World is an insane roller coaster and I need this insanity to stop

By David McElroy · April 15, 2020

I pass the sign every day and never notice it.

Stop.

But as I walked through my neighborhood late Tuesday night, my eyes were suddenly drawn to the crooked red sign. It grabbed my attention and wouldn’t let go. This is what I had been struggling for the last week to say.

Stop!

I’ve been in a funk for days, but I haven’t known exactly what was going on. I’ve felt angry. I’ve felt resentful. I’ve felt something powerful that needed to come out. Whatever it was has been strong enough to make me keep to myself more than usual. I’ve been slow to respond to phone calls and emails and everything else.

Stop! Everything needs to stop!

As I stood there in the street with this bright red sign screaming at me, something suddenly clicked. It wasn’t rational. It was an angry and chaotic desire to raise my voice here on this silent midnight street and demand that the insane world stop what it’s doing. I needed everyone to hear me.

I need this chaos to stop.

I don’t want to be polite and passive about it. I want to let out a primordial scream to get the attention of anyone and everyone. I need to be heard.

In this crazed moment tonight, I feel like one of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. They weren’t reasonable men. They weren’t trying to make friends. They were seemingly crazy men with crazy messages — telling the people to repent and change their ways — and they didn’t really care whether anybody liked what they had to say or not.

That’s what this feels like.

I feel like one of these men who God had sent into the desert to fast and pray and wander alone — and then who emerges to tell the world what’s wrong and how to be right with God.

But I don’t need to talk about sin or Idol worship or rebuilding the Temple. My message is simpler but ultimately just as profound.

We live in a world which seems more insane each day. I often say bitterly that there’s nothing else to call modern culture other than Clown World. The people who we are told are our leaders are evil men and women. The ideas which increasingly dominate the culture would have seemed completely insane to any decent person just a couple of generations ago. Our values are warped and twisted.

We have lost our way, individually and collectively.

As individuals, we have separated ourselves from one another in ways that matter. There are more of us than ever, but we have never had so many people who are lonely and miserable.

We have more material wealth than any society in human history. We have bigger houses, nicer cars, fancier clothes and more shiny things that we know what to do with. By all the values which our culture teaches, we should be happy and successful and feel valued.

In reality, more people than every are unhappy and lonely. More than ever experience secret shame about feeling worthless — in spite of the success than we were taught would bring us happiness. Our success isn’t bringing joy. Our wealth is making us only fearful of what we have to lose. We are more separate than ever.

And we are unknowingly raising another generation which will be even more unhappy and more confused and more alone.

I need this chaos to stop. I need this insanity to stop. I need the roller coaster to stop — so that those of us who want a different way of life can reject what we have and build lives with different values instead.

The insanity of the news media and politicians has to stop, but that can’t happen as long as you keep watching them and following their every move.

The chaos of social media has to quit capturing our attention and sucking us into living virtual lives that make it harder to live actual lives. We have to quit arguing and trying to force everyone to be just like us. We have to have the grace to allow other people to be wrong — without hating them.

We have to stop living with walls separating us from the people we need to love. We need to tear down the walls we’ve built — culturally and individually — which guard our hearts. We have to stop living behind walls that protect us from being hurt, but which also keep us from being loved.

We have built an ugly modern culture which does not work for most of us — and I want to call those for whom it doesn’t work to a new life. For those who have ears to hear the call, I want to insist that there is hope. I want to show that there is another way to live.

If you want another way, you have to stop.

You have to stop going down the easy path that seems so familiar.

You have to quiet your mind, quiet your heart — and start making the changes that a still small voice tells you that you need.

This isn’t a message just for tonight. It’s not just for tomorrow. It’s a long-term call to change our lives. But nothing is going to change until you at least take the first step.

Stop.

Get off the roller coaster. Listen to your heart.

A new life — a loving and connected life — waits for you, but nothing happens until you take this first step. Nobody can do it for you.

If your heart knows you need change, you have to choose to stop what you’re doing — and start over.

Share on Social Networks

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?

Related Posts