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It hurts to lose everything we own, but those we love can’t be replaced

By David McElroy · March 6, 2019

Troy Hardy stood amid the wreckage of his lakefront home in Smith’s Station, Ala., Monday afternoon. The house where he had lived with his wife, Susie, for 17 years was in ruins. A tornado had come through 24 hours before — while he, his grandson and his wife were home — and destroyed everything.

When he realized a tornado was bearing down on them, he started screaming his wife’s name, but the tornado was so loud he knew she couldn’t hear him. He told a Washington Post reporter that he found Susie in their bedroom. She had put their 4-year-old grandson onto the bed and gotten on top of him to protect her with her body.

Hardy grabbed another mattress and pulled it over the three of them — and then he covered them with his own body to protect them as much as possible. And then they waited in terror as the tornado destroyed the home around them.

“It’s hard to explain, or even really talk about,” he told the Post. “It was everything we had. But all of it is replaceable. My wife, my grandson, they’re not replaceable. Nothing matters more than life.”

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It’s OK to volunteer for tornado cleanup, but only if you’re not a pro

By David McElroy · June 5, 2011

In Minnesota, Mike Haege watched a couple of weeks ago as a tornado tore through the Minneapolis neighborhood where his sister lives. He knows the neighborhood and wanted to help. Since Haege owns a tree trimming and removal business, he was the perfect candidate to volunteer. He’s an expert at the services that were most immediately required and he had the right equipment to do the work.

The day after the storm, he drove the 40 miles or so with his equipment to volunteer to work. He registered with the appropriate agency to volunteer and then headed out with a representative from the agency to start work.

Let’s mention that companies that do paid services of this type have to be licensed by the cities in which they work. Haege knows that and is licensed in the cities where he normally works, but he doesn’t work in Minneapolis, so he doesn’t have a license from the city. I’m sure you can see where this is going.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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