David McElroy

You can’t live halfway between love and indifference. One or the other has to win in the end.

I’ve been thinking about this more and more lately because I continue to struggle to love in the ways I’d like to. A year ago this week, I wrote something fairly long about love in the broadest sense — and it’s something I’m still trying to come to terms with.

The natural way of this world is to ultimately experience something worse than hate. It’s for indifference, but it’s broader than that. The way of the world leads to a cold, hardened and callous heart. Hate can sometimes be part of it, but in its most extreme form, it’s indifference and a complete lack of feeling anything.

I believe we ultimately face two choices.

On one side, there is turmoil, anger, envy and judgment. Most “realistic people” — who have had their hearts hardened by disappointment in others — default to living closer to hate than to love, but ultimately they settle into a cold indifference.

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It was already raining lightly when I left the office late Friday afternoon. By the time I merged onto the interstate, the gentle summer rain had turned into a gushing torrent of water. Somewhere along I-459 south of Birmingham, I could barely seen the tail lights of the car creeping along in front of me.

Traffic was bumper to bumper in all three lanes of each direction. We inched along dangerously. I was afraid of what I might hit as I kept going forward, but I was equally afraid of being hit in the rear if I didn’t move fast enough.

I simply couldn’t see what was going on — and I was afraid that trying to pull off the road was no better since I couldn’t see anything and others couldn’t see me.

So I moved along blindly — barely moving — as buckets of rain continued to fall from the sky.

And then I saw something that seemed like a faint shaft of light in the sky off to my right. The rain still beat down furiously, but where was that light coming from?

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Everybody knows “net neutrality” is a great idea. Right?

Ask any self-respecting member of the digerati and you’ll get the same response. We need net neutrality to “save our Internet.” That’s what all their slogans say, so it must be true.

But do you know what the real issues are? Do the people leading the pro-net neutrality crusades even understand what they’re advocating? Or are they just going along with what seems like a good idea since it’s aimed at big companies they don’t like?

There are few issues today which are as dishonestly framed as “net neutrality.” Although I like many of the outcomes which its advocates favor, the idea is a massive intrusion on private property — and it sets up government to control the Internet.

Briefly, the idea of net neutrality is that any Internet provider must treat every packet of data coming through the network equally. The provider isn’t allowed to charge more or less for one type of data — video or traffic coming from one particular site, for instance. An Internet service provider isn’t allowed to have plans that give a user all the data he wants from one company but have metered access (or no access) for data coming from a different company.

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