Who’s Up?

When I was a kid, one of the guys on my block would call up a pal from a few blocks away and offer to teach their guys how baseball is played if they weren’t too sissified to take us on. We’d all meet up at the Beaver Elementary School backstop, ready for action.

Since we were all from the same neighborhood, there was no home team, so we had to choose who got to bat first. One guy from our team would grab a bat near the middle and hold it up. A guy from the other team would put his hand atop our guy’s hand and several guys would join in, alternating between teams.

Some guys would try to cheat by slipping their hand up or down on the bat, but the prospect of chaotic outcome minimized that activity. When there was no more room and the last guy put his hand atop the bat’s handle, his team batted first. Since we didn’t have an umpire, two guys (one from each team) would stand behind the catcher and argue about what was a strike and what was a ball.

There were close games and there were run-aways. Sometimes, we went home thinking we’d been cheated out of a win, and sometimes we went home realizing we’d gotten lucky. Somehow, it always worked out and we never considered the other guys our mortal enemies — although I did momentarily consider throwing a mud clod at Rusty Fergusson one time.

It occurs to me that our culture is in a similar situation today, but the potential outcome is far more serious and the change in attitudes is making that serious outcome far more likely. America used to be divided into two fairly cooperative teams. They chided each other for their shortcomings and occasionally had serious differences of opinion but nothing that merited a riot (innocuously labeled a “protest”) or an assassination (innocuously labeled a “political violence”) .

What changed? Somehow in the last fifty years, we went from a nation of laws to a nation that ignores laws we don’t agree with. We claim elections were rigged when we lose them and we label anything we disagree with as hate-speech instead of disagreeable free speech.

In the last year, there have been two unsuccessful attempts to kill a presidential candidate and one successful assassination of an outspoken activist. WTF? Have we degenerated into a bunch of ignorant gang bangers who shoot anyone that disrespects them?

What ever happened to losing an election, licking our wounds and biding our time until the next election? Is disagreement really hate? Is it not possible to disagree with someone’s values and still esteem them as a valuable human being?

I hear a lot of useless talk from both our sourpuss parties about toning down the rhetoric, to which I say “BS”. Talk is nothing but an outer signal of inner motivation, and violence is simply the logical outcome of a skewed psyche. If we don’t address the egocentric entitlement syndrome that plagues EVERY American of both parties, addressing the rhetoric will be like slapping a Band-Aid on skin cancer.

At the time of our last Civil War, the US population was 31,443,321. Around 700,000 of those died in the fighting of that war. Today’s US population is close to 350 million. Even discounting the major advancements in weaponry over the last 150 years, a similar civil war will result in close to eight million dead Americans.

I miss the days when we could just stack hands on a bat neck and abide by the outcome.

A meeting of great minds who think alike