Fallen world keeps bruising me, but I still believe love will win

By David McElroy · June 12, 2025

“They say if you scratch a cynic, you’ll find a disappointed idealist. And I would admit that somewhere underneath all this there’s a little flicker of a flame of idealism that would love to see it all — whoosh! — change. But it can’t happen that way.”
— Comedian George Carlin

I want to give up on this world. I want to give up on the human race. I go back and forth between rage and numbness about what I see from my fellow human beings.

I’m angry at the willful ignorance and delusion. I’m angry at the rampant dishonesty. I’m numb that people allow themselves to believe hateful idiocy — and I know there’s nothing I can do about it. So I swing wildly between two competing parts of my mind.

One part of me still clings to the belief that life can be beautiful. That love is real. That truth matters. That something sacred still flickers in this broken world. This part of me sees the way things ought to be and aches for those things. It dreams of deep, soul-level connection. Of a home where peace lives. Of a life anchored in what’s true and good and lasting.

But there’s another part of me that rolls its eyes and scoffs. That part has been hurt more times than I care to count. It remembers the idiocy, the lies and the self-deception of the masses who have given in to blindly following their passions and hatreds. That part of me sees a world that often mocks what’s pure and rewards what’s evil. And that part of my mind whispers to me, “You’re a fool if you keep believing!”

These two parts of me wrestle every day. The idealist still believes in love. The cynic keeps pointing to the scars and the new wounds.

It’s not a battle I asked for. I never wanted to become suspicious of what’s good. I didn’t set out to doubt people’s intentions or question the stories I used to believe in. But the world bruises you when you live with your heart wide open. It knocks the wind out of you in ways that don’t heal quickly.

The older I get, the more I understand why so many people shut down. I understand why so many trade dreams for distractions and empty pleasures. Why they choose safety over vulnerability. I understand it — but I don’t want to live that way.

I’ve been tempted, though, because it hurts me to watch what people choose to become. It confuses me that they can’t see what they’re doing to themselves — and to others — even when it’s pointed out. They’re so full of hatred for certain people that they end up blindly following liars and narcissists and con men of various sorts. And they can’t admit what they’re doing — to others or to themselves.

When you’ve poured your heart into a beautiful vision of what the world could be — of what humans could be — and had it shattered when you’ve seen people choose to believe lies instead, it hurts. When you’ve tried to live with integrity and watched people lie and cheat their way to success and leadership while you’re still struggling in silence, the temptation is real. Just give up. Get by. Numb the ache. Build walls. Go through the motions.

But I can’t.

Because despite everything — despite the bruises, the disappointments, the loneliness, the nights when despair feels like a permanent resident in my heart — I still believe love is going to win.

Not the kind of love the culture sells. Not the shallow kind that’s here today and nowhere to be found tomorrow. I mean the real kind. The hard kind. The holy kind. The kind that breaks you open and remakes you. The kind that comes from God and flows through people who’ve been healed enough to risk giving it away.

I’ve seen glimpses of it. Enough to know it’s real. Enough to keep me hoping.

Some days I want to give up on people. On relationships. On the idea that something beautiful can be built in a world this cynical. But something deeper in me — something I can’t explain — keeps whispering that there’s more. That love is real. That truth matters. That beauty isn’t a lie.

That voice is quiet, but it’s persistent.

And I’ve decided that voice is worth listening to, even when the louder voices — of fear, of disappointment, of bitterness — are trying to drown it out.

So I keep walking. I keep believing. I keep watching. I keep hoping.

I keep loving — even when it hurts and even when the love I can give is very imperfect. I keep loving even when it costs me. Even when I’m not sure others will ever see beyond their hatred, their self-deception and their ignorance.

Because I’d rather be bruised for believing than be safe and hollow because I’ve given up.

This fallen world keeps trying to make me hard. But I don’t want a hard heart. I want a heart that stays soft — even if it means I bleed more often than I’d like to and even if the wounds and the bruises remain long after they’ve been forgotten by those who delivered them.

It might not make sense, but I still believe love will win. I don’t know when, but I know love has to win in the end.

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