Friday, July 29, 2016

We Already Have a Wall

It may not run the entire length of the Mexican border, but in Tijuana at least, it is heavily fortified, patrolled, surveilled, enforced, etc.


So if building a wall is a racist thing to do...

For the record, I haven't heard anyone suggest we tear it down.


Thursday, July 28, 2016

3B

A triple is the most consistently exciting hit in baseball.  Here's why I think it beats the home run:


A home run doesn't always matter.
Sometimes it's just the winning team in a blowout tacking on another run.

Oops.
A breaking ball that didn't break.  Poor pitch selection or placement.  Sometimes a pitcher just makes a mistake and the ensuing home run comes as no real surprise.

The trot.
In any other context, it's not really interesting to see a guy jog around the bases.

"...but the ball carried just enough."
How many homers have you heard described that way?  Sometimes a homer looks like a routine fly ball, but gets just enough lift to go an extra three feet.


With a triple there's always hustle.  There's most likely going to be a play at 3rd that ends in a slide.
It also means a well-hit ball either caromed pretty hard off the corner or made it by an outfielder in plain view (which is pretty rare and at the major league level is probably the result of the outfielder taking the chance on a dive for the ball and missing.)  Then the fielder has to get up and give chase, Benny Hill style, and the base-running intensity immediately amplifies and we've got ourselves a show here.  And when that's all over, you've got a guy on third, which creates more excitement for the next at-bat.

On top of all that, you just don't see them everyday.  Kind of a rare bird.  An open and shut case in my book.

Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Aggressive Apathy?

I'm a big fan of being able to express a point with exactly the right words at exactly the right time.  Big fan.  I also think it's a pretty rare thing, so I put a lot of practice into it.  What you just read is a third draft.

So here's my problem with "Black lives matter."

I think we have to conclude that the phrase is poorly constructed because it elicited too many responses of "all lives matter" and created the wrong debate.  It did not express itself well.

Possibly the problem lies in the fact that, these days, anything you can stick a hash tag in front of has the potential to spread like wildfire, which is to say the popularity of the phrase grew haphazardly.  "We shall overcome" certainly didn't suffer the same fate.

The problem of course is with the word matter.  We are trying to address racism here, no?  Racism is hatred, and suggesting that a person "doesn't matter" suggests apathy more than hatred, and frankly, apathy would be a step up from full-on racism.  We're supposed to make the leap that if you think a life doesn't matter, you must also think the life is expendable, but it could be argued that Zimmerman wouldn't have shot Trayvon Martin if he simply thought the boy didn't matter.  In most cases, if something doesn't matter to you, you tend to leave it alone.  Apathy is not a particularly aggressive emotion.

You can write off any opposition to the phrase as ignorance, but I think these are the problems you invite when you fail to find exactly the right words.  As a side note, I thought we were supposed to stop saying "black".