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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The Republican Party is dead. It still exists in name, of course, but it’s nothing but a shell. All that’s left are idiots and stooges and con men of the MAGA party. When Donald Trump is gone — which won’t be long — those populist idiots and pragmatic fools will have no one to follow. Democrats will thrive. They will take more power than ever and they will push the federal government further to the radical far left than ever. When that happens, don’t just blame Trump if you’re a conservative. Blame every person who has claimed to be a conservative and has given up on principles, character and everything else that Republicans once claimed to stand for. As someone who worked as a GOP political consultant for many years, this is disgusting and disturbing to me. Those who have enabled Trump to have almost unchecked power are going to be shocked when they see what they will unleash in the long run. It’s been plain all along what this narcissistic con man is. It’s your fault that you chose to pretend not to see what he really is.

We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

A child having a tantrum understands only one thing: Did I get my way or not? He doesn’t understand the issues involved. He doesn’t understand the reasons that went into a decision. He doesn’t understand any of the things that mature and reasonable adults have to understand in order to live healthy lives. By his reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down his disastrous tariff scheme, Donald Trump shows himself to be — once more — a screaming child having a tantrum. Outside the world of mob bosses who expect to get their way every time, normal adults don’t act this way, but Trump isn’t normal. He’s an angry and vengeful man who has narcissistic personality disorder. And we are in danger as a result. Trump doesn’t understand the legal issues involved in this ruling. He doesn’t understand economics. He doesn’t understand rule of law. He doesn’t understand that he can ever be wrong. All he understands is that he didn’t get his way. And he is now a narcissistic and raging little boy who also happens to hold life-and-death power over most humans on this planet. He’s dangerous — and the system which gives him that power is even more dangerous.

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