Epilogue to yesterday: "U-S-A!" U-S-A?

I never did get back to watching last night's game, but checked my phone a few times. Missed a third Yankee home run in that horrid second inning, noted the comeback to almost tie the game, then this morning saw that we did tie it, even went ahead , blew the lead and came within about a foot of a Pete Alonso ball going over the wall to win it.  It wound up 8-7 in favor of the Evil Empire; but while it was still in that 8-7 state, one friend nailed the significance of that status with this Fox-y observation:



(Yes, their lead baseball announcer has to call a football game today in another city;)

Personally, I was waiting for the Mets to win it 11-9, which would appear in the line score as 9-11 and finally prove once and for all that this game is just as scripted as professional wrestling.

Just to rub it in, the Braves (our friendlyish opponents for that First Game Back in 2001 where Piazza's hit DID go over the wall)  lost their game yesterday to the lowly Marlins. So we lost no ground but could've gained some.  But in the end, it really didn't matter. The occasion was far more important than 1/162nd of a probably meaningless season. Hell, the Sabres would be tanking for a better draft pick by now (and screwing up their selection like, hey, the Mets just did!).

Football season for us begins in just under three hours. Who knows where they will fit into this sprots-metaphorical narrative.  (I actually posted on my baseball blog about them and the Mets for the first time in an age.)

For now, though, we leave the sports section and return to some more thoughts about the events commemorated at that game from, yesterday, exactly 20 years before.

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My earlier Faced thoughts about it:

On this anniversary, I've been mulling the question of why losing 3,000 lives in the wake of 9/11 "brought us together as a nation"* but losing more than 650,000 lives in the wake of COVID has only torn us apart.

I've considered reasons. There's the intensity of that single moment versus a multimonth plague, and the harshness of the imagery, and how many people didn't die but could have, or knew someone who did.

But I'm coming round to the one big difference: this is not the social media world of September 2001. There was no Twitter, Facebook or anything close in terms of collective influence. Yes there were "truther" crazies then, just like there are imbeciles snorting horse paste now, but their crazy theories weren't magnified, weaponized and monetized the way the current ones are.
If the social media of 2021 had existed in 2001, probably 40 percent of the country would still believe 9/11 was an "inside job" and they'd be marking the anniversary by storming President Jeb!'s White House for his brother's complicity in it.

Don't believe stupid just because it shows up on your monitor.

After a night of seeing the videos, both of the terror of 9/11 and the healing of 9/21 when the city and country came together on our baseball field, I realized another difference. It was right in my first paragraph above, but I didn't see it until this morning:

The aftermath of 9/11 did bring us together. If not quite as politically as legend holds (see first footnote below), physically and emotionally.  For those startling and shocking weeks, it was okay for firefighters to cry. It was acceptable and encouraged for even casual acquaintances to gather, to embrace, to cry it out together. We saw those tears and hugs last night in the videos from the Piazza game on 9/21/01, we saw them again in the live feed from last night's game, as you saw the tears coming down on the first responders in full dress and players from then and now in uniforms proclaiming only NEW YORK on the front of both teams' uniforms** as they stood, alternating Met and Yankee, along the foul lines during the ceremonies.

In contrast, the pandemic did tear us apart- and initially, it did so physically. We were rightly told that the worst things we could do would be to gather, and embrace, and cry it out together. We could mourn our dead and curse the causes, but we could only do it alone, or at best over things like Zoom that, initially, didn't even exist in any mass-available form.

By the time science gave us "do" answers- masks and vaccines- to overcome the "don'ts," for many, it was too late. Too many had died, and too many others, falling prey not to a disease but to conspiracies and ignorance, rejected what science was telling and giving us.  "Freedom" became a twisted concept, where the right to die and to kill through an unseeable and constantly mutating process, became more important than protecting that loved or random person who, twenty years before, you would have gathered with, and embraced and cried it out with.

On September 21, 2001, in a dump of a ballpark in Flushing, New York, we began to heal. Twenty years later, we have an incredible proportion of our nation that doesn't want to heal and doesn't want the rest of us to.

That's Amazin', although it's the opposite of what I've always meant by that word.

It sucks.




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* I know, we didn't "unite" as much as legend says we did, but at least we weren't tearing at each others' throats like we are now. 

** Well, that and Nike swooshes. Not even 9/11 could kill THOSE off.