David McElroy

I overheard two couples talking today about what a terrible time it is to be bringing children into this world.

“The world’s going to hell in a handbasket,” one of the men said. “You can’t do anything about it and your kids are going to end up rotten and screwed up from the drugs and peer pressure on TikTok and stuff. We wouldn’t have had kids if we’d known it would be this bad.”

The others seemed inclined to agree. For a couple of minutes, they talked about the bad influences that had affected their children — teen-agers, it seemed — from schools and social media.

It wasn’t my conversation, so I didn’t interrupt. I agree with them that the world is messed up. Western culture has become horribly dysfunctional, even though most people are too intimidated to be honest about what they see going on. There are deadly problems facing us everywhere — intellectual, cultural, moral, economic and more. These problems are fire-breathing dragons who threaten us all.

But I kept thinking about some words I read the other day:

“Never feel sorry for raising dragon-slayers in a time when there are actual dragons.”

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When I ran into Brittany tonight, she seemed subdued. She’s normally bubbly and happy, but it was obvious that she was miserable.

There were other people around at first, so I couldn’t ask much about what was doing on. I just leaned over and asked, “Are you OK?” She quietly mouthed, “I’ll tell you later.”

When the place had cleared out, she came and sat with me. Then she explained what her boyfriend had done Saturday. It’s a long story, but he was intentionally cruel and mean to her. He had laughed about it Sunday and taunted her. But when she threatened today to break up with him, he alternated between begging her not to and angrily threatening her if she did.

Brittany acknowledged what we were both thinking. I had warned her about this man after he did something similarly cruel and nasty to her nearly a year ago. I had warned her then to get away from him — because she had discovered who he really is.

But Brittany had given him another chance. And when similar things have happened over the months, she’s done the same thing. She chooses to believe his convenient words of remorse instead of his actions.

People eventually demonstrate who they really are. Always. When people demonstrate what they are — through their actions — believe them. It’s idiocy to pretend that people are going to be something other than what they’ve shown you.

Brittany hasn’t learned that lesson yet. And it’s a lesson that I’ve been really slow to learn, too.

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I spent much of my weekend showing houses to buyers. Every time I do this, it’s always the same experience for me. I wonder why anybody with the slightest understanding of aesthetics would have built such houses — and why anybody would buy them.

I’m in the minority on this, of course, because almost everybody buys whatever is popular among his friends and family. They don’t know any better. They buy what they know. They buy what seems “normal” to them. So they buy houses which are painfully garish or pretentious or dull to me. And builders keep building those sorts of houses — simply because that’s what people expect to buy.

When I’m showing such a house — and people are talking about borrowing half a million dollars to buy it — I want to ask them if this is what they really want. I want to ask them if they’ve ever considered the warmly beautiful piece of living art they could build for that money instead. I want to show them houses such as this one on the market right now in Redlands, Calif.

But I don’t — because I remember how ignorant I was about design philosophy before I finally learned to appreciate good architecture, too. They wouldn’t appreciate my suggestion any more than I would have appreciated it back when I wanted something which I would loathe today.

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