Very few things warm my heart and fill me with joy like babies

By David McElroy · July 3, 2018

I heard Mila before I saw her. The restaurant was empty a few minutes ago except for a handful of employees and me. But I heard Mila cry, so I knew there was a baby in the house.

I’d seen pictures of Mila before, but I’d never seen her in person. She was born almost 4 months ago to one of the managers here and I’d been wanting to meet her. Her father was called into work, so he had to drop her off with her mom while someone came to pick her up. In the 15 minutes she was here, I finally got to meet this little bundle of joy and love.

She’s a very serious baby and she seemed to be taking the entire world in with her huge brown eyes. She regarded me with intense curiosity. Then she eagerly took my finger in her tiny hand and squeezed it tightly as she gave me the only smile I saw from her.

Babies seem to be filled with curiosity and wonder at this tender age — and they spark a sense of love and delight for me. There are few things in the world that fill me with hope the way a new life does.

I have no idea what this little girl faces. Nobody does.

But at this point, her life is a book of blank pages waiting to be written. She hasn’t learned that some people hate each other. She hasn’t seen the worst of her fellow humans. There are so many possibilities about what she could become and what she could experience over the next hundred years.

What will Mila become? Who will she be? Who will she love? Who will break her heart? What contribution will she make to the long chain of humanity that’s come before her?

Her grandparents all came from Central America. Her parents grew up as Americans with one foot in each of two cultures. She will grow up among her fellow Americans with little understanding of where her family was a couple of generations ago.

And she can be whatever she wants to be.

I think that’s why babies make me so happy. They haven’t experienced the hurts and pains that life inevitably brings to all of us. They haven’t been shaped by things they would rather not have experienced. All the possibilities are open to them.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve felt fiercely protective of children — and I feel that way about Mila tonight. I wish there were a way for me to make sure that Mila would never be hurt and never experience the ugly parts of life that I’ve seen and that so many of us have experienced.

I wish she could remain innocent and happy and loved. She has so much ahead of her.

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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.

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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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