David McElroy

Unless some last-second deal emerges, the U.S. government will be shut down until squabbling Democrats and Republicans can reach a budget agreement. The media is filled with stories about how terrible this is. The Boston Globe even had an online headline that read, “US bracing for government shutdown no one wants.”

Are you scared of this terrible thing called a shutdown yet?

I’m ignoring my better judgment to comment on this, simply because almost anything you say about it is used as fodder by partisans of one side or the other as evidence that they’re right. But I’m not “with” either side on this.

I’m certainly not with the Democrats, who want to grow the size of government bigger and bigger and bigger, including funding the ObamaCare monster. But why would I support the Republicans, who are happy to vote for a monstrously huge government that’s almost as big, just as long as ObamaCare is delayed for a bit?

For years, Republicans have shown that they don’t oppose Big Government. They simply oppose making government quite as big as what Democrats want. And they certainly favor ever-increasing funding for the military-industrial complex that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about? (But who can trust Eisenhower? Those five-star generals are notorious peaceniks who don’t want to fund the military. Right?)

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If you met your child self from years ago, how well would you like him or her? I’ve been thinking with surprise lately that I’d like my younger self quite a bit. The big question in my mind is how I stopped being him.

A few weeks ago, someone reminded me in a vivid way of certain things from my childhood. Those images have stayed in my mind and I’ve been thinking a lot about who I was back then. Thursday afternoon, I started thinking about some of the funny and unusual things I did as a child and teen. The more I thought, the more I smiled. My way of “playing” wasn’t normal. Here are the things I thought of.

I remembered starting a bank for neighborhood children when I was about 11 years old. We hadn’t been living in this community near Birmingham for very long, but I decided I would take deposits from kids around me. I had a box with a lock, and I typed tiny slips of paper noting how much each was worth. I don’t remember exactly what the business plan was, so I’m unclear how I intended to make money, but I remember kids trading those little pieces of paper instead of money for a few weeks. (The whole bank went bust when my sisters demanded all of their money back. I guess it was a run on the bank.)

I thought about a radio relay service that I was going to set up when I was about 9 years old between Anniston, Ala., and Meridian, Miss. I lived in Anniston and I had a friend in Meridian, where I had lived for about a year and a half before. I knew that it was expensive to make long distance calls, so I had found a cheap radio with a limited range. My scheme was to set up repeating relays between the cities to deal with the limited range of the signal. And somehow, I was going to sell cheap communication time between the cities so that people could avoid expensive long distance charges. Yes, it made sense when I was 9.

I remembered my plan to set up an inexpensive telephone service for an area of several blocks between my house and the house of a friend who lived adjacent to the junior high school in Jasper, Ala., where I lived at the time. A tornado had come through town and destroyed a lot of office buildings. That meant that a lot of telephone equipment was being thrown away. I collected all of it that I could and figured out how it worked. I didn’t have central office switching equipment, but I figured out crude workarounds to make a simple system work. My friend and I started laying wire between our houses, but we were stymied by the little matter of how to run our wires over streets without climbing the utility poles. I gave up and just wired my own house with extra extensions everywhere. (I also rigged a bugging device to record all calls on the line. I didn’t really want to hear anything in particular; I just wanted to see if I could do it.)

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Cleaning out the notebook again…

Watching the bloody and useless battles over the funding of ObamaCare confirms for me once again that getting out of the system is the best choice for sanity and long-term logic. The forest is burning and it’s too late to put out the fire. The smart thing is to figure out how to escape the doomed forest, not fight over who gets to control certain trees. The whole thing is going to burn.

I’m frustrated by the utter lack of regard for the truth that I see in so many posts on Facebook and Twitter these days. Just because someone posted something and you’re reposting it doesn’t absolve you of responsibility for spreading lies. Show respect for the truth and your own credibility. Use some basic common sense before spreading obvious idiocy that can be debunked in 30 seconds. You’re making yourself look foolish when you do that. It seems that people are willing to post anything that appears to support their viewpoint, whether it’s credible or not.

For the last three months, I’ve waited through various delays for the person who had agreed to do the special effects makeup for my next short film. The continued delays in getting certain supplies were frustrating, but I thought everything would be on track once she finally got those supplies. She told me about two weeks ago that she would be ready to go in two weeks, but she sent me an email out of the blue last Thursday to say she was quitting because of “work and personal matters.” So I’ve wasted three months on this project and now I have to find someone else who can do the same effects or else switch to a different project. I’m frustrated, because I thought we’d have a finished film by now. I’m trying to find someone who can do the same effects, because I really want to make this film.

I have a Facebook friend who just had to endure a criminal trial in which his brother was prosecuted for killing their parents. The brother was convicted earlier this week and sentenced to life without parole Wednesday. Sometimes when I look at his situation — and the situations of others who’ve endured very difficult circumstances — it makes me feel as though I have less to complain about than I sometimes feel that I do. I know that you can’t really compare people’s heartaches, but I do feel fortunate that I haven’t had to endure what some others have had to endure. I don’t know how well I could deal with some of what I see friends deal with. In many respects, I have it pretty good.

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