Running for Your Life: The Old Ballgame

This December marks my thirtieth year as an American resident.

The move to the US surprised friends in my native Canada.

In fact, in my chosen profession, journalism, I was a reporter and editor known for an independence of mind who took seriously his responsibility to get to the bottom of a story.

A friend convinced me that the best way to selflessly serve the community was to belong to no outside organizations or groups beyond the public library.

The books I read reinforced a strong belief that reporters were about doing their utmost to provide, to the best of our ability, the first draft of a history that we wanted to read.

Employed to seize the noble task of yielding an honest version of the public record.

Democracy. Or at least a path on that road. Tipping our hats to those like-minded on similar routes: teachers, social workers, police officers, firefighters.

I’m still in the news business, all these years later.

What’s changed? Social media has eroded the places where people first acquire their “news.”

Google raided the sacred space of what constitutes information. Who needs a news professional devoted to constructing the public record?

In fact, in our democracy today, there is no such thing as a public record of events the way there was during those innocent days.

And yet there is a hunger for democratic values.

On Tuesday (Aug. 21) I went to see a ballgame: once known as America’s pastime.

The Star Spangled Banner plays and one senses the partisan suspicion all around.

Who is not standing? Who is not singing? Who is not doffing their cap and standing erect? Who is too boisterous in a fever of support to the motherland?

Is it democracy? Or a wink to authoritarianism? Whatever, it certainly doesn’t seem as though we are joining hands as one.

Later, though, the hunger for something we can all agree on … In this we show that we are still enthralled with democratic values. In these brief moments in which it seems everyone is on their feet singing their lungs out, I am hopeful.

Each line of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” reinforces a togetherness, one that shines with the crazy ideal that we can be one with this.

That it would be a “shame” if our side lost, but not the withering one that comes with authoritarian intent.

Rather one that celebrates the very notion that we can accept “1-2-3 strikes, yer out” as long as we can be taken out by friends and family and feel the surge of commingled joy – however fleeting – at the old ballgame.

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