David McElroy

I hate Mother’s Day and I hate Father’s Day. For many people, they’re sweet and nostalgic days to remember and appreciate parents who meant a lot to them. For me, they’re nothing but emotional turmoil and regret.

If you look in the dictionary next to the phrase “dysfunctional family,” there’s a picture of my family. There were five of us. In addition to my parents, I had two younger sisters. We were born just two years apart, so we were like three little stair steps. (That’s me with my mother around the time of my second birthday.)

My mother was very intelligent, artistic, funny and sensitive. She was a free spirit who didn’t even hear the drumbeat of the rest of the world as she marched to her own. She was oblivious to anything except following her own heart. In college, she had been selected as one of the “beauties” for the yearbook — back in the days when they used to do that — at the teachers’ college where she and my father both went to school. She was wildly popular and widely loved.

My mother was too sensitive to be married to my father. I didn’t understand it at the time, but his strict and controlling nature drove her to a mental breakdown. They were nothing alike in temperament or habits or much of anything else, but he insisted that his way was right about everything. He pushed and manipulated and controlled and cajoled to force her to be exactly what he was.

Keep Reading

Eight years ago, I made a short film. I had been saying for years that I wanted to make movies, but I hadn’t done anything about it. I was scared and I found every excuse under the sun not to do anything other than talk about it.

Then I met a woman. She was interested in film. She was interested in me. I was intensely interested in her and I wanted her to fall in love with me. I wanted to impress her and I wanted her to be proud of me.

So I put aside my fear and my insecurity and my ignorance. I made a film. It wasn’t a perfect film, but it was good enough to get into 20 smaller film festivals and win five awards.

The woman and I did fall in love. In a very real sense, my film was a love letter to her. It never would have been made without her in my life.

I think about this a lot lately when I think about why I haven’t made any more films and why I’m not turning out the kind of art I’d like to be making. I have several scripts in various stages of pre-production. I have a documentary that I’m working with a producer to try to bring to life. I even wrote half of a book last year that I ended up deleting in despair because I didn’t love it enough.

But I’m not finishing things. I don’t have enough enthusiasm for anything. I’m not using the talent that I know I have. Why not?

Keep Reading

If you or I were to murder a police officer, what do you suppose the sentence would be? Death? Life without parole? 40 years? Whatever it would be, it wouldn’t be a slap on the wrist.

So what happens when a police officer murders an unarmed 54-year-old Sunday school teacher and flat-out lies about what happened? If you’re Daniel Harmon-Wright, you get three years for “voluntary manslaughter.”

Why do we have one set of rules for people with badges and another set of rules for us?

Harmon-Wright was a police officer who responded to a report of a “suspicious woman” in a church parking lot in Culpeper, Va., at 10 a.m. on a Thursday morning last year. The woman was actually at the church to apply for a job, and nobody has said what made her “suspicious.” Harmon-Wright claimed that he tried to reach inside the woman’s vehicle to take her license, but she suddenly rolled the window up on his arm — trapping him — and tried to drive away.

There were problems with this story, though. Most importantly, a carpenter working in sight of the confrontation said nothing of the sort happened. He said the officer had his gun in one hand and had his other hand on the woman’s door handle. When she tried to drive away, the officer fired at least six shots, killing the woman.

Pure and simple, Harmon-Wright murdered a woman who tried to drive away from him.

Keep Reading