Where is our Field of Dreams?

 Even though I predicted that both Kevin Costner and the players would emerge like baseball ghosts from within the cornfield, it only took seconds before I began to sob.

I mean it moved me to the core of my heart.

The reason?  It was exactly what James Earl Jones said in the film:

“This field, this game; it's a part of our past, Ray.  It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again. Oh…people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.”

I think I cried because I’m no longer convinced that they will.

All I felt was what we have lost over the last four years.  

The election wasn’t stolen.  Our souls were. 

All that that  destructive/self-destructive animal Trump did was topple and stomp on our country….our world, with the callous glee of a murderous thug, fascist dictator.

He didn’t just fomate hate. He extracted it; he set it free with all its satanic wrath from the hitherto private rage rooms of the illiterate, stupid, selfish, gun abusing people who up until now have had to keep a civil tongue in public and on Sundays, where they pray to their caucasian version of Jesus. The message there is clear: if you are made in the image of God, God must be white and therefore you are the superior race.  You all have seen Middle Eastern men, right?

Baseball, which is a fully integrated enterprise, thank God, is our past, our present and I would like to believe, our future.  Yes, I despise the salaries that most of those guys make, while teachers and first responders sacrifice everything and make virtually nothing.

But that is a quibble for another post.

What I implore you all to think about is: where is the America that we love?  Where is our Field of Dreams?  Who ever thought that common courtesy, politeness and empathy would be nothing more than a quaint, faraway memory?

Lately I have found myself watching TCM almost non-stop because I literally can’t stand living here right now.  It is almost intolerable.  We are living in a democrazy that is operating like an Oligarchy.

So I turn to the past where nothing makes me happier than to watch an old Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland film, where they and their friends band together, forged by the fumes of their own talent, to create something magical and heartfelt that makes us, the viewers, feel like we are a part of.

I love watching films like The Best Years of Our Lives, where pain is shared equally, where challenges are supported and help is always on the way.

I ache for compassion, decency, kindness.  I crave the kind of George M. Cohan patriotism that used to send us singing and marching, with broad chests, down our city streets.

I’m not idealizing the past and I’m not ignoring the fact of how white it all was.  All I’m talking about is the emotion that made us feel like to be an American was to be a part of a community that embraced charity, whose purpose was to serve and to protect.  Give me a film like Sargeant York any time and while we’re at it throw in a screening of Pride of the Yankees.

There are friends who insist on living in the present, which I have always disliked because I find that the past is my own, personal laboratory which I get to transport back to on demand, in order to observe first hand, as an adult, what really happened.

As a child the future was a very different thing than it is today.  We used to dream about it with our eyes wide open, try on any number of hats or astronaut helmets as we envisioned an impossibly romantic, self-propelled tomorrow, using the stars as a road map for the journey that lay ahead.  

Today the future is hand delivered, literally, to our front door.  Twice a year Apple and Amazon alone will offer us the latest must have devices, which requires nothing on our part but a casual button click.  The internet has made us passive-aggressive.  Lazy. Entitled.  Why bother dreaming if you can hire someone else to do it for you?

America is an ongoing experiment that much of the world, and now the GOP have pledged to destroy from the inside.  

They do not care about your health, your pregnancy, your God, your well being, your jobs.  They have systematically screwed up the post office, stacked the courts and now the voting system in 30 states so that they can blatantly steal one election after another.  Is it racially motivated?  Of course it is.  Look who got Biden into the White House.  

But what is underneath it all?  Fear.  Fear that their churches will crumble, that gay people will take over the world and their way of life will become extinct.

This is why they won’t get shots or wear masks.   That is their paper tiger armor against the winds of change.

So what can we, me and you do about it?  Flood the world with love and decency.  Live a good and charitable life.  Write things that just might make a difference.

We have to stop the flow of poison that is surging through our blood streams.  We have to shut off the news, who are spreading fear as frantically as Butteryfly McQueen in “Gone With The Wind.”

Better yet: maybe we should turn off all our devices, walk into the curative, holy rays of sunlight, pick up a bat and ball and play with each other.

I have a feeling that everyone you love will come.