Had enough yet? Ready to quit pretending politics changes things?

By David McElroy · January 2, 2013

Democrats and Republicans manufactured an end-of-the-year crisis that they declared must be solved or disaster was imminent. Without a budget deal to stop automatic spending cuts, the entire country would go over a cliff, they claimed, presumably destroying us all. Their last-second solution was to pass huge tax increases and cut almost nothing from the budget. Is anyone naive enough to be surprised?

I’m not going to dissect the deal. Frankly, I don’t care enough to. If you just want to be outraged over the tax increases and the groups getting favors, there are plenty of places that’ll oblige you. I’d like to ask a much bigger and more fundamental question.

Are you ready to give up on politics? Are you ready to quit pretending that it makes a difference who you vote for or whose election you work for? Are you ready to quit wasting your time, money and effort on a losing effort?

I know plenty of good people who believed that if they worked for Republican candidates who promised to oppose taxes and promised to trim the size of government, things would change. There were a lot of people who had faith in the Tea Party movement to change things, even though the actual philosophy behind the Tea Party types became more and more muddled over time. If you’re among those people, do you see now that your time and work and money was wasted?

The Republican Party is like an abusive husband who keeps promising to change. He keeps saying that if you’ll trust him this time, everything will be different. And fiscally conservative voters act like a battered woman who’s scared to give up on the known and hold the louse accountable. So like the abused wife who returns to the abuser, those voters keep going back to the system and back to a party that has betrayed them time after time — including this week.

This week’s bi-partisan agreement raises $41 in new taxes for every dollar of spending cuts. Is this what you expected when you marched in protests and volunteered for candidates and voted for people who promised to stop the taxing and spending increases? Did you expect the House Republican leadership to ram the deal through? After all, they were supposed to be the fiscal conservatives who saved us. Can’t you see that nothing is going to save us?

There is a fiscal cliff that the entire society is going to go over at some point. It was always a dishonest characterization to pretend that this latest “crisis” was a cliff at all. At worst, it was a speed bump for government. But even the speed bump was enough to terrorize the politicians who don’t understand anything other than making government bigger.

At some point, the government will lose the ability to pay its debts, because productive people will be unable to pay what’s demanded of them. There just aren’t enough of them, and more and more of them are going to walk away rather than be robbed blind in order to allow money to keep flowing to military adventurism, corporate welfare and the quasi-socialist medical system. (If you think we’ve had a free market in medicine, you’re not paying attention.) When the government loses its ability to pay the debts, draconian taxes will be imposed. Borrowing will stop. Rebellion will increase. Collapse is inevitable.

For now, you have two broad choices. You can either keep returning to the Republican Party and believing its lies about how it will cut the size of government and stop taxes from growing or you can give up on the system and figure out what you’re going to do when things collapse.

Those are really your only real choices. If you want to continue playing political games — pretending that it matters who is elected president and Congress — go right ahead, but you’re wasting your time, money and effort. Worse, you’re distracting yourself from figuring out what to do when the system collapses.

When the system collapses, nobody is going to care who you voted for or where you marched. The only thing that’s going to matter is whether you have a plan to take care of yourself and your family.

Quit thinking that swapping one politician for another is going to change anything. It’s not. The entire system has to go. The Titanic is going down. Quit paying attention to the two groups fighting over who gets to claim authority over the bridge of the sinking ship.

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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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