There’s a lot to complain about, but miracle is so much goes right

By David McElroy · May 26, 2014

I live about 12 miles from the Birmingham airport, so I don’t normally pay much attention to planes coming in to land. But I was in my car Monday evening when a descending plane caught my attention. And it suddenly struck me how strange it is that hundreds of people at a time can go hurtling through the air in giant machines — thousands of times each day around the world — and it’s so routine that we don’t even notice.

We pay attention to the things that go wrong. Those are the things we consider to be “news.” But the really amazing thing is how many things go right every single day and we don’t even notice.

It’s not just airplanes. We live in a complicated world. We don’t grow our own food or have it shipped to us, but when we’re hungry, there’s almost anything we want just down the street at grocery stores and restaurants. There’s gasoline for our cars when we need it. There are new cars to buy when we want new ones. There’s new clothing before we realize we need it. And all of this happens without any bureaucrat planning it and without us even knowing ahead of time what we want.

See the huge trucks going down the road around you every day? And the trains and cargo planes you see? Those are carrying the goods we need to live a modern life. We don’t know how the logistics of all that works. We just know that what we want is there when we want it.

We complain when things go wrong. We notice when things aren’t perfect. If my Internet service is down for a few minutes, I fume. When a phone call — to anywhere in the world — doesn’t connect immediately, I’m irritated. When a store is out of something I want, I’m outraged. And when some narcissistic lunatic stabs and shoots people, we collectively wail, “Why didn’t someone stop that?!”

We expect our world to work because we’re spoiled. That’s not a bad thing in this case. We don’t notice all the things that go right because the world is so relatively advanced and relatively safe that things which would have astounded our grandparents are now completely unremarkable and routine.

Two years ago, I had surgery for breast surgery, and someone mentioned in a comment on another story here that she just had surgery. Many surgeries have become pretty routine. It wasn’t that long ago when anesthesia didn’t exist. Even when doctors knew what to do, they had to simply strap down fully conscious people and cut on them — with those people feeling everything. Infections were routine. Surgery was frequently a death sentence. Today, we operate on hearts and brains and other important organs that were closed even to the most skilled surgeons of a hundred years ago.

There’s a lot to complain about in the world. I’ve made the case many times that our basic human rights are violated by the existence of the state. I’m outraged by the habit of politicians of attacking other countries and creating enemies for us around the world. Other people rail against the injustices that they see, whether I agree with them or not.

There’s plenty that’s wrong, but there’s so much right that we have the luxury of worrying about things that would have seemed trivial to people a century or two ago — because they were busy just trying to survive. Even our poor live better today than the typical prosperous person back then. The world has improved so much that we have very little conception of just how good we have it.

There are terrible things in this world and I’ll keep making that point at times. There are serious structural problems. I think we’re heading for social and economic collapse, but the knowhow and talent will still be there later to rebuild. I expect a terrible time to come, but it’s still going to be a better life than those experienced by people a couple hundred years ago.

Yes, the world is terrible — but it’s a wonderful world as well.

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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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