As I quietly watch my world burn, I’m painfully aware this isn’t fine

By David McElroy · August 27, 2022

You might have seen this cartoon dog and these flames before. The artwork has become popular on “memes” which satirize people who are oblivious — or in denial — that their world is falling apart around them.

I feel like the little cartoon dog. I feel as though the world is on fire around me. The economy seems to be collapsing. The political system is in a dangerous shambles. The broader culture is a dysfunctional cesspool which is driven by idiots who are out of touch with reality.

But it’s not just the broader outside world. My own life is burning down, at least by the standards of what I expected and what I wanted — and even by the vision of what I believe is possible for my life.

I’m sitting here passively — in the metaphorical sense — and I’m watching the chaos play out all around me. I’m not doing anything about it because I haven’t figured out how to fix everything. I keep functioning as though everything is normal.

But inside, I am painfully aware that this is not fine. Something has to change.

I can’t fix the economy. That’s true. But I’ve understood for many years that the crisis — the potential collapse — was coming. I’ve known I needed to put aside enough money in a safe place to weather the storm.

I’ve seen the growing possibility of political and social collapse. I’ve seen how things could turn ugly and dangerous. I’ve known that I needed a safe place to go to escape the changes which I can’t control.

I haven’t set aside the money I need. I haven’t prepared a place to escape.

I came to an understanding years ago about what I needed to be doing with my life. I realized that I had a strong internal need to create art which expressed myself on a wide array of related ideas. Even if the work never made me wealthy or famous, I knew it was possible to live that way. I knew I could find a way to be congruent with my emotional needs and philosophical values.

But I haven’t done that yet.

I’ve understood for years what kind of family and love I wanted. As I set aside my early-life notions which I simply adopted from my culture, I came to understand what I wanted in a partner and in a family.

But over the last 20 years or so, I’ve squandered the opportunities I’ve had for love and family. I’ve fallen in love with women who were always going to be emotionally unavailable or I’ve mismanaged relationships in which I might have had lifelong love.

And now I find myself alone in life.

I find myself working five days a week on a job which I detest. It’s not a terrible job. The people I work with are good and decent. It’s not difficult work. But I spend each week praying for Friday afternoon to come so I can leave the office — and then I spend the weekend dreading having to return on Monday.

It’s not because the job or people or duties are awful. It’s simply that I desperately need to be doing something else — and having to do anything else has become deeply painful to me.

So I feel as though I’m passively sitting here watching the chaos of the world — watching a lot of things burn down — and I’m not fixing the things I could fix.

I tell myself I’m not sure how to fix the things I’ve left undone. There’s some truth in that. I’m also afraid of things I might have to do — risks I might have to take — in order to become who I need to be. I’m afraid of being an imposter as an artist. I’m afraid of failure. I think I’m even afraid of what it would feel like to succeed.

I don’t know the path forward, but I know that things have to change.

I might be sitting here passively. I might look as though I’m going about my life as normal. I might act as though I don’t know that my life and my world are on fire. I might seem as though I don’t know that I need to take massive action. But none of that is true.

On the inside, I know that this reality isn’t fine. I feel a sense of panic about a clock that’s ticking faster every day.

I know this isn’t fine.

I know that everything has to change.

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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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