What Matters

Chicago took the measure of the Detroit Tigers 4-1 tonight to go 8 games up on 3rd place Detroit…

It’s important at times like this—times like this being the immediate aftermath of yet another painful Tigers loss—to remember that what happens out there between the white lines doesn’t matter.  It doesn’t matter at all—not a whit.  It never has.  It never will.

It’s nice to win and all, nicer than losing for sure, but win or lose it just doesn’t make a bit of difference in this world.  It’s all exactly as meaningful as make-believe.

It’s fun to watch and that’s all it is.  And mind you, all of this, this heresy, comes to you from as big a fan of baseball and of so many sports as there is. 

But the games, they don’t matter. 

What matters are things like that court ruling today that says that the majority cannot take away fundamental rights of the minority, even in a free election.  That matters. 

We have a choice of the direction which we want to take our state: more of the right wing cut-taxes-on-the-rich and watch, watch as the benefits trickle-down to the rest of us bullshit, or a candidate who knows that you cannot run an economy by having the rest of us give each other haircuts.  We had an election last night.  That matters.

I had to get off the freeway last night on the way home from the ballpark on account of an accident that had the freeway down to one lane and me being unwilling to sit in my car for the hour or so it would have taken to clear the wreck.  I saw that which I see every time, and it happens from time to time, that I have to drive the surface streets in the City of Detroit.  It’s a terrible shithole.  It’s a goddamn sin.  It’s a sin that we will, all of us, be held to account for.  We’re willing to let our fellow citizens in this, the greatest country that ever was or ever will be, live in abject squalor and poverty without giving it a second thought.

That matters.  More than a stupid baseball game, anyway.