Politicians, empires come and go; only love and nature will endure

By David McElroy · November 6, 2016

Nature doesn’t care who wins the U.S. presidential election Tuesday.

No matter who wins, the sun will rise in the east Wednesday morning. It will sink gloriously to the west that evening.

The earth will keep spinning. Trees will keep growing. Leaves will keep changing in the autumn and returning in the spring. Torrents of water will keep falling from the sky and forming great rivers to rush toward the sea.

Animals will keep reproducing and living the lives they’re designed for. They’ll keep growing and changing and evolving. They’ll continue to roam the earth, sometimes competing and sometimes cooperating.

Humanity will continue, too. The billions of people on this planet are the descendants of people who lived through far worse than what most of us will ever face — or can even imagine. The worst scenarios we can conceive would have been unimaginable fantasies of luxury to them.

Two people are competing Tuesday for a terrifying degree of control over this earth. They are both horribly flawed human beings — far worse than even the average among us. You can make arguments, if you’d like, about which of these terrible people is worse for the immediate future and why.

But it doesn’t matter.

First, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. One or the other of them will win and your thoughts, emotions and actions will not change anything about that.

Second, each is competing for power which is immoral for any human being to hold over another. Neither outcome is more moral than the other. No human has the right to control others against their will. Having a majority of people agree to violate the rights of any minority doesn’t somehow make such violations any more moral. We are all losers of every election, because most of us are buying into the monstrous notion that it is moral and acceptable for someone — anyone — to have this power if we happen to agree with him or her.

Third, the things that will determine your future — your love, your happiness, your fulfillment, your comfort — are mostly decided by the things you do with your own life, not by the actions of any politician.

What I’m saying goes against everything you’ve been taught. You’ve been told — at almost every election — that “this is the most important election of our lifetime.” You’ve been taught to worship a system of state power which is essentially a secular religion. You have been taught that every decent and responsible person must choose a side in an election in order to “support our democracy.” You’ve been taught there’s nothing more important than who holds power in the White House.

All of those things are lies.

The world has survived the birth and death of countless empires, most of which we don’t even remember today. Even the ones we do remember and celebrate are historical oddities, not things which matter to our daily lives. The Roman Empire — which started as the Roman Republic, remember — ruled most of the known world for far longer than the United States or other modern regimes have existed. None of the people living under those various emperors believed their empire would wither away. They believed their empire was unique — that it would always survive.

The people who lived in those places were just as varied as we are today. Some of them were great people. Some of them were evil. Most were varying shades in between. Same as today. Every single one of them is dead, no matter what he or she did to influence the direction of any government of that day.

The thing that mattered most while they lived is whether they were productive and how they related to the people around them — how they worked and how they loved. Same as today.

My future is determined by the things I do. I can’t change what politicians decide to steal from me. I can’t change the wars that people start because they are greedy or hateful or insane. As Pat Terry once wrote in the words of a song, “Nothing I say’s gonna change the way of this world.”

Nature is going to outlive all of us. Even if politicians are stupid enough to destroy humanity entirely before we can find a way to live on other planets, nature will still be here and it would recover without batting a metaphorical eye.

Mostly, though, love endures. In the here and now, the most important things I can do involve loving others and finding emotionally healthy love in return. Creating love and life somehow connects us to the Spirit I know as God. (You can argue about the nature and theology of God, but that’s not the point here.)

The God I know is the source of all love. He is the source of all life. When we love and create, we are most like Him — and I have faith that the love we experience and express somehow lasts far beyond the point when our feeble bodies return to dust.

If you have any sense of perspective — historical, spiritual, rational, any kind — you will begin to sense how little any election matters.

No matter what happens, the earth will keep spinning. The sun will keep rising and setting. Life will keep evolving.

And around the world, people just like you and me will continue living our lives, struggling to be better people, striving to achieve more and desperately seeking to be loved.

Nature endures. You and I will endure, too.

No matter what happens, you and I will keep walking on toward the future we’re personally creating for ourselves — through what we create and how we choose to love.

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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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