Your healing can begin with Political Junkies Anonymous

By David McElroy · June 23, 2011

I’ve already done the hardest part. I’ve confessed that I was once a serious addict — a political junkie addicted to the highs of winning elections and helping my ideological bedfellows take over part of the world.

But as a recovering political prostitute, it’s time for me to try to help others make a break from their addictions, too. So I’m happy to announce the founding of Political Junkies Anonymous.

If you’re a political junkie, you already know it in your heart — and you know you need help. You’ve found yourself caring more about elections than real life. You’ve made the mistake of thinking that it really mattered whether your favorite candidate won. Worst of all, you’ve taken buffoons such as Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann seriously. Yes, my friends, you need help.

Here at Political Junkies Anonymous, you can meet with other political junkies who have come to understand that majoritarian political systems are just traps that let you compete with other groups to impose your will on everybody else. We can jointly admit that we love the drive for that power — and we can help each other as we seek to learn to leave other people alone to live their lives as they choose. The program has two levels — one for the casual abuser and another for the hardcore cases who’ve turned to political prostitution.

Like any good 12-step program, we have a system for you to work through. Take a look at our steps and see if you’re ready to admit you’re a junkie and begin breaking free:

Step 1: We admitted we were powerless to control our craving for electoral politics — that our lives had become unmanageable from political overload.

Step 2: We came to believe it was only through the power of individual choice that we could be restored to sanity rather than live with the insanity of majoritarian dictatorship.

Step 3: We made a decision to turn power over to individuals to allow them to make personal choices for their lives rather than trying to raise up rulers over them.

Step 4: We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of the harm that our previous political activities have had on others.

Step 5: We admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our coercive political sins.

Step 6: We were entirely ready for God to remove the defects of character that made us believe we had any right to choose rulers over other people.

Step 7: We humbly asked God to remove the shortcomings and delusions that led to getting involved in politics and polluting our minds with garbage from pandering cable TV news shows.

Step 8: We made a list of all persons we could think of who had been harmed by the politicians we worked for and supported.

Step 9: We apologized to those who had been hurt by the politicians we worked for and supported, except in the cases of those who hadn’t yet figured out they were still being hurt by willingly following politics.

Step 10: We continued to take personal inventory and we confessed to each other whenever we felt ourself start to desire power over others or desire to watch idiots argue on TV.

Step 11: We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood God, praying only for better understanding of the morality of not forcing our will upon other people.

Step 12: Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other political junkies and began trying to build a world where everyone could make choices for his or her own life.

If you’re ready to take your life back and quit trying to control other people, it’s time to join us. We can turn off cable news. We can quit working in campaigns. We can quit pretending that we’re doing good things when we send money to politicians. We can start building alternatives that don’t require us to tell other people how to run their lives.

Yes, it’s tough, but we can do it. Altogether now: Yes, we can. Yes, we can.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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