David McElroy

Cleaning out the notebook again…

I’m not sure what to say about the Florida GOP results that I haven’t already said over and over again. Barring something completely unexpected, Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican nominee. The fall choice will be progressive vs. progressive lite.”

I continue to hear from my Ron Paul-supporting friends that he still has a chance to win. No, he doesn’t. I have more chance of being struck by lightning than he does of winning. A friend accused me Tuesday night of being negative, but it has nothing to do with that. It’s just a hard, cold analysis of the facts. Neither Paul nor anybody else selling libertarian ideas has any chance of winning anytime soon. That’s not what people want.

People don’t understand basic economics. I’m reminded of that frequently. The latest example comes from a couple who live on my street. They had their house on the market for months and months. They had one offer, but that offer was for $20,000 less than the asking price, so they declined it and the house is now off the market.

They talked to me a few days ago about this situation, and the wife kept saying, “I’m just not going to give it away. It’s worth what we’re asking. People just want you to give it to them because prices are down.” No, seriously. I’m not making this up. People don’t understand that something is worth what a willing seller will take and a willing buyer will pay. The value from a few years ago is irrelevant. What they prefer to get is irrelevant. This very nice woman is angry at potential buyers — who she sees as trying to cheat her. She doesn’t understand the market. Sadly, this is the way most people think. It’s the kind of ignorance that leads to wage and price controls, as well as laws to control all sorts of things instead of letting the market work as it’s supposed to. It’s that ignorance that’s leading us to financial ruin.

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Even though I spent a decade in the newspaper business, I’m not sure I know what “news” is anymore. What’s even worse is that I’m not sure I ever did know what it was. Was I in the news business? Or was I in the business of filling holes with trivia to attract readers for our advertisers?

There’s an argument that what we call news has always been fairly banal. A dictionary I consulted said that news is “information about recent and important events,” but who’s to say what’s important? If the market is deciding, isn’t there always going to be a race to the bottom — a race to attract people with sensational and emotional stories rather than any discussion of things that matter?

In “Walden,” Henry David Thoreau wrote of being concerned that our inventions were giving us a technological ability to communicate, but he worried that people didn’t have things to say to each other that really mattered:

“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” [Emphasis mine]

What if our whiz-bang technology is ultimately empty in many ways? What if our incredible satellites and TV production facilities and complicated infrastructure give us the means to communicate with one another, but what if the things we have to say are banal and empty? That’s what I’m afraid of.

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By the time most of you read this, I should be in surgery or maybe even finished with it. I’m scheduled to be at the hospital by 6 a.m., so many people will still be asleep. I wish this were a day for me to be asleep in my own bed instead of “sleeping” from anesthesia.

Let me bring you up to date on where things stand. As you might know, I was diagnosed with breast cancer slightly more than two weeks ago. A week later, tests of additional samples led the doctor to back off a bit, saying that he could now only say that there were “atypical” cells. The lump in my chest might be cancer, but it might not be.

I won’t know until I wake up after the surgery what was done to me or what they found. Here’s the plan. They’re first going to remove the lump. While I’m still knocked out, it will be sent to the hospital lab for testing. If the people in the lab can determine that it’s definitely cancer, the surgery will resume and they’ll remove all of the breast tissue from the left side of my chest, possibly even lymph nodes, depending on what they find. If the lab can’t definitely say the cells in the lump are cancer — if the cells just appear “atypical” again — the surgeon won’t do anything else today. Obviously, the second is the one I’m hoping for.

If the cells are cancerous and they have to do the major surgery — a “modified radical mastectomy” — I’ll be in the hospital for at least one night. If they don’t have to do that, there’s a good chance I’ll be home Monday night. Either way, I’ve been told not to expect to do much this week.

Honestly, I’m expecting the less-serious outcome, so I’m expecting to be home Monday night. I got one piece of very hopeful news Friday when I went in for a CT scan. (That’s the scanner above.) The technician operating it told me that the lump didn’t appear to be connected to anything else. She said that’s a good sign that whatever is going on in it hasn’t spread elsewhere. She’s not a doctor, so she could be wrong, but it’s a hopeful sign.

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