A Look Back from 2019 Or So

I was reading, of all things, ESPN The Magazine, in passing this week.  The "passing" aspect has gone quicker and quicker over the years.  The more pages are assigned to motor sports, trash-sports like "X Games", women's basketball and the NBA, the less time it is taking me to read through it.

There are usually two or three essays in the form of what we would call an editorial.  They use people to write them like Howard Bryant, who would find ways to interject racism into a discussion about flavored coffee.  But I read them anyway, in the place you, uh, need reading material.

This issue had a couple things I objected to, though.  The first was an article by Pedro Gomez, a staff writer, about the joys of Latin baseball.  I don't object to the joys of Latin baseball, of course; it's fun to watch players having fun themselves, and the Latin players are second to none in making the game fun.

I did object to his first paragraph, though, wherein he describes Roberto Clemente as the "first Latin superstar" in the professional game.  Now, Clemente was great and a superstar, for sure.  But he wasn't first.  That, as I pointed out months back, was not only the first but the greatest Hispanic player in baseball history, none other than Ted Williams.  Old Ted, who broke into the majors when Clemente was about four, was every bit as Mexican as Barack Obama was black, so you get my drift.

But I digress a bit.

One of those editorial-type articles was about something that had nothing to do with politics, but the guest author still tossed in a paragraph worth of drivel about how he was afraid, and his people were afraid, and we should all be afraid, obviously because of the results of the last election (hint: he didn't mention President Trump by name, but he was talking about him.  Duh.).

So you know how people like me sometimes make notes of the predictions made before a sports season, or a playoff season or the like, and then look at them after the games are over to see who got it right, or how bad the predictions were, that sort of thing?  I mean, I do that too, before the baseball playoffs start but once we know the teams.  Maybe 30 reporters give their predictions, and if three of them get the winner right, that's pretty good, and no one ever gets all the rounds correct.

Well, I want someone to do that now.  Note down a dozen or two of those predictive statements about why they should be afraid, or what this or that exaggerated outcome will definitely happen, and how bad it will be.  Then set a reminder for, say, mid-2019.  Look at what we were supposed to fear and see if it actually happened.

I think the outcome would be amazingly educational.  We will find that some things we were concerned about indeed were as bad or worse than predicted -- Obamacare is a perfect, horrible example.

But for the most part, I expect -- let's say "predict" -- that all the panic among the snowflakes, and among the people who write articles for ESPN and sneak in little fears, will turn out to be completely unjustified.  We have a system of government in place that tends to stabilize the tiller of the ship of state, as it were, after all.  Except when the Democrats have 60 senators.

And I hope that I will have the perspicacity to go back in a few years, after Donald Trump has been president a few years, and look at some of the writings of people who were talked into fears they should not have had.  We'll see, I am confident, that whether or not we have advanced that much as a nation, on all of the many fronts in which we needed to have advanced, the fears will have proved completely unfounded.

I'm going to try to remember to look back in a few years.  Will you?

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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