David McElroy

When I was in elementary school, everybody in a class exchanged Valentine’s Day cards at school. Is it still that way? We each decorated a shoebox with our name on it. We cut a slit in the top for others to drop cards through. The displays were up for several days — and everybody was required to give a card to everybody else.

When I was in the fifth grade, I had a crush on a beautiful blue-eyed blonde girl named Wendy. She was my ideal girl when I was about 11 years old. I was terrified of anybody realizing this, though, because then she might know — and that seemed scary. I guess it was “puppy love” rejection I feared.

Since classes routinely gave cards to everyone, there were large packs of small, cheap cards that stores sold. I bought a pack of those generic cards — but I also bought one very special card, much nicer than the others, just for Wendy.

Surely, I thought, nobody will notice. Nobody will figure it out. My secret would be safe.

But little girls who compared the cards they received in our class did notice. And they talked among themselves. Before I knew it, everybody was whispering that I “liked Wendy.”

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I’ve always been baffled by Joe Rogan’s popularity.

His comedy isn’t funny to me. He often comes across like a thoughtless jerk who doesn’t care about others. He doesn’t seem insightful or interesting to me. He comes across as a blustering buffoon who hasn’t thought much about what he’s saying.

But it’s never crossed my mind that I should try to silence him. I simply don’t listen to him. I might tell others what I think about him. I might express surprise at his popularity. But I don’t want to muzzle him.

A lot of people want to silence Rogan right now.

Much of the mainstream news media and pretty much all of the political left is screaming to stop Rogan from distributing what they call “misinformation.” What they really mean by that is that Rogan has guests on his podcast who hold views which they disagree with. That’s the real issue.

Do you remember a time when the political left championed free speech? Do you remember when this was a core “liberal value” that was important to the left? The old counterculture leftist of the 1960s has taken over the culture — and he’s become the very thing he once knew was evil.

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I felt completely different from the other kids. We moved a lot when I was young, so I was in a new school every year. Atlanta, Knoxville, Meridian, Anniston, Birmingham and Pensacola. That was just through the seventh grade.

I was always the new kid in class. I was always the new “smartest kid in class,” too. But even beyond that, I simply felt different from the others. My thinking was different. I wanted different things. My play was different. I felt like an alien.

But on the outside, I complied with every norm of my childhood culture. I looked and acted like the others. I obeyed their norms. I learned to fit. I didn’t want to, but I learned to play the part that was expected of me. I was forced to learn.

I’ve been thinking about this lately because I’ve been learning about the experiences of high-functioning autistic children and their families. Until recently, I’d never thought about the challenges faced by such families, but now that I’m thinking through the issues involved, I feel a lot of empathy for children in such situations.

As I’ve learned about the therapy considered the “gold standard” for autistic children — “applied behavior analysis” — I’m comparing it to what I experienced as a child. I’m finding a lot of autistic people who say this therapy is abusive. And I don’t know what to think.

How far is it reasonable to go to mold and manipulate a child to fit into his or her society? Is it abusive and immoral to force someone whose nature is fundamentally different from ours to conform to our expectations?

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