David McElroy

I no longer take politics seriously.

My years of experience working in politics cured me of the childhood training which had taught me to respect politicians and their offices. I saw what they were behind closed doors. I saw what the system was really like.

I learned that becoming enamored of a politician — of any party — was a bit like thinking that the stripper who’s taking your money at a strip club really, really likes you.

You can see politics as a strip club or a brothel, but I tend to see it as a circus instead. It’s like a full-time televised circus in which various clowns are competing for your attention and adoration. And the prize they collect at the end of each election cycle is the right to run your life until the end of the next election cycle.

It’s pretty insane if you realize what’s really going on.

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There are two men who live inside me.

One man is the most rational person you know. He’s deeply logical and focused on objective reality. Just the facts. This man wants to have his affairs in order and live in ways he can be proud of. He wants to be a good man above all.

But there’s another man inside of me, too. That man is deeply emotional. He believes in magic. He trusts his intuition. He values love and connection above all. He would do anything for the right kind of love.

There are times when the hyper-rational man is in charge. He gets a lot of things done. He’s hard-working and he’s capable. Many people admire him for being smart and reasonable.

But there are times when my heart is open and there seems to be a portal open to some sort of fantastic world of wonder instead. And when that man is in charge, he feels like taking risks and making magic happen — if he just knew which magical words to say.

He’s waiting for something inexplicable to happen. Any moment now.

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By the time I was in college, I knew everything. My beliefs about politics and theology and society were firmly fixed. I’d been taught almost everything and I figured out the rest.

Or so I thought.

Eventually, a bit of humility started to erode my arrogance. I finally had to ask myself  how I could have been so lucky to have been born into the only culture and country and religious group to have everything figured out correctly.

When I realized how absurd it was to think that could have been true, I was forced to look at what I believed and ask myself why I believed those things.

I went through a lot of deconstruction of what I believed. The process was painful at times. Eventually, I firmly embraced some of what I’d been taught and rejected other parts of it. This was a terrifying process that forced me to be vulnerable to the scary possibility that I had everything wrong.

Years later, I’m nothing like the person I was when I was young. My values are the same, but many of my beliefs have changed. I’ve realized now that a lot of people believe changing your mind is a sign of weakness or failure.

I’ve come to see that the power of change has given me more joy and freedom and confidence than I ever had when I knew everything. And I couldn’t have experienced that without accepting that I’d been wrong.

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