Trivial objects have power to be containers for strong emotions

By David McElroy · May 13, 2018

The tiny music box has no monetary value. It probably cost a couple of dollars when it was new. It’s just a novelty, really, not a real music box. You turn the hand crank and it plays “Happy Birthday.” That’s it.

But as I experienced another birthday today, nothing made me happier — if only briefly — than this little piece of cheap metal and plastic.

Why? It has nothing to do with the device itself. There are a million similar things out there which I wouldn’t even notice. So why this one?

It was a birthday gift from a woman who used to love me. It was part of a box of whimsical delights that she spent an afternoon carefully selecting for me in the past. I still have the box and the music-maker and a few other things.

I keep them because such tiny objects have the power to hold onto love — and playing that silly little box allowed me to feel loved by her again. Just for a minute.

I guess anybody can understand the sentimental value of objects, but to me it goes beyond that. In a way that sounds a little mystical, it’s as though an object that has been touched by one person — especially as a gift — somehow becomes charged with the emotions behind that gift.

Have you ever received a message from someone in the mail — a card or a letter, perhaps — that could have more easily been sent by email? If the only intent is to communicate information, there’s nothing quite so efficient as email or a text message. So why is it special to get a physical letter or card?

When someone chooses and then touches a physical object — such as a card or a piece of paper on which a message is written — it becomes something special. It’s no longer just the information. It seems to contain a kind of magic. It seems to come with the emotional and spiritual essence of the sender.

This is why gifts are so important.

A great gift isn’t a generic item that the recipient would happen to like to own. There’s a place for such gifts and there’s nothing really wrong with them. But a great gift is one that has thought and touch and emotion in it. That sort of gift isn’t something to throw away or to sell. It’s something to treasure, because a little piece of the sender’s heart came with it.

If I were to die and someone else had the task of going through my things and deciding what to do with them, there’s no question that such a person would throw this little music box into the trash. I have a lot of things like that — things which have no value to anyone except me, because those things are physical containers for a feeling from the past.

That’s the real value of the things that we keep. Yes, some objects have simple utility and we all need those. But there’s an entirely different group of things. They’re the things which mean nothing to anyone except the giver and the receiver.

Those gifts are charged with powerful meaning to those two people, but they’re useless to anyone else.

Love is a powerful emotion. So are many other human emotions. In a way that I can’t explain or understand, gifts can hold onto those emotions. They can allow us to replay emotions from the past. They can allow us to feel loved once again.

That experience isn’t as good as the real thing, but there are times when holding onto the belief we’ve been loved is all we have. And there are even moments when that’s enough.

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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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