Opinion: Have No Sacred Cows

"...when I was about 18 and my dad and I couldn't communicate about anything at all... we could still talk about baseball. Now that was real."

-Phil, City Slickers

I love baseball. I love baseball beyond reason. Sitting down in a beautiful Major League ballpark with a brat and a soda on a warm sunny day, or beautiful summer evening... taking in the hum of the crowd, the flow and action of the game, the sounds... alone or with a loved one, it is one of the closest feelings to complete inner tranquility I can experience. I consider myself close to my brother... yet sports, especially baseball, are often the only things we ever talk about. I forget where he works, but he keeps me up to date on any significant goings-on with the Minnesota Twins.

I am trying to illustrate the depth of emotion that lay, probably to a mostly-unconscious degree, in my psyche as I evaluated the politically tense push in the mid-aughts (2006 or '07) to build a partially-taxpayer-funded new ballpark for the Minnesota Twins. At that time I was a minimally-informed twenty-something who essentially fell into political arguments along party lines in favor of the Democratic position. In the ballpark debate, however, it was almost like an entirely other consciousness took over.

Normally, any political article I read, I had a default sympathy with whatever was uttered by a politician with a (D) by their name, and default antipathy towards those with an (R). It was wholeheartedly different with the ballpark. Whenever I read an article about it, anyone who spoke in favor of it, whether (R) or (D), I nodded my head as I read their point. Anyone who spoke in opposition, didn't at all matter the letter between the parentheses, I felt reflexive antipathy. The ballpark was going to be good for the economy, I believed it and anyone who tried to lay out any kind of argument in opposition simply didn't understand that.

I cheered when the ballpark bill was approved. I couldn't have been much more thrilled. The Twins had been trying to get it for probably more than a decade, and it was starting to seem like it was never going to happen and we were probably going to lose the team.

This all happened ten years ago and I do not wish to re-hash the debate over this particular ballpark. The main point I want to make is that there are extremely good arguments in opposition to building taxpayer-funded stadiums (just look up Andrew Zimbalist if you don't think so). I essentially refused to hear them. I am ashamed to say that it wasn't until after the stadium was approved that I began to open my mind, especially when it came time to argue over a new stadium for the Minnesota Vikings, a team I care much less for.

Why was I so close-minded on the Twins stadium? As my mind started opening up and I started examining my motivations- the truth was simply that, emotionally, **I** wanted the stadium, and no logical argument could change that. Even if I started to intellectually accept that a Twins stadium was  a bad idea... deep down I just wanted one personally.

I couldn't bring myself to acknowledge this in the stadium debate. This desire was not really operating within me on a very conscious level. The truth was that not getting the stadium, especially if it risked losing The Minnesota Twins altogether, was emotionally akin to being told that a beloved family dog had to be euthanized for the good of the neighborhood. Even if for some reason you accept that it should be done, you can't emotionally bring yourself to be happy about it.

I think there was no way possible that I could ever cease yearning for a new Twins stadium. No intellectual argument could change the emotional meaning it would have for me and I was incapable of being honest enough with myself to recognize that. Instead I tried to intellectually rationalize my desire for the ballpark as if it was somehow the right thing to do.

I strongly suspect this kind of motivation is operating at the core of many charged political debates. I suspect the gun-rights issue is like this for many people. For a large swath of the American population, the gun is a cultural centerpiece, especially for people who use them for sport like hunting. Comedian Jim Jeffries shot to fame based largely on a viral comedic bit he did in opposition to widespread gun ownership. In it he attempts to debunk essentially all defenses of gun ownership, and he says there is really one reason and one reason only to defend gun ownership: "fuck off, I like guns."

Today, Freddie DeBoer, a left-wing academic, is denouncing black bloc, an anarchist protest movement, or specifically a protest tactic, on Facebook, specifically targeting his criticism towards a black bloc rioter who hit a woman with a metal pole. While a lot of Freddie's readers seem sympathetic to what he has to say, there are actually people commenting in some kind of strained defense of the action. Or, if not defense of the action, accusation that Freddie is mischaracterizing the black bloc movement/tactic, or falsely using this isolated incident to discredit the whole movement.

I am going into intellectually questionable territory here and speculating that anyone who would defend a man hitting a woman with a metal pole is engaged in some kind of desperate mental/emotional gymnastics. I am guessing at least 9 out of 10 people who would argue back against Freddie, rather than join him in soundly denouncing this incident and the protest movement, have in some way emotionally invested in the black bloc tactic and now that they are feeling it challenged, feel inclined to rationalize it. They don't actually feel comfortable with the metal pole incident, they just feel there are deeper concerns which are going unaddressed... one such person talking angrily in response to Freddie claims that Freddie doesn't know "the reality on the ground," there are fascists who pose an immediate physical threat to a vulnerable population, and violent tactics are necessary as a form of self-defense. If we denounce the entire black bloc movement, we denounce the only tactic handy to immediately defend this vulnerable population. Perhaps this one incident is objectionable but we can't throw the whole movement under the bus.

The defense is a desperate rabbit-hole I don't really want to go down. The point is, a man hit a woman with a metal pole and supposedly left-wing people are putting themselves in a position where they are not roundly, soundly, and loudly denouncing it.

The whole Freddie DeBoer thing may not be the best example of what I am trying to talk about. But it is a phenomenon I think is present almost anywhere you go in the political spectrum and on almost any argument. We all have intellectual limits, we don't have an answer for everything, and to a degree we start from an emotional position and we rationalize from there. This is something we all need to take precious caution to guard against. I saw it in the contest to unionize my fellow flight-attendants in 2015. Some people who defended unionization nodded approvingly at any argument which rationalized it, however intellectually thin it might be upon inspection. Similarly, many who opposed unionization seemed to look through desperately rose-colored lenses at our employer, who treats us so good and fair and can do no wrong.

Wherever you are on the political spectrum or whatever side you take on any contentious issue, there should be inviolable principles and you should be ready to denounce people on your side at any point. Violence against a woman should be one of them. Violence against anyone, unless an overwhelming self-defense justification can be mounted (they have already physically attacked you, or they pulled out a gun and were threatening to use it, something like that), really should be one of them.

Just today Facebook is telling me that 1 Million are "talking about" Yemen, because a botched raid ordered by Drumpf is being splashed across the headlines. It may indeed be the case that there was some special kind of incompetence on Drumpf's part that led to this raid to fail to achieve its mission. But I can't help but instinctively think with some despair, "gosh, we care about Yemen now? We've been bombing them for at least two years under Obama, civilians have undoubtedly been killed by us, I have no recollection of 1 Million people talking about it on Facebook before today.