The Night Hank Aaron Took a Swing for Racial Justice

“Where have you gone [Hank Aaron], our nation turns its lonely eyes to you….”   --Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, alt.

In the blizzard of news that’s been reported just in the past few weeks, it’s the kind of story easily lost in our 24/7 intense media cycle. What hasn’t happened lately? Our new President takes office issuing a slew of executive orders. The old President will have an impeachment trial come the first week of February. COVID is still such a huge threat and why is it taking so long for our nationwide vaccine program to get up to speed? Then there is the tale of a 43 year-old sports star leading his team to the Super Bowl, leaving us fans here in New England to stew at the fact the team we love just finished a dismal season, all without our terrific Tom Brady.

Here’s the story.

On January 22^nd, Hank Aaron died in his sleep at the age of 86, at his home in Atlanta, Georgia. You are forgiven if the name and the person don’t ring a bell for you.  It’s mostly diehard baseball fans like yours’ truly, who are so saddened by Aaron’s death.  You see, for a short time in the spring of 1974, Aaron was at the center of the media universe, caught up in a whirlwind of unprecedented publicity and press coverage, as he tried to best Babe Ruth’s lifetime career home run record of 714 home runs, a number that stood for almost forty years. 

On April 8^th, 1974, Aaron stood in the batter’s box, to face Los Angeles Dodgers’ pitcher Al Downing. The stands were packed 55,775 raucous fans, pulling for Aaron, on a chilly spring evening in Atlanta.  A future President, Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, was in attendance to watch, and like everyone there, he hoped, and maybe even prayed a bit, that this was the night for history to be made. Just one more home run off the bat of “Hammering Hank” as he was affectionately known.

Coming up to bat in the bottom of the fourth inning, Aaron took the first pitch for a ball and then leaned in, waiting for the next offering from Downing. At 9:07 pm, the ball was delivered and Aaron squarely hit it, sending that little white ball into the night, over the left field fence, for the 715^th time as a major league professional.  He was the home run king.  Play was stopped and Aaron was lauded by the fans and he offered this sobering assessment to spectators about what he’d just accomplished.

“I just thank God it’s all over.”  

What is often forgotten in remembering the triumph of that night, was the ugly and awful racism that followed Aaron, as he chased after the Babe’s record. By the time that evening rolled around, Aaron was under 24/7 law enforcement protection. He’d received hundreds of nasty and terrible racist cards and letters and anonymous phone calls, all threatening to kill him for daring to challenge Ruth’s record.  Recalling that time in an interview, Aaron said, “It really made me see for the first time a clear picture of what this country is about. My kids had to live like they were in prison because of kidnap threats, and I had to live like a pig in a slaughter camp. I had to duck. I had to go out the back door of the ball parks. I had to have a police escort with me all the time. I was getting threatening letters every single day.”

Yet somehow, Aaron handled it all with courage and grace and humility.  No victory dance or a fist thrust in the air as he rounded the bases. For one who had grown up in the violence of the Deep South, who’d watched as the Ku Klux Klan try to burn his family out of their home, who’d played first in the Negro leagues, because major league baseball waited so long to be racially integrated, Aaron was an exemplar of toughness and commitment.  Later in life, after retirement from the game, he vocally advocated for those who came after him, especially for the hiring of the first Black baseball manager, which remarkably did not happen until 1975. 

At the end of his life, in one final act of being a role model for our nation, he rolled up his sleeve and got a COVID-19 vaccination to, in his words, help spread the word that the vaccine was safe.  Though his life was marked by strife and struggle, Aaron died quietly in his sleep. I wonder if he and the Babe are now comparing swings and talking baseball.

I’m not sure why Aaron’s death has so affected me, in a time when there are so many other seemingly more “important” new stories to follow.  I guess it might be because of the greatness of his character, his bravery in living through the racism of his day and our day too. Maybe it’s because as a lifelong baseball fan, I can still look to that field of dreams and watch as a select few of the players, do more than just swing a bat or catch a ball. In rare cases, players like Aaron transcend the sport and become icons, folks who embody our nation’s struggle to live up to its most noble and hoped for ideals: that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Then again, I also just loved watching him swing a bat and send the ball up towards heaven, flying so far and so high, it is as if it will never come back down to earth.

