David McElroy

I was talking with a friend Sunday about some things that bother us about mainstream middle-class American culture. She was telling me about having to go to the home of a relative for holidays for years. Everyone was expected to buy expensive presents for everyone at Christmas.

She was describing her sister’s house, which had five bedrooms, five baths, work room, weight room, art room, pool, trampoline, built-in everything, eight televisions with eight cable boxes and a three-car garage.

It sounds like a really nice house, doesn’t it? So why was my friend bothered by it all? And why did the description sound so suffocating and sickening to me?

It was hard to put my finger on it, but I thought about it for much of the afternoon. I’ve thought about this issue before and I sometimes have trouble justifying the revulsion I feel for such things. I can try to justify my feelings in practical terms by talking about the waste of money and resources that go into such places, but the real answer goes much deeper than that. (Here’s another attempt I made about 18 months ago to answer the same question.)

Trying to understand why I feel this way is making it easier for me to understand why punks, goths, rappers and other “weirdos” of the world dress as they do and reject acting and looking like what we consider normal.

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This picture isn’t from urban fighting in Iraq a few years back. It’s from Tuesday in Birmingham. More than a hundred officers — local police, sheriff’s deputies and DEA agents — stormed a housing project to conduct seven simultaneous drug raids.

Reporters and photographers from The Birmingham News were along for the ride and recorded the action. The pictures make it look like something from a TV show such as “COPS.”

And what was the result of this massive show of force? Six people were arrested and two weapons were confiscated. That seems to be it. The newspaper said that “the operation was aimed at the ongoing problem of people selling crack cocaine, meth, marijuana and Lortab out of apartments there, and even on street corners.”

So an entire housing project was disrupted with more than a hundred heavily armed officers just to pick up six suspects? All so they can’t conduct voluntary transactions with other people? It seems like an open-and-shut case of state overreach — which is typical of the so-called drug war.

But at least some residents were happy to see police. For instance, 31-year-old Kimberly Coleman told the newspaper that she woke up a couple of weeks ago to discover a bullet hole in her living room window.

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Wednesday was a terrible day for me. It started out badly when I woke up and found a picture and some text that someone had sent me in the night. Someone who I love has been depressed and suicidal for some time. There were times when it was better and times when it was worse. Right now is one of the worse times.

But this isn’t her story. Instead, it’s the story of someone who loves a depressed and suicidal person. It’s about how it’s affecting me.

All day Wednesday, I felt physically sick and mentally anxious and emotionally heartsick, simply because someone I love needs help that I don’t know how to provide.

I’ve been through things in my own life that scared me, but I’ve never been as afraid as I am now about this situation. The most recent crisis point had passed by the time I knew it was going on, but I still walked around in a daze all day. At different times, I felt fear, despair, anger and determination.

I can’t be sure how much of my fear is for her and how much is the realization that her death would destroy me. So am I feeling empathy for her or am I selfishly fearing the loss of someone I value? I keep thinking about that, but I don’t know. I’m not sure it matters, because the same outcome is in the best interest of both of us, even if she doesn’t see that now.

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