David McElroy

When I was 12 years old, I was lonely, unhappy and confused. I didn’t like my family very much, but I was afraid to admit that. I was certain that my future was going to be perfect — if it would just hurry up and get here. In other words, I was a lot like many millions of people at that age.

I’ve thought a lot in the past about how I’d see myself as a child and what I’d say to 12-year-old David to make the years afterward less painful. It’s on my mind today because of an video posted Thursday by 32-year-old Jeremiah McDonald, who has a videotape of his 12-year-old self pretending to talk to his future self. He’s edited it in such a way that it appears there’s a conversation going on between them. It’s a funny and poignant idea. You can see it at the bottom of this article. (The language isn’t family-friendly or work-friendly in a couple of instances.)

“I saw an episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos [when I was 12] where a guy had a conversation with himself on TV, and I did my own version of it,” McDonald said. “While I was playing around I decided to have an open-ended conversation with my future self.”

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Every conservative I know seems to be counting on Mitt Romney to be the great hero to save them from ObamaCare. Romney is playing up the role, of course, trying to fire up conservative Republicans to turn out in November to help him him. But if you’re honestly counting on Romney as your health care savior, what makes you think you’ll get anything better?

After the Supreme Court saved the new health care boondoggle last week, Romney immediately went into a full press against it. Note in the picture what he’s saying he wants to do: “Repeal and replace ObamaCare.” Does that mean he’s going to give us something more similar to the RomneyCare plan from Massachusetts, which is even worse than ObamaCare?

Republicans who support Romney will tell you that there were differences between the two plans, but they’re straining pretty hard to find substantive ones. (This list of things that supposedly makes Romney’s plan less offensive than Obama’s plan leads with the length of the bills in number of pages, as though that’s the issue.)

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What started long ago as a celebration of independence from the rule of a foreign power has become something very different today. The Fourth of July was once a day when Americans celebrated their independence and their way of life. In too many cases, it’s ended up becoming a worship of state and a celebration of militarism.

As a result, I don’t enjoy as much about the Fourth of July as some people do. I look at the nationalistic elements that have crept in and become dominant for so many people — and I cringe. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to love what it originally stood for. And it doesn’t mean that I don’t want to be a part of an extended family celebrating our homes and our lives.

I wrote Tuesday about how people have come to associate words such as “conservative” and “liberal” with political positions. I’m not that kind of conservative and haven’t been for more than 20 years. But I’m a traditionalist in many ways. I’m an odd mix. I love many things about the modern world, but I feel a tug to a past that I’ve never experienced. In the truest sense of the word, I’m a conservative in those ways. There’s much about the values and lifestyle of our past that I want to conserve, and I’m extremely conservative in my own lifestyle.

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