Thanks Hank.

 

 

  

 

 

The Crucial Work of 2021 Begins: To Have Hope.

 “Ooh, ooh, child, things are gonna get easier. Ooh child, things will get brighter. Someday, yea, we’ll put it together and we’ll get it all undone, some day when the world is much brighter.”

--The Five Stairsteps, 1970

Crucial.

When I was a new writer and penning stories for a now long forgotten employee newspaper at a Massachusetts high tech company, I got into a bad rhetorical habit.  To emphasize what I thought were the most important and pressings aspects of a story, I’d use the word “crucial” to make my point. “Crucial”—as in “decisive or critical, in the success or failure of something” and “of great importance.” 

“Crucial” is a great descriptor to bring home the gravity or immediacy of a given situation.  The problem was that in one particular story I used the word “crucial” something like five or six times, and all within a 500 word article.  My editor read my first draft and then stated the obvious: “You know, John, if use the word ‘crucial’ so many times in a story, it kind of loses its meaning. Everything can’t be crucial, right?”

To avoid a repeat of that linguistic faux pas, I’m trying my best to tamp down my temptation to go overboard in my word choice for this story. Using words multiple times, like “crisis” or “emergency” or “urgency” or “unprecedented.” For you see if I begin to use any of those terms to describe the intensity of what our nation has gone through in just the past two and a half weeks, never mind the past year, I might go overboard. Label everything as in “once in a hundred years!” or “never before in our history!”

I’ll confess as a writer this: I feel like I’ve run out of words to describe the journey America has been on the past 365 days, beginning January 21^st, 2020, when the first confirmed case of the corona virus appeared in Washington state. Since then? Some mighty crucial things have happened.

Crucial.

As in the first attempted violent overthrow of an election and the democratic process in America’s history. As in the second worst pandemic and health crisis in our republic’s many years of existence. As in demonstrations for racial justice in the wake of the killing of so many people of color. As in the collapse of the economy and record numbers of people going jobless and hungry. As in the mental and spiritual health struggles so many of us are going through, isolated from our families, our friends, our past times, like sports and the arts.

As in just trying to remember back to a time when things were “normal”.

I’ve exhausted the English language.  I tried to use the thesaurus function in my word processing software to write this essay, but it finally just broke down, after so much overuse. I know many of you feel this way too: how can anyone put into adequate words that which was and still is 2020-21? I’m liking “dumpster fire”, a phrase that’s been used by many.

And then there’s the anxiety about what next “crucial” event is lurking around the corner.

A volcano popping up in the backyard? Or plagues perhaps, hordes of frogs falling from the sky? How about Tom Brady, marching towards another Super Bowl, but doing so in a uniform that is not the red, white and blue of our New England Patriots? Okay, that last one is actually true, but it still feels kind of apocalyptic.

So, I’m now going to attempt to use only good words to look ahead, as we move into the next chapter in our shared lives.  I’m thinking “hope” might be a great place to start. “Hope”, as in “an optimistic state of mind that is based on an expectation of positive outcomes.” Thanks Wikipedia.  “Hope” as in, “Hope is the thing with feathers, That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops - at all.” Thanks Emily Dickinson. Hope, as in, “Surely there is a future, and your hope will not be cut off.” Thanks Book of Proverbs.

For in the end, “hope” is a word and a feeling and a commitment that has the power to lean into and overcome anything the world throws our way. “Hope” is actually the most courageous thing we can do right now, an act of defiance, a commitment that each of us has the power to embrace and embody right now.  “Hope” doesn’t deny the bad but instead hope looks at the bad and declares, “We’ve been through the worst, but, by God, I dare to believe that the best is yet to come.”     

Yup. Hope. Unlike “crucial” hope is a word that we can never use too often or too many times. Hope always looks to tomorrow and trusts in better days ahead. I need to hope. I must have hope. It is hope that will save us all.   

