Baseball & the VOTE

One thing I didn’t do in my marriage was watch sports.  I could never understand (nor want to) football. I’d watch a little tennis but never got that scoring either.  Golf too slow and boring to me and basketball, well, basketball was just too rough — too intentionally violent in a sport that should be power and grace.  I understand the need for that physicality playing football because that’s what it is — the inevitable collision of bodies, but I believe basketball shoudda stayed pure.

That leaves baseball. This game is the one that can most hold my interests probably because I can understand it and it’s got so many, many variables and many plays often open to interpretation which is something I find I like and maybe am even good at.

Watching baseball was something we could have shared I think, if I had chosen to.  I didn’t.  I’m not sure why, if it was a passive-aggressive kind if thing or a bias that I felt I wouldn’t enjoy it or was it partly making the choice to do something that I thought needed doing.  I just don’t know.

The Mets (my husband’s team) is playing in the World Series and surprisingly I’m pretty focused on watching, even that first 14-inning game.  I texted him back and forth that night, but on some level I felt I might be interrupting his enjoyment of the game so the next night, I stayed silent and solitary.

What’s also weird to me is that now they interview (briefly) the team manager (Terry Collins) DURING THE GAME!  How intrusive is that??   But that’s the way of the world these days.  A demand for more and more information, instantaneously.  Seems no one can wait for anything.

That worries me — this drive for more and more information but not information that’s necessarily of value.  While I certainly know that not everything has to have substantial “worth,” I do think the pendulum’s swung all the way to people consuming more and more that says less and less.

What worries me beyond the multitudes gobbling up and spewing out more and more words, words, words?   People are not voting.  The electorate is content to sit back and watch the game of politics without participating.  John Oliver said the other night that a higher percentage of people in Guam vote than in the US. We are letting lapse the fundamental right that makes this democracy work the way it does.  Or not.

In a marriage, it can be something huge that upsets the cart, but some times it comes down to lots of little decisions along the way that can derail things. 

Same is true for a democracy.

The Mets are up again tonight fighting the fight.  Let's hope they knock it outta the park!  

And you can knock it out of the park too — 

if you just make sure to VOTE.