It’s best to focus on future, ’cause dead past is a ‘bridge to nowhere’

By David McElroy · October 10, 2018

I got an email a couple of months ago from someone I hadn’t heard from since high school. He and I were never close, but we knew one another from taking all the upper-level math and science classes together. He had been to a class reunion the night before and looked me up online to tell me about people asking about me — and even thinking he might be me.

I’ve never been to a reunion of any kind. Over the years, I’ve been tracked down by reunion committees who seem to assume that everybody is eager to know when a class is getting together, but I’ve never been tempted to go to a reunion. Not for high school. Not for college. Not for any workplace.

I’m not mad at anybody from the past. I simply don’t care. All of those people are strangers to me now. For years, I’ve puzzled over why I seem to feel so differently than most other people do about such things and I think I’ve finally figured it out. Most people seem to believe their best times were in the past — and they’re eager to relive some of that past — but I’m convinced my best and most interesting days lie ahead.

Unless someone from my past is going to be part of my future, that person has no place in my life, because the past is dead and buried.

I’ve been thinking about this for the last couple of days, because I got an email Monday with the news that a member of one of my favorite old bands has died. The leader of the band — a musician who I admire greatly — sent out a grief-filled reminiscence about his long-time friend and band-mate.

For the band, their glory days are mostly behind them. The response to this man’s death was entirely appropriate and reasonable, so I’m not saying there was anything wrong with it. But reading him reminisce about his lost friend crystalized why I feel so different about the past. I have an interesting past — and I have some interesting stories to tell — but the future is where my attention lies.

I’ve had to spend a lot of time lately thinking and writing about the past as it relates to my parents, but that has felt more like trying to come to terms with what made me the person I am today. It’s been more like therapy and wading through a swamp in an effort to never go back there again.

I’ve recently become aware that a friend of mine is completely clueless about how much he’s changed since I first met him a couple of decades ago. Some things have come up that make him question whether he’s really changed more than he realizes. I’ve seen the changes — they’ve been obvious to me — but he prefers not to see them, because seeing where he came from would force him to admit that he had been some things he would find unethical now.

That’s another reason the past can be dangerous. If you’re an emotionally healthy person, you aren’t the same person you were 10 years ago, much less 20 or 30 years ago. But focusing on the past — and focusing on the people from your past — can easily keep you living in the mold of the person you were back then.

I’m a radically different person today than I was 30 years ago. I’ve much different even than what I was 10 years ago. I expect to keep growing and be an even different person in the future. I don’t have any desire to become weighed down by what I was in the past, much less with other people’s false ideas of what I was.

I was reminded last week that people who knew you in the past often have boxes in their minds for what they think you are — and they are eager to stick you into those boxes and keep you there. I heard from someone who I used to know and the things she had to say were full of preconceptions about me. It was a mixture of accurate things which were true years ago and her false impressions of things that were never true.

Such people who knew you from the past — especially people for whom you played an important supporting role at some point — don’t want to let you out of the mental box they have for you. Depending on who the person is, that can be annoying or it can be toxic.

I’ve found that people from the past are rarely going to understand who you are today. That makes sense, I suppose. They don’t have the context to understand the changes you’ve gone through and they usually have an emotional investment in seeing you as that person you used to be (or that they believed you to be).

I used to think I could explain myself to people from the past and they would “get me.” For a long time, I thought that about my father. I’ve thought it about other people. But I’ve rarely found it to be true. I’ve found that the best I can do — in many cases — is to walk away and build different lives without those people.

Sufjan Stevens touched on this in his song “Should Have Known Better,” from the album called “Carrie and Lowell,” which deals with his relationship with his dysfunctional mother. He sings:

Nothing can be changed
The past is still the past
The bridge to nowhere

There are people from our past who can choose to be part of our future, if we choose to allow them to be. But for those who want to leave things as they were in the past — or who want to sit on the sidelines of your life — I see no place for those people.

I’m focused very clearly on building a future for myself and for the people who I choose to be in my life. I’m not angry at the people from the past. I’m not upset with old classmates. I don’t wish ill to old girlfriends or family members. I don’t have bad will for any of them.

But if you don’t have a place in my future, our past is nothing but history. I want to live in the future I’m building, not in the pages of a history book where you’re not going to allow me to be who I am today. You can either come with me — or stay in the past without me.

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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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