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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