David McElroy

When I look around myself at the society we’ve built, I frequently want to run away — to a life that’s simpler, quieter and more contemplative. I haven’t found the place to live that way, but I’m still looking.

In the mid-19th century, Henry David Thoreau gave himself a two-year experiment in self-reliance and contemplation that he eventually wrote about  in his book, “Walden, or, Life in the Woods.” Even if you don’t see the world the same as Thoreau did — and I don’t in some instances — the ideas in the book are important to those who are desperate to find more meaning in a modern world that feels plastic and sterile and dead.

An old song by Pat Terry says, “The whole world lies awake in its bed — and they wanna know if there’s life before death.” I don’t have any question that there’s life after death, but I sometimes wonder if there’s life before death — because what we call life frequently doesn’t seem like really living. Not everyone feels this, but many of us do. Maybe not all the time, but often enough to make us wonder whether we’re living our lives as we really want to.

Thoreau sensed that most people around him were unhappy even if they weren’t conscious of the reasons for it. In “Walden,” he said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” I see people who have resigned themselves to living a life they don’t love — with people who don’t understand them and feeling awash with contradictory desires and unrealized expectations — and I see desperate people.

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If you love kids and dreams, you’re going to love this 11-minute documentary film. It’s about a 9-year-old boy in Los Angeles who made his own (very imaginative) arcade out of cardboard. He wasn’t getting customers, so one man turned to Facebook and Reddit to give a little boy the best day of his young life.

The next man to be inaugurated president of the United States is going to be Mitt Romney or Barack Obama. If you’re one of those counting on elections to bring change to this country, this realization should be a wake-up call. Americans want big government.

It’s been clear for some time that Romney would win the GOP nomination, but the obvious became pretty widely accepted Tuesday when Rick Santorum dropped out of the race. (Ron Paul and New Gingrich remain in the race, but anyone who thinks at this point that either of them has even the slightest chance of being the nominee is delusional or doing drugs. Sorry.)

So now that we know what the choice for the fall is going to be, what does it tell us? It tells us that we have another choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, between a Republicrat and a Demopublican. It tells us that nothing is going to change in this country. It tells us that Americans want big government and are going to keep electing people to give it to them.

My optimistic friends tell me that “freedom is popular” and that “The People want their country back,” but they’re fooling themselves. The rhetoric of freedom is popular. People love to talk about freedom and responsibility. They just don’t want anybody to actually implement it.

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