Do you simply hate a status quo? Or do you stand for something?

By David McElroy · June 20, 2012

Most people have no idea what they stand for, but they know very clearly who and what they hate. That makes me very uneasy, because I feel it from people of every political position — and this isn’t the way things ought to be.

When George W. Bush was president, most Democrats hated him far more than they liked any Democrat who might take his place. Since Barack Obama has been president, most Republicans hate him with a passion, but only a tiny percentage of them actually like Mitt Romney, who won the GOP contest to be their standard-bearer. Why is this?

I think part of it is a modern form of tribalism. We like to think of ourselves as past such crude ways of acting, but that’s wishful thinking. If you arbitrarily divide people into a Purple Party and a Yellow Party, both groups will soon develop all sorts of “reasons” why their sides is wonderful and the other is evil and wrong. (And they’ll each declare that their reasons are rational.)

Beyond that, though, I suspect there’s another very important reason. It’s simply easier to feel and express hate than it is to articulate something good and find the character to stand for that instead of the hate.

Anybody who’s ever done anything politically related has pandered to this hatred at times, even if they’d rather not admit it. Campaigns pander to partisan hate all the time, but in ways that make it seem safe and reasonable. When I was working in politics, that was the real basis of what I did. Yes, there were times when we talked about positive things — and I actually liked doing that — but I knew that those things didn’t get the votes.

The things that got votes were the things that reminded people of the things they hate — and connected that to the candidate on the other side. In general, the candidate who most successfully paints his opponent with the things the voters hate is going to win.

Those of us who write about anything political end up pandering to hatred — and I’m guilty of the same thing. Honestly, writing about things that you know are going to anger people and push their buttons is a much better way to get readership than it is to talk about positive things that matter. People are excited to talk about tearing down what they hate, because that’s not hard. They can see how to do that. What’s they’re not so willing to do is the difficult thinking about how to build the world they prefer.

I have more than 3,000 Facebook friends now, and I like to browse through the opinions being expressed there because it gives me an idea of what people are thinking and feeling. I have people of all sorts of political beliefs among my friends. When I scroll through what they’re saying, I find that most are yelling about how terrible “the other side” is. Every group seems to hate another group (or two).

As long as we’re hating, we don’t really have much room to have passion for the things we love. Hate pushes out love, and vice versa.

It’s a good thing to know what you’re opposed to, because it provides a contrast so you can know what’s off-course. But if you let yourself get bogged down in hating what already is, you’re not building a replacement. Your eyes are pretty much totally on the object of your hatred. Your passion and time and money go toward defeating what you hate. You have nothing left over for building positive things.

I’m not going to tell you what you should stand for. We all have things we believe in — things that we believe are good and worth living for. But what I am going to tell you is that standing for something good will make you a happier person than fighting with the things you hate.

Try making a shift in your thinking and feeling — from hate to something positive. I think you’ll be surprised. It might or might not make a difference in the world around you, but it will certainly make a difference on the inside of you.

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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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