Too many voices with little to say: Politics matters less and less to me

By David McElroy · July 27, 2012

There was a time when I wanted to change the world through politics. I grew up believing that a great, moral people elected wise leaders, who then made decisions in our best interests. If I could just become one of those leaders, I could change so much and help so many.

But I finally grew up and quit believing in fairy tales.

I’m having more and more and more trouble lately being interested in politics, even enough to write about the subject. If you’re not a partisan of the two major “teams” — and you have no illusion that enough people are going to adopt your ideas to put them into practice — it’s pretty boring to watch the political spectacle. Have you ever tried to separate yourself from the shouting participants in the political process and just observed the way they interact with each other? It’s sickening.

If you’re a part of one side or the other, you imagine that the people on your side are the kinder and more intelligent and more well-meaning. You notice the positive examples of people on your side, but you don’t notice the many angry, hateful people on your own team. On the other side, you see screaming idiots who hate you and don’t have a good bone in their bodies. When you’re caught up in that trap, you have no idea how much the two sides are mirror images of one another.

This world isn’t going to be changed through politics. I’ve made that argument many times here. You either agree with me or you don’t. But for those of us who’ve decided that politics can’t change anything, the question is why we continue to pay even as much attention to the entire slimy mess as we do.

Some people will tell us that if we don’t pay attention to politics, we’re going to be controlled by it. Frankly, you’re going to be controlled by it anyway, so you don’t have any choice in that matter. The honest person who doesn’t believe in the process will either look for a way out or simply ignore the whole thing and concentrate on the things that matter.

And that’s the really interesting question. What are the things that matter? It’s certainly not the shouting idiots on television. It’s certainly not the smooth-talking politicians. So what does matter?

For me, it’s big things and little things. It’s the excitement of joy at experiencing God sometimes. It’s one of my purring cats climbing into my lap and going to sleep. It’s the joy of reading beautifully written words. It’s the voice of a certain woman. It’s the realization of the arrival of email from someone I want to hear from. It’s the hope of maybe becoming the man I was made to be.

It’s listening to people tell me their stories and finding out the things that matter to them. It’s times when I suddenly figure out some truth that’s eluded me. It’s the joy of some piece of art that suddenly means something to me. It’s the times when I can help someone, sometimes just in very small ways. It’s the moments of satisfaction I can have every now and then to feel that someone loves me.

It’s all of those things and a million more things. They’re the things that make life worth living. The further I get from politics, the more I experience these things. The more I have my eyes on the things that matter, the happier I am. The more I have my eyes on politics, the more disgusted and angry and alienated I am.

Lately, I’m more and more interested just in paying attention to the culture around me and to the values and psychology of people. I don’t necessarily like most people most of the time, but maybe I can love them and make the world a better place in small ways even if I don’t especially like them.

You can’t make a difference in the world through politics. You can make a difference in the lives of individuals, even if the society as a whole is too sick to repair. Maybe it’s the best we can do.

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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?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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