the car and possibly hurting someone in another car because I didn’t know how to get my foot to the brake.

Somehow, I knew that I was doing this because the woman had run away and there was something self-destructive about me because of that.

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Someone told me Friday that there’s a new local website that someone has set up to compete with the Birmingham newspaper. Because I’ve thought seriously of the same idea for years — and because I despise what that newspaper has become — I was eager to see the site.

Sadly, I was very disappointed.

It wasn’t that Alabama Today isn’t a decent site or that the stories are poorly written. As soon as I saw the mix of stories being promoted, it was very clear that the site reflects the world view of someone who assumes politics and government are the most important things in the world.

I spent years working among people like that when I was a political consultant — and I know that people who believe that can’t produce anything I’m going to want to read.

The site is called Alabama Today — a name which I once considered using on a statewide newspaper — but it’s really Conservative Alabama Politics Today. The name suggests that it’s a general-interest website for news from the state, but it’s clearly directed at the things on the mind of a very tiny political class — a group of activists who tend to be out of touch with the people they claim to be working for.

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There was a shooting in Chattanooga, Tenn., today. Four Marines were apparently killed by a gunman motivated by religious hatred. That’s as much as I know about it — and that’s all I want to know.

When I was growing up, I thought it was everyone’s duty to be informed. By that, I meant one should read newspapers and watch news on television. It somehow seemed like the responsible thing to do. I thought news was important. That’s probably part of the reason I ended up spending a decade in the newspaper business.

But I pay little attention to news today. What’s more, I pay very little attention to the larger evils that I’m aware of. I know people are being slaughtered in various countries because of political and religious conflicts. I know that people are sitting in prisons — in the United States and around the world — who have no business being punished for things that shouldn’t even be crimes. I know that there is open slavery in some parts of the world. I know there is underground sex trafficking in most places. I know that women are abused and children are being taught to continue ugly cycles of evil all around the world, including near me.

I know that children and adults suffer in violent and dysfunctional households. I know that kids are being beaten and sexually abused pretty much everywhere, mostly hidden. I know that animals are being tortured and abused for the pleasure of evil people. I know that people mistreat each other and hate one another and excuse it in the name of religion or other beliefs.

There’s so much evil that it’s impossible to list it all. In fact, there’s so much evil in the world that much of it is so routine as to seem banal.

I’m not paying attention to any more of it than I have to, but it’s not that I’m callous. I actually care too much.

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