I need responsibility for slaying dragons to protect those I love

By David McElroy · August 7, 2021

It was just an odd computer glitch. Something with a reasonable explanation. It has to be. But I’ve sat here for the last hour or so looking at a photo I didn’t intend to find tonight. And it pushed some unexpected emotional buttons.

I wanted to find a photo on my MacBook from about 20 years ago, so I typed in a file-name search. Instead of things related to what I was looking for, the system turned up five photos that were completely unrelated to that. At the top of the list was a photo from seven years ago. I didn’t open it.

Then I worded the search an entirely different way. It gave me a handful of files again. At the top was the same photo which had been at the top of the search before. I felt mesmerized by the weirdness of what I was seeing, so I opened the file, even though I knew what it would be.

There were two faces. One was my face. The other face was that of a beautiful woman who I used to know.

The photo was a composite the woman made seven years ago. We had been talking about what our children would look like. She made something that was a closeup of her face and mine to help her envision how our genes would combine.

She thought we would have beautiful children. I thought so, too.

As I looked at this photo of our smiling faces, I thought again about how much I had wanted to end up married to her — how much I had expected that. And I found myself thinking about why I had wanted to marry her. But I saw it from a slightly different point of view than I’d seen it before.

I’d always seen it primarily as being about the love and connection that I felt between the two of us. I still saw it that way, but I saw another layer on top of that. I had wanted to marry her — and to build a family with her — to give me real purpose in life. I wanted to be responsible for her.

I wanted someone to need me. To count on me.

All of this was strongly influenced by something that happened Thursday night as I slept. I vaguely remember being awake for a few minutes during the night, tapping out some thoughts that came to me in my sleep. I found the words on the Notes app of my iPhone Friday morning. And as I looked at this photo tonight, I suddenly applied my nocturnal thoughts to this woman.

“Without responsibility, what’s the point of life for a man?” I had written. “If you’re not taking care of someone who you love, you feel useless. Having responsibilities gives a man purpose — and I lack purpose now. I need purpose so badly. I need a family who rely on me to slay the dragons of their world, not because they can’t fight their own battles, but because they allow me to show them how much I love them.”

I don’t know what prompted that in my sleep. Maybe it was connected to a dream. Maybe it was just some random thought as I was in the twilight state between waking and sleep. I’ll never know.

But as I looked at the photo from seven years ago — and thought about what I had written last night about purpose — I fully understood that additional layer of why I’d wanted to marry this woman.

She didn’t need me to slay her dragons. She’s smart enough and competent enough to kill any dragons in her way. But that increased my desire to take care of her and to build a family with her. I wouldn’t be doing it because she was weak or incapable. I would be slaying dragons for all of us — solving problems for us — simply because I wanted to express love in a tangible way.

The times in my life when I’ve had the most success have tended to be when I was doing things for someone else. Today, outside the simple needs of my cats and my dog, nobody really needs me. I lack purpose.

I have a great need to do work for someone who I love. A wife, a family. I have a need to be able to make something good and take it to a woman and say, “I made this because of you. You inspired me to be my best.”

And that’s a big part of why I wanted to marry her. I was excited to have purpose again. I wanted to slay dragons and build a future for a family who counted on me to be their champion.

Love and connection are important. I do want those things. But I also want someone to rely on me. I want the responsibilities — and burdens — of showing a wife and children that I love them and that I’ll take care of them.

That’s a purpose worth living for. And it’s a purpose worth loving for.

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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?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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