David McElroy

In 1933, the National Socialist Party had gained enough votes in the German parliament that Adolph Hitler won the post of chancellor. Because Germany didn’t have a winner-take-all system for a leader as we do, it wasn’t that sort of election. But Hitler gained power legitimately through the electoral system.

In the coming months, Hitler used every excuse he could to bully the Reichstag into passing laws giving him absolute power. In other words, Hitler used the legal political system to gain power. His goons certainly did work behind the scenes that was illegal, in order to scare Germans into believing they needed him, but the correct legal authorities gave him power.

At what point did Hitler go from being a popular and democratically elected politician to being a dictator? Is there really a difference?

From the early days of the country, U.S. presidents have used so-called “executive orders” to do things which Congress hadn’t specifically authorized. Some of those things were benign and followed directly with the intent of Congress. In other cases, presidents seized powers that they absolutely didn’t have. For instance, Franklin Roosevelt issues an executive order giving power to the military to round up Americans whose ancestry was Japanese. There was no legal authority for this. He simply did it. And nobody stopped him.

Was he a dictator? In what ways do the unilateral actions of a U.S. president differ from the unilateral, dictatorial actions of Hitler?

On Wednesday, we expect to see Barack Obama issue executive orders which are aimed at preventing you and me from owning weapons which he doesn’t approve of. He plans to surround himself with children from across the country; in a disgusting display of dishonesty and cynicism, he’s going to pretend that he’s taking these actions because these children have asked him to make them safe. (As far as I know, he has no plans to ban the automobiles and bathtubs which are far more of a danger to them statistically, but that’s another matter.)

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Democrats and Republicans manufactured an end-of-the-year crisis that they declared must be solved or disaster was imminent. Without a budget deal to stop automatic spending cuts, the entire country would go over a cliff, they claimed, presumably destroying us all. Their last-second solution was to pass huge tax increases and cut almost nothing from the budget. Is anyone naive enough to be surprised?

I’m not going to dissect the deal. Frankly, I don’t care enough to. If you just want to be outraged over the tax increases and the groups getting favors, there are plenty of places that’ll oblige you. I’d like to ask a much bigger and more fundamental question.

Are you ready to give up on politics? Are you ready to quit pretending that it makes a difference who you vote for or whose election you work for? Are you ready to quit wasting your time, money and effort on a losing effort?

I know plenty of good people who believed that if they worked for Republican candidates who promised to oppose taxes and promised to trim the size of government, things would change. There were a lot of people who had faith in the Tea Party movement to change things, even though the actual philosophy behind the Tea Party types became more and more muddled over time. If you’re among those people, do you see now that your time and work and money was wasted?

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It was a year ago today that I saw a doctor for the first time about what I was to discover was breast cancer.

I had been feeling a small lump for a couple of weeks and I finally decided — on New Year’s Eve — to call a doctor friend and go over to his house for advice. He took a look and told me that it could be benign, but there was a good chance it was cancer. He gave me advice about who to see.

Then we sat on his porch next to some woods and watched the last sunset of the year through the trees. (That’s a picture I took at the time.) It’s hard to believe that’s been a year.

The end of a year and the beginning of another one almost always leads to reflection. For me — this year in particular — it leads to questions about what I’ve learned and whether I’ve “spent” the year wisely. I certainly didn’t have any control over the way the year started. I didn’t have any control over the uncertainty that came from the diagnosis of breast cancer and the surgery to remove it. But I’m not sure how well I handled the rest of the year. I’m not sure I’m any better off than I was as I sat on my friend’s porch in the late afternoon a year ago.

Up until that lump showed up, I had big plans for 2012. When you find out you have cancer, plans go out the window. Uncertainty creeps into everything. That’s understandable, but I think I let that overshadow everything else. I don’t think I ever got to the place of saying, “Hey, that was scary, but it’s over. I can go back to what I’d planned.”

I think that my fear — and especially the fear of what it felt like to go through the crisis alone — threw me into a tailspin that’s taken longer to recover from than I realized. In some undefined way, I was waiting for someone to rescue me, I think. It’s hard to accept that nobody’s going to rescue me. I just have to deal with life — and with life-threatening crises — alone.

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