The other side of the story!

  The Great American Pastime.. It used to be Baseball, or so I am told. The great American pastime. People would relax in the summer Sun, watching their teams play…kids and all. In parks and little league fields and baseball fields across America. In stadiums big and small. Parents would yell at the umpires, fans would root for their teams. In the end, some would lose and some would win. Some would walk home miffed at the bad calls, the payers left on the bases. The winning team would cherish their hitter that got the homerun, the pitcher that got the strikeouts…they would go back to homes and restaurants and bars and continue their game talk. They would discuss the day’s happenings some more into the night. By morning though it would matter a little less. The humdrum of daily life, the church, the office.. the Sunday dinner or Monday morning coffee would take over, with some office talk nevertheless. And so it would go, year after year, through the summer months, from little lea...

Recently, I chanced upon an individual, in a casual setting, who announced he was a “liberal” barely fifteen minutes into our otherwise benign conversation. There was no political discussion leading up to that proud announcement. It was more of a preface to that person’s description of what he liked in a particular situation he dealt with. I was a taken aback at a little at first, perhaps at the abruptness of it. Then I gathered my wits to decode what it meant. My mind scoured all the liberal positions that I knew of, so I could associate them with this person. Open borders, gun control, abortion rights, higher minimum wage, what else?   However, what does all of this have to do with our introductory conversation, I thought. There was a chance that I may never see this person again. Why was he so anxious to lay it all out there so earnestly? Was he really that invested in all those positions?   Clearly, he was not. Clearly it was a casual comment that he pulled up from his str...