David McElroy

Babies don’t come with instruction manuals. The creator doesn’t provide a book for parents which explains how to grow a baby to physical maturity and mental health.

A baby is more complex than any artificial machine humans have ever created. We’ve been studying the human “machine” for as long as we’ve existed. We’ve managed to muddle through for many thousands of generations of change and growth. But we still don’t really know how to consistently raise babies into emotionally healthy adults.

My father was about to turn 30 years old when I was born. I was his first child. He was incredibly proud to have a son of his own. The photo above is one that someone snapped of his reflection when he was watching me in the hospital nursery through the glass.

I know all the things that are ahead for him (and for me) after this photo was taken. I know how unhappy he became. I know how badly our family fell apart. I know how miserable I became — and how confused I was by almost everything in my childhood.

On this day, though, he was full of love for his baby boy. He had the best of intentions. He wanted to be a great father. But with a job this difficult, good intentions aren’t aways enough.

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When shame comes over me, I often don’t recognize it. Not at first, anyway.

I often find myself feeling angry and hurt over some small thing. Someone might have insulted me. Someone might have simply disagreed with me. A person might have been rude or belittled me in some way. Maybe some tiny way.

And something in me feels ready to explode. I’m furious. I’m hurt. I feel the need to strike out and hurt whoever is hurting me. I just want the hurting and humiliation to go away. And that’s about the time — if I’m lucky — that I’ll realize I’m dealing with shame.

Someone has pushed one of my buttons. Maybe it was an intentional slight. Maybe not. Either way, I feel shame. Before long, the shame has morphed into a passive form of self-directed aggression. I’m not good enough. I’ll never be loved or understood.

Then my harsh and brutal superego — the imagined channeling of my childhood father’s voice — tells me to stop whining. To stop feeling anything.

“Just get over it,” the voice screams.

And then I hate myself for having needs. I hate myself for hurting. I hate myself for feeling anything. As I simmer in this toxic stew of shame and hurt, I realize I’m not as close as I’d thought to the emotional health which I’ve been seeking for decades.

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Why is America ruled by evil men and women? You don’t want to hear this, but it’s almost certainly your fault.

Almost everybody has been brainwashed to choose “the lesser of two evils.” You’ve been brainwashed to hate one side or the other of the mainstream, so much that “your side” seems almost sane and saintly by comparison.

So most of you hate one group of politicians or another. The makeup of the groups changes over time. Some people used to hate Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan more than anybody else. Then they hated George W. Bush. Most recently, they’ve learned to hate Donald Trump with every fiber of their beings.

For another group, it was once George McGovern, then Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy. Bill Clinton and Nancy Pelosi soon followed. Today, it’s Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who they hate with passion.

If you’re pushed into a corner, many of you might admit that the candidate you enthusiastically support is a terrible person in some respect or another, but you’re adamant that you must support your “lesser evil” — because a different brand of evil would rule us if you didn’t worship the evil you choose to support.

And this mass social brainwashing results in the vast majority of people knowing their rulers are evil, even the ones they support — but unwilling to step away from this system — because “the other evil would be so much worse.”

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