What’s your goal? Do you want to blow off steam or find solutions?

By David McElroy · August 29, 2011

It seems as though I’m seeing stronger and stronger expressions of political anger lately. If you read that and thought, “Well, of course we’re angry. The other side is so unreasonable,” this is for you.

The people you’re angry with are just as convinced they’re right as you’re convinced that you’re right. “But they’re dishonest,” you say. “They must know that they’re wrong. They have other motives.”

I’m here to disagree with you about that. There are a very few people who get into politics purely as charlatans, but very few. Mostly, they got into it because they were attracted to the political process (and the power involved in it) and they believed that the political position they took was obviously the right one.

The vast majority of liberal progressive Democrats sincerely believe that conservative Republicans are selfish, greedy racists. The vast majority of socially conservative Republicans honestly believe that liberal Democrats are immoral, evil idiots. Various other groups have similarly distorted views about people they oppose. The truth is that almost everybody honestly believes he’s right. The problem is that we have a system that allows only one group to get its way.

I used to get very angry in political discussions. For that matter, I used to get very angry and bent out of shape about a lot of stupid disagreements. I took policy disagreements as personal rejection of some sort. I’m embarrassed at how strongly I felt that way. I’m also embarrassed about some of the ways I’ve acted in online arguments — even when I was right — when it would have been so much more mature (and less time-consuming) to simply disagree and walk away.

For me, that was a character flaw based on a deep fear of rejection, but other people have different reasons for their own extreme anger. A lot of people are frustrated because they don’t know what to do. A lot of other people are scared by change they see going on (and the discomfort makes them angry). As the country’s demographics naturally change — as they always do — we’re going to see more anger from these sort of people, because massive change is coming, no matter who decides what happens in the future.

You need to ask yourself what your goal is. Why are you involved in politics or writing or agitation or whatever it is you’re doing to express your anger? Is your goal to express your anger and make sure that others know why you’re angry? Or is it your goal to find solutions to get what you want?

If you’re just blowing off steam, I have a suggestion. I realize most people won’t take it. (I probably wouldn’t have been either until my psychological epiphany about the source of my anger a couple of years ago.) I’m going to suggest that you’re hurting yourself — not your opponents — with your rage. Further, I’m going to suggest that you aren’t accomplishing anything that will help get you closer to where you want to be.

In the sermon I heard Sunday night from Dr. David Platt at the Church at Brook Hills, he asked how many of us were praying for our political enemies. “It’s hard to hate someone who you’re praying for,” he said, paraphrased as best I can without the audio recording.

Whether you care about loving your enemies or not, the expressions of anger we see around us aren’t doing any good. They’re simply adding more powder to an increasingly dangerous pile of explosive material. It’s going to be ugly if the fuse is ever lit on that powder — and nobody wins that kind of fight.

The problem isn’t the people we disagree with. The problem is a system that requires us to fight against everybody for supreme power. Reject the notion that we have to fight. Accept the notion that there are solutions outside the current political system. Accept the idea that you’re going to be happier to find a solution that will work for you and your children and future generations. The “call to anger” that you’re putting out to everybody is only making you bitter and raising your blood pressure.

Our opponents aren’t generally evil. They’re just wrong. We need to work toward solutions that can get what we all think we want — even though I think a lot of groups will be unhappy with what they claim they want.

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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?

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