As nightmares plague my friends, I’m grateful mine have subsided

By David McElroy · October 4, 2015

Nightmares always end, but when you’re in the middle of one, it seems as though it might last forever.

Last year was terrible for me. For several years, I’d been letting myself slide into a very deep hole. I was depressed. I was broke. I was alone. I was confused.

It was a nightmare that felt as though it would never end. In fact, I didn’t just slide into that deep hole. I fell into the hole and kept digging it deeper and deeper. It seemed as though nothing I could do was right. For the first time in my life, everything felt bleak and hopeless.

But I’ve finally dug my way out of the hole, even though I’ve not really recovered entirely. I’m not where I want to be in life. I don’t have the love or family I need. I haven’t achieved the things I want to achieve. I haven’t become the person I feel driven to become.

I sometimes complain about the things in my life that I’m still unhappy about, but then I see things in the lives of people I care about — and my troubles don’t seem as big as they had seemed before.

• Last weekend, the 16-year-old daughter of a friend in Washington state was riding in a car that was struck by a hit-and-run driver in a stolen car. The young woman suffered serious head injuries and might not make it. My friend has been traumatized, of course. Her daughter had brain surgery but there’s still been serious swelling and she’s remained unconscious. She’s on life support in critical condition. It’s impossible to tell what will happen, so my friend is living in limbo.

• The daughter of a friend in Oklahoma killed herself Thursday. The 43-year-old daughter had been with the same man since she was 17. They have three children together. But she found out he had been cheating on her. Then he suddenly left his family. In her despair and grief, she shot and killed herself. My friend was devastated, especially in light of the fact that another of her children had killed himself 20 years ago.

• A neighbor who I’ve come to love dearly is being evicted from her home. She’s a physician, but she had a car accident last year and couldn’t work for a long time. Because she was away from her practice for so long, she lost all her patients. She didn’t have insurance that replaced the missing income. Her bills piled up and she entered a cycle of debt and despair. Her power is turned off and she’s in the middle of losing her home. Bankruptcy lies ahead for her — and she feels as though recovery is almost impossible.

• Another friend lost her best friend Friday. Ever since her traumatic divorce, she felt as though the only thing she had to live for was her cat, Ruffus. When he died unexpectedly, it sent her into an emotional tailspin, because this feline had been the focus of her emotional survival after the loss of her husband. He was the only one who needed or wanted her. And now she’s truly alone.

I know that problems aren’t really relative in this way. There will always be people with problems worse than mine — no matter what — so I don’t mean to imply that those of us with less serious problems can’t lament our lives not being the way we want them to be.

I don’t mean to say that as long as there’s someone with worse problems, we can’t be hurt and disappointed by things in our own lives. I’m just saying that peeking into other people’s hurts can sometimes put my own problems into perspective.

My life certainly isn’t what I need it to be. But I can still change all of those things I’m unhappy about — and the loneliness and disappointment I feel now don’t begin to compare to the grief some of my friends are feeling tonight.

So while I’m lonely and I’m eager for change in various parts of my life, I’m grateful that things aren’t worse for me. I’m grateful that I’m no longer where I was last year. I’m grateful that I’ve seen such improvement toward getting myself back to where I was 10 years ago.

I’m grateful that I have hope.

Mostly, though, I have strong empathy for my friends, even though I can’t do anything about their pain.

I know their nightmares will end. I know it doesn’t feel that way to them right now. But I know from experience that the nightmare always ends — and the slow process of rebuilding lives can start.

There’s every reason to hope, even in the middle of a nightmare.

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We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

A child having a tantrum understands only one thing: Did I get my way or not? He doesn’t understand the issues involved. He doesn’t understand the reasons that went into a decision. He doesn’t understand any of the things that mature and reasonable adults have to understand in order to live healthy lives. By his reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down his disastrous tariff scheme, Donald Trump shows himself to be — once more — a screaming child having a tantrum. Outside the world of mob bosses who expect to get their way every time, normal adults don’t act this way, but Trump isn’t normal. He’s an angry and vengeful man who has narcissistic personality disorder. And we are in danger as a result. Trump doesn’t understand the legal issues involved in this ruling. He doesn’t understand economics. He doesn’t understand rule of law. He doesn’t understand that he can ever be wrong. All he understands is that he didn’t get his way. And he is now a narcissistic and raging little boy who also happens to hold life-and-death power over most humans on this planet. He’s dangerous — and the system which gives him that power is even more dangerous.

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

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