We’ve learned to think it’s normal, but time spent commuting is nuts

By David McElroy · January 10, 2019

As soon as I can find a way, I’m going to start working from home again — and this is part of the reason why.

This could have been almost any evening rush hour on I-459 south of Birmingham, but it happens to have been Wednesday just after 5 p.m. We were at a dead stop for awhile and then we inched along for awhile. There were two wrecks between I-65 and U.S. 280.

All of those highways are clogged in the evening even when there are no wrecks. But when there are accidents, the place can be a parking lot.

I spend about an hour and a half each day driving to and from work. By the standards of some — especially in larger cities — it’s not bad to drive 45 minutes each way. But I find myself wondering how we ever came to accept this as normal.

I used to work from home. I kept my own hours. I dressed as I wanted — unless I had to meet with clients or visit vendors. I controlled my time. Nobody dictated when I had to be where.

When I started driving again to a job with set hours — about five years ago — I swore it was temporary. Then I picked up another job and that turned into my full-time gig, but it still required me being in the office half the day each weekday.

I’m not sure how I came to accept that this was necessary. Honestly, I’m not sure how our entire culture was conned into thinking this is a reasonable use of our time.

We used to live close to wherever we worked. That was out of necessity in the days before cars. Then cars made it possible for suburbs to sprawl farther and farther out. People started accepting spending ridiculous amounts of time in cars every day, rarely stopping to think how much time it was taking us from the people we say we love.

I know everybody accepts it as normal now, but it’s not the way I want to live.

The way my work is structured right now, I have to show up at the office Thursday — and Friday and next Monday and so on. If I don’t, I don’t get paid. But it’s a mistake for me to think I have no choice in the matter.

I don’t want to keep wasting this much time in my car. I don’t want to blow this much gas driving to an office. I don’t want to be at an office certain hours — even if it’s only half the day — because someone expects me to be.

I want to work from home again. I want to work for myself again. I want to take back the control I used to have.

Ironically, there’s more money to be made in doing things which allow you to be in control of your time. They just require — at least for me — going back to the mindset I once had that I was going to work on my own terms and accept only the work I wanted.

In politics, that was easy. It can be easy in other things.

I have a specific list of things in my life which I’m changing. It’s a written list and I read over that list fairly often. This is one of those things on the list.

I’m going to be working from home again — or nearby, as I choose — before long. I’m going to take back the control I’ve given up.

I’m not going to sit with the rest of the suckers in the rat race on I-459. I’m going to do things my way once again.

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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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