The Green Fields of the Southern Mind

Bart Giamatti penned a poem that I often hear quoted in the fall by people who adore the game of baseball. "The Green Fields of the Mind". There is a line in it that frustrates me. "The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone."

Alone? In the fall? In Georgia? Not hardly!

What actually happens is that baseball tries to outstay its welcome, lingering well past August and tying up radio broadcasts and interrupting good football with score updates and highlights. And then in October, it finally goes away and we can focus on the great game played by the big boys on the gridirons. And how wonderful that time is. The glory and festivity of Southern Saturdays leads up to the annual rituals of late December and early January when southerners storm the fields of bowls and playoffs and humiliate schools from other regions - treating their players like little children and leaving them wondering how they could rack up 11 wins back home but couldn't manage to cross the 50 to save their lives.

And then the college teams mothball their gear.

The mercenaries hang in there, getting us through the American secular holiday known as Super Sunday. Not as glorious or as impressive as the school boys but enough to keep the DTs at bay.

And then there is REAL abandonment.

Football goes away. We are left with clouds, cold and groundhogs see their shadows, frost covers the Earth. And then, just when you think it couldn't get any worse....someone mentions something about a hot stove. And then there are pitchers and catchers allegedly writing some kind of reports. Someone inevitably gets cut - didn't realize they allowed knives in baseball. Then the Atlanta Braves appear on 47 of the 48 channels that a standard car radio will pick up in this area. That other station is picking up the Braves "A" affiliate in Rome.

At sometime during the summer, you make an escape to the beach, the mountains or maybe Disney and "everything you think you see becomes a (football) to me!"

We will survive the summer. We will make it to August and then the hopeful news will begin to trickle...two-a-days begin...then the "Place color/color here" games are played...picture day...fan day...media day...time to hit someone!

Oh, yes. We will survive the summer. There will be a lot of sweet tea, a lot of swatting gnats and a lot of listening to radio guys talking about how great Glavine was. But August will get here.

But until then, we'll just sit here and twitch....

Lemmings

Remember when you were a kid and your mom asked you "if Billy goes and jumps off a cliff are you going to go and jump too"? All those years ago mom was trying to do a little more than defend our earlier bedtime and keep us from supplementing our diets with live goldfish.

In a world of political parties and religious denominations it is becoming more and more difficult to find free thinkers - people with their own ideas, forged on an anvil of knowledge with a hammer of curiosity. So I asked a friend the other day why people are so willing to become lemmings - as in the small arctic rodents that allegedly commit mass suicide during migration. The truth is, they don't. Even they are smarter than that. So why are people so willing to follow others off a cliff simply because they somehow identify with them?

Thomas Jefferson once said that he had "sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man". Obviously this included the Crown of Great Britain. But I don't think Jefferson stopped there in his thinking. He founded the University of Virginia, which was an accomplishment held in higher esteem by him than his presidency. Educating the minds of young people was more important to his hostility than policy. His authorship of The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (also favored above his presidency) was to ensure that people could not be told by the government how they can and cannot worship God. Religious freedom was more important to him than policy.

Jefferson was not the only one to espouse such ideas. I chose him because of his passion in the quote above. (Well, that and the fact that he is the greatest political mind in the history of the united States, but back to the point.)

In America, and many other places, there is no one forcing you to have any particular point of view. No bullets being launched at dissenters. The heads that spout opposing voices never roll. Yet, the Tiananmen Square incident happened where bullets are launched and heads do roll. And in America, where there is no serious threat, our personal belief system can be boxed up in the statement "yeah, what he said". Our religious beliefs are along the same lines. Why is it that in a nation built on rugged individualism, we have become several colonies of lemmings, ready to follow strangers off a cliff? Are we still disregarding mom's voice after all these years? You're smarter than a rat.