David McElroy

It’s election day in Alabama, but I won’t be voting. Most people have been brainwashed to think that a “good citizen” must vote. They believe it’s a moral issue. They’re right that it’s a moral issue, but they’re on the wrong side of the question.

Those who have been brainwashed into believing they must vote are fond of saying, “If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain,” but that’s illogical. A truthful way to phrase it would be, “If you consent to the legitimacy of the system by participating, you have no right to complain when someone else gets his way — and you’re agreeing to obey.”

If you vote and participate, you are agreeing to the legitimacy of the system. You are agreeing to be bound by the results. You’re agreeing that it’s morally legitimate for some group of voters to select people to give you whatever orders they please. You are agreeing to be their slave.

But most people are so locked into the battle between the two sides of the political mainstream that they can’t even consider this point of view. It’s pretty much impossible to explain the philosophical reasons for not voting to people who are only interested in winning elections.

A friend of mine posted an interesting thought experiment today. Steve Smith asked, “Would you rather have the Crips or the Bloods running your neighborhood? Two rules: 1. Not having one gang or the other run things is not a choice. 2. If you decline to state a preference, you can’t complain about anything that either gang does to you, ever.”

This is what voting is. You’re not allowed to question whether you want to be ruled. You’re only allowed to choose which of the two (very similar) groups you want to control you.

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There are times when there’s no time like the present to follow your instinct and take a crazy chance. This is the story of one of those times.

On the online networking site, Reddit, someone asked an interesting question today: “Ladies of Reddit, what’s the best way a guy has asked you out?”

Here’s a story one woman told:

“I was driving around town after work, windows down — it was a gorgeous October day. I noticed two guys in a car next to me, one in civilian clothes, the other in his ABUs (Air Force uniform). I thought it was adorable that they were together because Don’t Ask Don’t Tell had just been repealed. I kept driving.

“A friend prank-called me and asked if I had any condoms, so I was laughing. We hung up and I was singing along to a Christina Aguilera song (‘I Hate Boys’). I stopped at an intersection and glanced in my rear-view mirror and saw a man running, full tilt, toward my car. I was so shocked that I didn’t think to lock my doors or anything. He got to my car, threw a slip of paper in, and ran off. It happened so fast I didn’t even really see him.

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Harry Bernstein’s first book was published when he was 96 years old. After a life in which he supported himself as an MGM script reader and as editor of a construction magazine, it wasn’t until five years before his death that anyone would take his books seriously.

Over the years, he had written 40 other books, but they had all been rejected by publishers. He ended up destroying those manuscripts. But after he finally had a first book accepted — a memoir of the anti-Semitism he experienced as a child in England — he wrote and published three more books in his late 90s.

Bernstein said his 90s “have been the most productive years of my life.”

I’d never heard of Bernstein until I came across this quote a few days ago. I’ve still never read any of his work, so I have no opinion about it and I have no idea whether any of those 40 destroyed manuscripts were lost masterpieces. But as someone whose life hasn’t turned out — so far — the way he planned, I was struck by the lesson of his life. Maybe it’s never too late to become what you always knew you were intended to be.

I’ve written before about my frustration with losing touch with the person I had once been — with somehow losing the confidence and drive to achieve that I had felt in my youth. I’ve been thinking about variations on this theme for the last few years, but it’s really accelerated in the last six or eight months. Just a few weeks ago, I wrote about my fears of never doing anything meaningful with my life.

I always assumed that people who achieve something meaningful have a linear and obvious path to their success, but what I’m learning is that success looks much more obvious and predictable when you’re looking back at someone’s life, not speculating about what it might be in the future. And I’m also finally accepting that the path to something meaningful is rarely straight and obvious.

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