I keep forgetting that I can’t save those who don’t want to be saved

By David McElroy · February 22, 2022

There are times when the most liberating thing you can do is to give up.

I keep deceiving myself. I tell myself that I’m finished trying to “save” others. I know it’s a waste of time and emotional energy to keep trying to save people who don’t want to be saved. People who don’t believe they need to be saved.

It’s ridiculous. It’s even arrogant of me. And it’s exhausting.

But I keep slipping back into the habit anyway, and I feel like a fool. I find that I’m not saving anyone — and I’m destroying myself by giving myself false hope that change might be coming. The truth is that change isn’t coming. Nobody is going to listen. And I need to save myself — instead of trying to become a hero by saving someone else.

When I look at reality, I see so much which is going to hurt people — some who I’ve loved, some who I’ll never know — and I want to scream in frustration that what I see isn’t obvious to those others. I was once naive enough to believe that if I just explained carefully why people were putting themselves at risk, they would eagerly make changes in their own lives.

What I find is that many people will admit — in the abstract — that they badly need change, but then they’re unwilling to do anything about it once they realize there’s a price to be paid.

I find that people want change — in their world and in their own lives — but they stick with what they already have when they realize that change might be temporarily painful. They overvalue what little they have. They fail to understand that what they could have could be so much more.

They seem blind.

The Christian gospel of Matthew tells the story of a wealthy young man who came to Jesus and asked him how to have eternal life. Jesus first told the man some simple religious things and the man said he had already done those things.

Then Jesus told the man to go sell all that he had and give the money to the poor. When the young man heard this, he went away — and the story tells us he was sad, because he had a lot of money. He wanted to follow Jesus. He wanted eternal life. But he loved his money and security more than he wanted a better life.

Everybody wants something to change in his or her life, but few want to pay the price for what they want. The price is different for each person, but almost all of us make the mistake of believing that we can somehow find a way to have what we want without giving up anything in return.

We believe we can somehow have everything we need without making the obvious changes we need to make. And I’m tired of feeling hurt and frustrated over the pain I see coming for people who aren’t willing to change.

I’m not sure how much I care to warn anybody anymore, because I increasingly feel like a useless fool who’s wasting his time and talking to a wall.

Nobody is going to listen. Nobody is going to change.

I’ve been going through a shift that I didn’t see coming. I’m losing the desire to warn others about what’s going to happen, in the broader world or in their own lives. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a waste of time, so I’m not sure what my point is in speaking.

It might be time to close another door. I’m speaking into a void and few even hear what I say. Those who do hear don’t want to change.

The few who already know they need change don’t need me to tell them what they know. And those who don’t know they need change are going to go right on living their lives exactly as they are.

I’ve realized much of this before. I started out in life wanting to save the world. I really did. Then I wanted to save smaller and smaller portions of the world. I constantly reduced the footprint of what I thought I might be able to do. Now, I realize that I can’t save even one person. I’m wasting my time and my emotional energy. I need to save myself instead.

The irony here is that I need to make a change — a change I’ve known I need to make — but I haven’t wanted to give up on my fantasy of being a hero. Saving a life. Saving the world.

So this is me talking to myself. I can’t save you. I can’t save the world. I just need to save myself — before it’s too late.

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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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