David McElroy

Have we become a society that has no regard for human life? Or have we always been that kind of callous society? Are we becoming more civilized over the centuries? Or are we hopelessly fallen savages who are fooling ourselves by pretending to be more civil? I can’t decide.

There’s a game that certain thuggish teens in Chicago play called “Pick ’em out and knock ’em out.” (Maybe it’s played elsewhere, but I’ve never heard of it until now.) Three Chicago teens ran across a 62-year-old man last Tuesday when they decided to randomly play this sick game.

“I think I’m gonna knock out this (expletive),” said the 16-year-old who started it, according to prosecutors. They say he started the video recorder on his cellphone and handed it to a 17-year-old to record the attack. He and an 18-year-old took turns recording the beating.

The three thugs surrounded Delfino Mora, an unemployed, partly disabled man who was in an alley collecting cans for recycling. The 16-year-old asked whether Mora had any money. When Mora didn’t respond, he punched him hard enough to knock the older man down. When his head hit the concrete, there was a loud crack that can be heard on the video recording, according to prosecutors.

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When I was a kid, I was pretty sure of whatever conclusions I came to. This used to irritate my father, who would say with exasperation when we disagreed, “You just think you’re right.” I found that an odd thing to say. Of course I thought I was right. Why would I have said it if I hadn’t thought I was right? Why should I question myself now?

My 12-year-old self would have really understood Barack Obama and various other politicians who seem puzzled when people want them to pinpoint the things they’ve been wrong about. I was reminded of it again a couple of days ago when I read these quotes from Obama when CBS News asked him about his mistakes as president so far. He sounded like a job applicant struggling to find an answer to a question about what he biggest weakness is.

“When I think about what we’ve done well and what we haven’t done well,” Obama said, “the mistake of my first term — couple of years — was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. And that’s important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.”

See? He hasn’t actually made any mistakes. He just hasn’t sold his actions well enough.

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Life doesn’t come with convenient signposts letting us know which is the path to happiness and which is the path to misery, so we’re stuck taking blind gambles. Sometimes we choose well. Sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we have chances to change mistaken choices we’ve made. Sometimes we don’t.

But all along the way, we’re guessing and hoping, no matter how much thinking and reasoning we bring to bear on our choices. And we frequently end up with regrets that we carry to our graves.

I thought about this Saturday because of a woman I met and talked with. She’s consumed with trying to make a decision that will affect the rest of her life. Although the specifics of her story are very different from what happened to me, the feelings she described were enough to remind me of where I was four years ago this month.

We’re going to call her Ashley. She has two men who want to marry her, but she can’t decide what to do. She’s dated both of them, but the relationships have been very different. With one guy, she feels the magical connection that most of us want to feel and that a few of us have felt in a very real way. But that relationship had problems. It had great highs, but great lows. She saw things in him that she knew needed work — for both of them.

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