When the Lights Were Low

The TOTs Blue/White Night Game

It might be said that the TOTs played a night game under the lights, but it wasn't very light. At least eleven of the lights on the poles around the field were burned out. In the photo, above, the pole to the left has exactly one of its six lights burning.

"It got better after a while", one of the players said. That is a little like saying that one can get used to being partially blind.

It is a parable of government. Not that government is dark and evil, but that a government starved of financial support cannot afford to replace the public lights when they burn out. Government is not the problem--Thank you Ronald Reagan for starting us down that dismal, dark road!--but when government comes to be seen as the dark menace instead of the middleman of desirable and necessary services, then all of us have a problem.

Who is going to put up and maintain lights for the public good? Your local, Goober, Grub and Gadget Store is not going to do so unless it increases sales and profits of goobers, grub, and gadgets.
There are things we need to do together, for our common good.

Maintaining the ball field at Udall Park is one of the least important, but still desirable things we need to do. We need public security, education for everyone who can be educated, roads and bridges and airports and seaports, health care for absolutely everyone, ways to insure that our food and water and air are safe, and a thousand other things that will not be done at all if we do not do them together. And a civilized city will provide a place for recyclables to be gathered, for the kids to play, and for the Boys of November to play baseball at night, once in a while, just for fun, and so that their granddaughters can take pictures of them, through the cyclone fence. "That is my grandpa playing baseball, when I was about ten!", she will say, someday.

Then she will say, "It is hard to see him, because the lights were burned out."

Comments

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

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SmokeSound

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