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David McElroy

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People who confront harsh reality are ones who survive bad times

By David McElroy · April 15, 2020

In February of 1973, a U.S. Air Force C-141A transport plane took off from Hanoi, Vietnam, headed toward the Philippines. As the wheels pulled off the ground, 40 jubilant men screamed with joy and relief.

They were the first planeload of nearly 600 American prisoners of war being released from North Vietnamese prisons, where they had been tortured and abused for much of the previous decade.

I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be one of those released prisoners, but it’s even harder to imagine how these men stayed sane — most for years — while they waited for the end. And since they were tortured and abused, they never knew whether they would survive to return home or if they would be killed instead.

I’ve been thinking today about those men because they offer some clues about how different people handle extreme stress. As I keep hearing people talk about how much stress everybody is under right now — with many locked at home in quarantine with their families — I’ve found myself thinking about ex-POW Jim Stockdale.

He said one thing separated those who thrived in captivity from those who were destroyed. It offers an important clue for us today.

When writer Jim Collins interviewed Stockdale years later for his business book, “Good to Great,” he asked Stockdale how he endured the years of uncertainty without falling into depression and despair.

“I never lost faith in the end of the story,” Stockdale said, as recounted by Collins in the book. “I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

After Stockdale told him this, Collins said they walked together in silence for a couple of minutes and then he asked, “Who didn’t make it out?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Stockdale said. “The optimists.”

Collins was now confused. Didn’t Stockdale just tell him that his optimism and faith had let him survive. So he asked Stockdale to explain.

“The optimists,” Stockdale repeated. “Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

Collins reports that Stockdale paused and then continued.

“This is a very important lesson,” he said. “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

When I recalled that passage today — and then when I found it to re-read — I suddenly understood why I’ve been paying attention to how people are reacting to the crisis we’re going through right now.

Some people are enduring the stress, but they’re in deep denial about what’s going on and what things need to change in their lives. They’re the ones who don’t want to change. They’re the ones who want to put their brains into neutral and just believe that everything will go back to the way it was.

Those are the people who are going to have trouble in the years to come.

There are other people who are looking reality squarely in the face. They’re the ones who are soberly assessing the changes they’re going to have to make in order to survive and then thrive. They’re the ones who see just how ugly things can get and they’re trying to start making plans. They’re preparing themselves mentally for life completely changing.

As we face the future, we need to have unwavering faith in our ability to improvise and in our ability to face whatever challenges are thrown our way, but if we put our faith in fairy tales — the notion that life as we knew it will return with no substantial changes — we will be setting ourselves up to be destroyed.

You didn’t create the environment into which we’ve entered. You didn’t trigger the events which seem to be leading toward a financial apocalypse. But you are the only one who can decide what your reaction to these events will be.

Most people will wait for politicians to tell them what to do and how the future will be “fixed.” These people will believe lies and fantasies. They will have their hopes crushed. They will wait too long to realize that nobody is coming to rescue them.

A few people will realize that their mindset and their decisions will determine their futures. These will be the people who stop being passive consumers and quickly become planners and builders instead.

Jim Stockdale was the senior U.S. military officer in North Vietnamese captivity. He had been a U.S. Navy commander — leading a squadron of planes from an aircraft carrier — when he had been shot down. After he returned to the military, he became a three-star admiral and retired as a national hero. He and his wife wrote a book detailing their experiences apart — alternating chapters to tell their different points of view.

Stockdale and those like him were not destroyed by their POW experience, but there are hundreds of men who never returned and who remain unaccounted for. Although the Vietnamese admit to only 55 Americans dying in captivity, so many others remained unaccounted for that it seemed likely others were killed by their experience.

You and I will probably never be tortured in a prison, but we do face a probable future that is very stressful and different from all that we’ve planned for.

You and I can survive this experience and come out better for it, but only if we’re willing to face the hard, cold, ugly reality — and deal with it instead of trusting in childish hopes and fantasies.

Nobody is coming to rescue us. We must rescue ourselves.

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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