David McElroy

For a long time, I’ve found myself wishing I could live on an island somewhere — or maybe even in a cave — to escape the stupid people who seem to be all around.

But when I think about it more seriously, I realize it’s not just stupid people who I want to escape. I want to escape from very bright people who insist that it’s their moral right to force me to obey their will.

There are some quite brilliant people — at least as measured by IQ — who have fallen for the civic religion that tells them it’s their moral right to make my decisions and take my money to use as they please. Most galling, perhaps, is their sanctimonious belief that I’m being “greedy” if I don’t want to obey them.

I watched an online discussion play out of Facebook Monday between siblings over the issue. One woman posted this graphic from the Bastiat Institute, which I had also posted Monday. It points out something that I’ve talked about before. If someone else claims a right to what you produce, you are a slave to that person or group to that extent.

After the woman posted the graphic, her two sisters disagreed with her, each for a different reason. It ended up mostly as a dialogue between the original poster and one of her sisters, who is a progressive left Democrat. They’re all three exceptionally intelligent women. But the leftist misses the moral point about the theft of property entirely. I think this part of the exchange was when I most wanted to bang my head against a wall:

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When a couple in Mississippi recently set their wedding date, they thought they were looking at dates in July of 2012. But some members of their church looked at the calendar and thought it said 1965.

Charles and Te’Andrea Wilson had been attending the First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs together and had planned to join the congregation after they were married. They reserved the church for their wedding weeks in advance and invitations were sent. Then the couple got news that no one in 2012 would have expected.

The Rev. Stan Weatherford told them that some people in the congregation objected to a black couple being married there. They were told that no black couple had ever been married by the church since its founding in 1883. The pastor said certain powerful people in the church had let him know he would be fired if he went ahead with the wedding.

The couple were married on the day they had chosen and Weatherford still married them, but the ceremony was moved down the street to another church — one with a black congregation.

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Six months ago today, I had surgery to remove cancer in my left breast. It was an episode so far out of my normal experience of life that it almost seems as though it never happened. And now, six months later, one of my best friends is going in for major surgery today, too.

When I had my brush with cancer, I didn’t think I was going to die, but I knew it was a possibility. As my friend goes in for some serious surgery, I don’t expect her to die, either, but I know that she could die. We all react differently to the idea of death. Some people get depressed. Some people think of others they’ve lost. It has a different effect on me. It makes me think seriously about life.

(If you weren’t around for my cancer scare last January, here’s the article in which I first discussed it. And here’s what I wrote as I was going in for surgery that day.)

I don’t know about you, but I have a terrible habit of taking life for granted. There have been certain chunks of my life when I’ve absolutely wasted my time, simply because it seemed as though my time was almost limitless. When I’ve done that, I’ve felt bored and unfulfilled. I think that’s one of the real causes of some people turning to various kinds of drugs or other addictions. (For me, the addiction was sugar. I’ve written before about feeling like a “sugarholic.”)

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