And “crucial”? I used it twelve times in this essay. I think I’ll give that word a rest for now.     

 

 

 

         

          

Don't Let The Mob Win. Carry On The Work of Democracy!

 "For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”           --Hosea 8:7

It’s not the headline I expected to read in the wake of an event that will go down as one of the most tragic and sinister events in the history of American democracy: the storming of the United States Capitol by a violent mob, seeking to overturn a free and fair election.  But on the night of the 6^th, as I surfed the internet trying to glean as much news as I could about that day’s bloody insurrection, I decided to look for any polls, to gauge what I assumed would be American’s overwhelming condemnation of the attack. America’s absolute abhorrence at the reality of armed and dangerous thugs and jackboots seeking to subvert the will of the voters.

And then I found this….       

“One in five voters - including 45% of Republicans - approve of the storming of the Capitol building”

That isn’t a typo. It’s a direct quote from a poll, taken by YouGov.org, that asked 1,345 registered American voters how they viewed what happened on the afternoon and evening of January 6^th.  YouGov is not a fringe polling outfit. Based in London, it is a widely trusted source of information and polling and the most quoted market research source in the United Kingdom.

The question they asked was clear and simple. “Supporters of President Trump have stormed the US Capitol to protest lawmakers certifying Joe Biden’s election victory. Based on what you have read or heard about this, do you support or oppose these actions?” No wiggle room there. 

I suppose the “good” news is that seventy-one percent opposed the insurrection.  But what does that say about the twenty-percent who “somewhat” or “strongly” approved of the storming?  Extrapolate that number out to estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau of the number of registered voters in the United States (153 million people) and that means upwards of 32 million of our fellow citizens are okay, I suppose, with the attempted coup that happened last week.

Consider that chilling and sobering number. It certainly scares the heck out of me, as I wonder and worry about just what is still yet to come, in the post-election parallel universe that we are living in.

Where more than one hundred elected representatives in the U.S. Congress still voted to dispute the election, even as the blood on the floor of the Capitol building had yet to dry. Many of them even sent out fundraising appeals last Wednesday, as the Capitol was still being cleared. Even as reports of vicious attacks on Capitol police officers by the rioters were becoming clear. Even as the family of police officer Brian Sicknick prepared to say goodbye to a veteran and their son, he who was beaten to death by an insurrectionist wielding a fire extinguisher. Even as a life-sized hangman’s noose was erected by the protestors within sight of the center of American democracy.

So, for those among us who might be tempted to breathe a sigh of relief at the failure of the mob to overturn the Presidential election, we might want to think again.  For those who are tempted to  imagine if enough of us just sing “Kumbaya” and then reach out to the folks who led and supported this riot, then there will be peace; we may want to reconsider that pipe dream.

My faith teaches me a simple lesson: humans always reap what they sow. When the seeds of insurrection and outright lies are sown by cynical self-serving leaders and when false narratives about stolen elections are then believed my millions of Americans, at some point, the whirlwind had to explode forth. A whirlwind of chaos and fear and bloodshed and those heartbreaking images of a mob despoiling and vandalizing the heart of our democracy, the seat of our civic religion.

For someone who is the hope business, I confess it has been very hard for me to find any signs of redemption that might still emerge from the ugly events of the first Wednesday in January 2021, a day that will live in infamy. But I still believe in a God who can bring the very best out of the very worst of human behavior, a God who can inspire the good hearted and noble people to stand up for and defend eternal values. Peace and justice. Non-violence and love for neighbor, for all of our neighbors, no one left out, even, especially, the ones with whom we most disagree. Somehow we must get to a place as a nation where “E Pluribus Unum”, “from many, one” means more than just hollow rhetoric printed on a dollar bill. No.   

It is our job as Americans, to summon the courage and sow the seeds of an America yet to be born, one where the sword does not rule but instead the olive branch of peace and the scales of justice finally win the day. One where a mob cannot and will not win. One where the Constitution of the United States, not any human leader, evokes our true loyalty.

We’ve got a lot of work to do. Let’s get to it.