Why waste time on Ukraine war? Focus on your own future instead

By David McElroy · February 24, 2022

When U.S. troops invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, I eagerly watched every move. The airstrikes and explosions were exciting. The constant updates on progress were addictive. For the first time in history, a person on the other side of the world could sit at home and watch people being killed on live television.

I can’t tell you now why I watched. There was nothing I could do about what was going on. The information was useless to me. Even if something I saw changed my mind about anything, what was I going to do about it?

I’m thinking about that today as Russian troops invade Ukraine. I’m not watching, but almost everybody I know is glued to the coverage of this bloody and outrageous invasion. Why are they watching? Because they’ve been brainwashed to believe responsible people “stay informed.”

The truth is that wars have become entertainment. All “news” is now entertainment and political theater. I’ve learned not to waste my time and attention on things I can’t control — and I hope you will learn this lesson which it took me way too long to learn.

I’m not minimizing the significance of what’s happening right now in Ukraine. This is an outrageous and immoral invasion. On an emotional level, I desperately wish someone would strike back against the Russian bear and defend the Ukrainians. I would love to see Vladimir Putin humiliated and stripped of power.

What Putin is doing is very similar to what Adolph Hitler did at the start of World War II. Hitler had German troops seize more and more territory around Germany, quite confident that nobody would stop him. He took the Sudetenland, then all of Czechoslovakia. Then it was Austria. Then Poland.

Hitler’s propaganda explained at each step why he was right to do what he did. He explained his aggression to the German people and they mostly believed his lies.

In 2014, Putin likewise stole the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, and he paid no price for it. Today, he is just taking his aggression to its logical conclusion. Just as Hitler justified his invasions by claiming the lands he invaded were historically German, Putin is now claiming that Ukraine is traditionally Russian territory.

All of this is evil and wrong. The lesson — if you didn’t already know — is that Putin is a dictator and he lies constantly to justify doing whatever he wants to do. You can also reasonably conclude that permanent peace is pure fantasy when politicians are allowed to accumulate power with which to attack their neighbors.

If you need to take 10 minutes and brush up on the history of Ukraine and why this Russian invasion is based on lies, go ahead. It won’t take you long to learn everything you need to know.

But once you’ve done that — hopefully from books or some other print source — turn your television off and quit watching what’s going on in Ukraine right now.

There’s nothing you can do about it. Whatever happens there — terrible things, most likely — are going to happen no matter what you think. And the time you waste on a war you can’t control is time which you can’t spend on your own life.

We really are trained to believe that we’re supposed to watch such things. When you were in school, you probably got credit for knowing what was happening in the rest of the world every day. But all you’re doing is entertaining yourself.

The flow of up-to-the-minute information which we have come to call news is essentially meaningless, but there are powerful forces which want you to pay attention.

Politicians want you to keep watching because what you see inflames your emotions and make you easier for them to control. The big media companies want you to watch because they count on your attention to allow them to keep selling advertising.

If you’ve been watching the invasion, think about what you’re doing. What’s your purpose? What will you do with whatever information you gain? Is there anything you can do about it?

No, you have no real purpose. There’s nothing you can do with the information. And there’s nothing you can do about the war.

The future is bearing down on us like a speeding locomotive — and most of us have done little or nothing to prepare for our own future. Shift your attention. Deal with your own needs. Fix the problems in your own life.

Turn your television off and leave it off. You don’t need any “news.”

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