Dallas Green

People count on baseball for all of the good things in life. Sure, there are incidents that are horrible and ugly with spitters, fighters, and cursing up a blue streak, but baseball is a sport that matters because it doesn't matter. It's not politics; right, left or in between. It's not a give and take relationship. It just gives and you either accept what it gives you or you mope. It has a history that is all its own. Nobody questions it that much and contemplates ulterior motives on it that much (save excluding African Americans, collusion, and strikes that need to be handled by larger than life authorities).
When baseball is at its best, George Bush is throwing a strike over the center of the plate and Mike Piazza is bringing the city of New York back to life. When America needs to heal, there is baseball. For this, we love it.
All the same, sometimes, baseball loses its players in horrific and tragic ways. For these times, we cry, but usually, we don't see these things.
Nevertheless, when the world cries and baseball cries, too, then we know that there is something wrong in the world.
And it is at times when Dallas Green, the former manager of the 1980 World Champion Phillies loses a grand daughter (Christina-Taylor Green) as part of the shooting that seriously wounded Gabrielle Giffords and many of her staff members and people present at a town hall rally AS WELL AS killing 5 other people, we all mourn.
The whack jobs from both sides making their noise... either in terms of gunshots fired or claims that anyone who joins the Tea Party is this kind of whack job, when clearly the gunman was a mentally ill man.... we just can't believe or support this type of insanity.
We wonder where and when it will all end and moderation will take back this country again. We wonder when the hate and the partisanship will end.
We look to the meaningless things in life to distract us from that: PIXAR movies, waterfalls, slot canyons, music, day trips to beautiful places, music, and Christmas decorations. But the decorations have all come down. The world outside is cold, and warmth is still a few months away. And so there is only one meaningful distraction that always makes it better, and for that, I sit here waiting for my wife to come home because this cold dark and insane world just feels too far away from the good things in life.