David McElroy

Are you a coward? For much of my life, I’ve been one — at least a large part of the time. I’ve drifted along avoiding things that scared me, acting as though I could somehow cheat my fears without having to face them. I’m at the point in life where I can’t do that anymore.

I can either face the fears and become who I’m supposed to be or I can go back to hiding in cowardice. Now that I understand the truth about what I’ve done, though, I don’t think I can put it back into a box and hide it on a shelf. I have to confront the fears — and become the person God made me to be.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue since the first of the year. Something happened that made me ask myself whether I was going to continue being less than my best or if I intended to make the changes necessary to be who I wanted to be. If I’d realized all the implications of that when I started thinking about it, I might have run. But I didn’t. And once I let myself go down that road, I didn’t have any choice but to follow some trails to their logical conclusion.

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I’ll be honest and tell you that I couldn’t care less about auto racing. The idea of spending my time watching a bunch of cars go around a track — much less caring which car finished first — is beyond my comprehension. I’m sure other people feel that way about sports I love, but car racing seems bizarre to me.

It’s hard to consider it a sport when the biggest key to strategy is to go as fast as you can and keep turning left. (The Onion had my all-time favorite satire of NASCAR.)

But news from the world of NASCAR caught my attention Friday when there was buzz that five drivers had declined an invitation to the White House to meet with Barack Obama. (One of them later said he actually will be there.) Not only can I not understand why this is news, but I can’t understand why all the other people who receive similar invitations don’t do the same thing.

Somewhere along the way in this country, we’ve started acting as though the president is a big deal and should be treated like royalty. If the apparatus of government were limited to the powers it should have, a peacetime president would have nearly as much power and appeal as the general manager of your local water purification plant. We need to quit treating presidents as though they hold an office worthy of automatic respect.

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Lack of honesty in communication bugs me, but it’s also something I understand very well. As a longtime political consultant, I’ve been guilty of saying things to the public to push emotional buttons at times.

So I’m not sure whether to be disgusted or feel professional admiration for the public relations people at the Federal Emergency Management Agency who are responsible for morphing government bureaucrats into our “federal family.”

According to the Palm Beach Post, FEMA has pretty much banished the word “government” from its news releases. In its place, you’ll find talk of the “federal family,” as though they’re going to take us on vacation when school gets out.

It’s definitely creepy and kooky, but there’s nothing mysterious about it. They’re not the Addams Family. They’re just politicians twisting the meaning of words.

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