David McElroy

I’ve become increasingly frustrated lately that there’s no easy way to explain what I need to talk about these days.

There is something badly wrong with our dysfunctional modern culture. We have become like blind men following other blind men — and that path leads to us all ending up in a ditch and wondering what happened.

I’ve realized that I can’t keep “dumbing down” some things. There are some ideas that you simply have to learn if you want to have this conversation and if you want to help correct what’s wrong with the culture. And that means we have to confront the fact that our education and our cultural experience has dumbed down much of what we need to learn.

I’m not going to try to explain history or philosophy or anything else complex in this presentation, but I’d like to start making the case for why most of our culture — probably including you — have to give up the shallowness we’ve been taught. And if this isn’t what you want, it’s probably also true that nothing else I’ve said for many months will make a bit of sense to you, either.

The audio embedded below is about 21 minutes long.

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I will always feel like an alien trying to fit among humans, because I don’t know how to blend in. Not really.

I can move among groups. I can talk as though I belong. I can say the right things. I can even lead them to believe I’m one of them.

Inside, though, I will always feel like an alien among others. I will always feel as though I don’t quite fit. And I’ll always hate it that I care what they might think of me.

Earlier this week, I found a group of my school photos from my younger years. It turns out that I have almost every year’s photo from first through sixth grade. In the younger photos, I looked like a happy little boy. By the time I got to the sixth grade — the one you see here — I look older than my years and I look unhappy.

Maybe I simply know too much about what was really behind those young eyes, but I see unhappiness and alienation. I see someone who felt alone in the world.

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I was still 14 years old when I wrote the letter, but I sound older than that. How many ninth graders sit down and type a long and serious letter to an unknown future spouse?

The letter is an attempt to explain myself and where I came from to this future wife. It tried to explain how my confusing childhood had made me feel different from others — and I found myself assuming that the only sort of woman who could fit me was someone who could understand that.

“I figure you will have to be someone who has [been] hurt and been lonely just like me for you to understand,” I wrote.

Most of the letter is happier. It’s filled with joy at the prospect of finding someone who‘s enough like me — and shares enough values — for me to love. It describes in very clear terms what I want our marriage to be like.

I went though a box of unexplored things Tuesday night and found a number of interesting artifacts from the past, but two of them are on my mind tonight. One is this letter and the other is a handwritten application to a private school which asked what goals I had set for my adult life.

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