David McElroy

Is there anybody who hasn’t felt the need at some point to get away from the insane world and escape to a place of relative sanity? I feel it a lot, and I’ve been feeling it more strongly recently. It occurred to me Tuesday that I don’t really need Galt’s Gulch right now. I need to find my own version of Hugh Akston’s diner.

If you’re a fan of “Atlas Shrugged,” you know what the two represent. Galt’s Gulch was a brand new society, cut off from the mainstream world — existing without outsiders’ knowledge. It had been founded to give the world’s productive people a place they could go to escape the “looters” who were taking their money and their ideas.

The diner that Dr. Hugh Akston ran, on the other hand, was a part of the mainstream world, in plain view of everyone. Akston had been a philosophy professor who found the world uninterested in his ideas, so he was forced to retreat from university teaching and ran a small, remote diner in Colorado. The two places represented entirely different things. Galt’s Gulch was an entirely new free world. Akston’s diner was all about living honestly within the existing world until you could get to the new world.

I want to live in Galt’s Gulch. I want that new world to exist. I believe it’s possible, and I believe we’re going to build it. In the meantime, though, I have to live in the same old world that everybody else does. And if I’m going to remain sane, that requires finding my own version of Akston’s diner.

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We’ve become a society of spoiled children who cry when we aren’t handed what we want. Not everyone, of course. But the trend is clear enough — and the number of people overcome by it big enough — that it saddens and frightens me.

When Christmas came and went over the weekend, not everyone got the gifts they were hoping for. Many of them took to Twitter to whine to their friends about what they didn’t get. It seems that a lot of poor spoiled children didn’t get the iPhones and iPads they wanted. One abused young woman said, “Was i the only person who didn’t get an ipad? i mean i got a car but thats a different story all together.”

There’s an entire series of these pathetic rants, many of them filled with angry profanity that I won’t quote here. Read them and weep at what we’re becoming.

Living in a wealthy society is a good thing, because it allows us to have a standard of living that was unheard of in the rest of human history. It gives us material comfort and health and many other things. But it’s blinding people to what really matters, it seems. It’s taking away their perspective. It keeps them from realizing that their “First World problems” are things that average people in some societies only wish they had the chance to cope with.

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If two bullies taunt each other for long enough, there’s going to be a fight. It seems that a small minority of insane people in Iran and the United States are nudging both countries in that direction. And when the shooting starts, it’s not going to matter who fired the first shot. It’s only going to matter how many body bags we’re going to need for the dead.

Neo-conservatives in the United States have been trying to maneuver the country into war with Iran for decades. They wanted to attack Iraq, and they finally found a way to trick the public into supporting that war 10 years ago. The country hadn’t attacked us and the shaky evidence that was used to justify the attack turned out to be a combination of lies and bad information. Still, the war hawks had their way. U.S. taxpayers spent trillions of dollars over the last decade, and many people on both sides were killed and maimed. And for what? As most U.S. troops pull out, the place is still a violent political basketcase that could fall into civil war at any time.

But the Iraqi misadventure hasn’t taught the neo-conservative war hawks anything, so now they want to attack Iran. They’ll use any excuse. They just want to overthrow the Iranian government, ignoring the evidence that external nation-building doesn’t work.

There’s a hardline element inside Iran, of course, that’s just as bad. To them, it’s a religious struggle, and they’re eager to fight “the Great Satan.” The Iranian military is in the midst of a war games exercise in international waters that has the possibility of setting off a war, either accidentally or intentionally. The Iranians have spent years building their military and pursing nuclear weapons, in large part because they’ll always be at the mercy of countries such as the United States unless they join the “nuclear club.”

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