Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [49]
Every season, when the robins and the cherry blossoms return to Washington, D.C., I try to get jazzed up for the baseball season ahead by picking up a baseball book I haven’t read. There are always plenty to choose from, but none better than Walter Johnson: Baseball’s Big Train the definitive history of a man, an era, and a game of games.
I Am a 9-10er
As an American and a lover of freedom and the processes of a free society, the events of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, have filled me with the same grief, outrage, loathing, and lust for vengeance as they have so many millions at home and throughout what we have referred to for decades as “The Free World.”
I was eleven years old when President Kennedy was murdered. I can remember how that apocalyptic event, coming as it did not long after the Cuban Missile Crisis, plunged our society into an abyss of uncertainty, fear, and dread. And we were a people already suffering from the prospect of Mutual Assured Destruction and the many lethal concepts that the realities of the Cold War inflicted on the American psyche.
It is hard to describe the mindset all of us—even kids—carried throughout our daily routine. Growing up in Washington, D.C., I can remember very well looking up into the sky and imagining the bomb burst that would end all our lives, our civilization, our planetary existence. These anxieties were compounded over the years, not only by the uncertainties of the Cold War, but by the frustration of the seemingly unending conflict in Vietnam, which divided families, sapped our nation’s wealth and credit, sparked inflation, and took from us so many friends, both warriors and draft resisters. And the terrifying and inexplicable assassinations continued.
Cynicism crept into the American political mindset, and it has lived there ever since.
And then, as so often happens in times of peace, a new naiveté set in. Perhaps it was a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the sense of relief that the Cold War was at last over. Perhaps the legacy of Pearl Harbor—that America’s military would never again stand down as it did after World War I—led us also to believe that there were certain constants in the nature of international evil that required us as a nation to be forever ready to fight a world war at a moment’s notice.
Now it seems we have been given yet another shocking lesson about the realities of our world.
As a publisher, and a believer in and upholder of our various hard-won freedoms, including freedom of speech and the right of assembly, and of the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, and papers, I am as frightened by politicians suggesting that we must now abbreviate those freedoms in order to cope with a world gone wrong at the hands of terrorists, as I am by the potential deeds of the terrorists themselves.
Could they speak to us now, would the lost soldiers of D-Day, Argonne Woods, Gettysburg, or Valley Forge tolerate such a notion?
I am also chagrined at the idea that for America now, in the aftermath of this terrible act of war, “everything has changed.” All I can say to that is, not for me.
For most of the weekend of November 22, 1963, my family stayed home, watched the horrible news broadcasts surrounding Kennedy’s death, and made a thousand cookies, with, as my mother remembered it, “a tear in every one.”
But on Sunday, November 24, 1963, my family took a few hours off from the horrible realities of the hour and watched the Washington Redskins play the Philadelphia Eagles in Philadelphia. It may seem distant and strange now, but a semblance of normalcy mattered to us then as we faced so much uncertainty each new day would bring thereafter. We didn’t know then if we were truly on the brink of another world war.
The NFL has stated since that it regrets not canceling the games that day. But on November 24, it meant a lot to us to see our team play. Yes, it was a somber event. But there was comfort for us in watching our team, in seeing