Mail Bag

Opening day

Posted

To the Editor:
Today was the home opener of baseball season in St. Louis...an unofficial holiday on the local calendar. One of the Post Dispatch’s writers, Ben Hochman, returned to Busch Stadium after an absence of over 500 days, and his column was surprisingly not about the game. It was about how the taken for granted sights, sounds, and smells of the game flooded into him with a sense of familiarity and normalcy that was pure ecstasy. Find the column, read it and you’ll be joined with a happy man. What he missed from baseball it seems we are all missing from our social and political lives...a sense of wholesome normalcy. We’ve adjusted to the acrimony, the phoniness and self-serving opportunism of the political divide. We’ve learned to carry on, arm ourselves with resentment and Twitter lines, put one foot in front of the other, and make it through the day. But we know that something’s very wrong. Oh, it’s not that we didn’t have our differences before, but they could be resolved, or at least aired, with a sense of civility and trust in our process. We could disagree and not feel contempt.
Ok, so what if there’s no official opening day for restoring normalcy to our lives, perhaps we can devise our own. If we resolve to quit force feeding our anger and view anew people and issues with empathy and unbiased clarity we are on the right track. Open hearts, open minds... Opening Day for a season of America again.
Gasconade County Democrat Club
gasconadedems.org