David McElroy

In 2009, three baby girls were among the victims of a missile attack launched on their village in Pakistan. They were badly burned and someone placed the three into a trash bin to die. A volunteer doctor from House of Charity found them and tried to save the little girls. Two of them died, but one of them, Shakira, lived. Barely.

Later the same year, Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. What will Shakira think when she grows up and discovers that the man who was inexplicably lauded for being a peacemaker was also the man who unleashed terror on her and her village?

How can we live in a world insane enough to give a peace prize to the man who gives orders for missiles to destroy random sections of remote villages just because someone suspects a U.S. enemy might be there?

It was under George W. Bush that the drone program was launched, but it was under Obama that it was greatly expanded. The administration has recently admitted that U.S. policy basically says that if you’re in the vicinity of a terrorist, you must be a terrorist. Can you imagine if police used that standard for criminal cases here? If a criminal suspect is said to be in an office building, they’d just blow up the office building.

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I was in the checkout line at Target last week when I heard someone call my name.

“David? David McElroy?”

I turned and looked at the man calling my name as though he knew me. The voice was slightly familiar, but I’d never seen this man before. He was a stranger.

Or so I thought until he told me his name. It was someone I’d met in business through a mutual friend. We were friendly and had done a little business together, but we hadn’t ever really been close. Still, the man I saw in front of me wasn’t the man I’d known. This was a new man.

It’d been a couple of years since I’d seen Paul. (That’s not his real name, but it’s what I’m going to call him here.) The guy I knew was a lot heavier. The big weight change was the most obvious difference. But there was something more than that. I couldn’t put my finger on it.

We ended up standing there talking for nearly two hours. He told me all about the changes that had taken place in his life. He seemed eager to tell how the “new” Paul had come about.

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Many schools have some version of a tradition involving a senior prank. Kenowa Hills High School in Walker, Mich., has such a tradition, but this year’s seniors decided to do something creative, fun and non-destructive. Instead of painting lockers or blowing up a toilet or moving furniture to the top of the building — or any of the typical crazy high school ideas — these kids decided that they’d all ride bikes to their very last day of school.

About 60 seniors rode bikes that day. They talked to local police ahead of time, who had a car meet them for the mini-parade and ride behind them for safety. They even invited Mayor Rob VerHeulen, who joined and rode along with them in the police car. It sounds like a great idea. There was only one problem.

Nobody was taking into account the giant egos and control freakery of the school’s administration.

After the students got to school, principal Katie Pennington suspended all of them for the day, denying some of them the right to take their final exams. She didn’t let them participate in a local tradition called “senior walk” and she even threatened not to allow them to participate in graduation ceremonies — all because they legally rode bikes on public roads with a police escort. Why? Because nobody told her about it ahead of time.

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