Bereavement Notice: Some Teacher Thoughts on Going Back to School

When there is a death in our school district or “extended family,” HR sends out a bereavement notice email.  “Francisco Silva*, father of Nicholas Silva, food service worker at School # 11, died Monday, December 1.  Funeral will be held at....  In lieu of flowers, please make a donation to....”  Or, “Ellen O’Leary, teacher of mathematics at Passaic High School for 30 years (retired 2010), died….”  In a normal month, we might receive a handful of these notices, no more than two a week.  This past April and May however, at the height of the pandemic here in northern New Jersey, we received sometimes two or three a day.  The flow has subsided for now.    

            The notices do not give the cause of death, but the sheer number of them, peaking when they did, juxtaposed to the COVID numbers from our city and county led us to assume that most were COVID-caused or related.  Regardless, we were hit hard.  As far as I know, we did not lose any students, and we did not lose any current faculty or staff—I did not personally know of any these deceased—but the notices were devastating nonetheless.  Each one trickled into the inbox, dramatically illustrating the situation’s severity and also the helplessness we felt: "The deaths keep rolling in, and the best thing I can do is just stay here, inside?"  The notices concerned faculty and staff and not necessarily our students directly, but Passaic is a small enough city that the deaths overlapped with the students’ own families and social networks.  One of my current students lost a grandfather.  Another, her aunt.  Seniors Maria and Julia, whom I taught last year, respectively lost their fathers.

            Passaic unfortunately was primed for COVID’s crushing because of its geography and demography: it is in North New Jersey; it is densely populated and primarily low income; it is primarily Latinx (of Mexican, Dominican, Peruvian, and other heritages); there is a significant Indian-American and African-American population (and a significant white, Orthodox Jewish population); there is a substantial number of undocumented people; and many parents had to continue working through the pandemic because the nature of their work could not be done at home and/or they were deemed “essential workers” and/or they could not afford to be income-less for several months, with less of a safety net to fall back on. 

When the schools shut down and moved to online learning, the transition and landing were not exactly smooth but I think as good as possible, given the circumstances.  As has been much written about, nationally, online teaching and learning was demoralizing, on the whole.  Granted, some kids find in-person school demoralizing: for example, the middle-schooler bullied for his perceived sexual orientation or bullied “just because”; the undiagnosed child in need of special ed supports floundering; the black student who does not see herself in the stories from her history or literature course and at the same time sees her black peers disciplined more than her white peers.  And so, I sympathize with the minority opinion on distance learning, as written here by 13-year-old Veronique Mintz.  What can we do on the individual and institutional level to make in-person schooling less horrifying for some and just more engaging for all?  These are pressing perennial questions.  However, almost all of my students by the end of April wanted to be back in school.  Based on surveys I conducted, all of them want to be back in school in September, even David, who has done as little work as possible for me the past two years.  I want to see David, too.

            Across the board, student engagement dipped way down: across all districts, all income levels, all grades, and all ability levels.  Soon into the online learning battle, I understood there were four general categories of students: 1. Students who worked hard before COVID and continued to do so 2. Students who worked hard before COVID but did not; 3. Students who did not work before COVID but surprisingly came alive through it; and 4. Students who did not work before COVID and continued to not work.  The first and third groups gave me my “energy,” and that is where I focused my efforts: students seeking more feedback on their thesis statements or asking for additional reading, for instance.  I celebrated the third group, especially, and tried to lift them up: "Better late than never.  Also next year when (if) we are in person, you know you can continue this trend, right?"  The second group, the drop-offs, worried me the most.  And, as for the fourth group, I still made calls regularly but soon realized I could not lose sleep or that much time over them.  (From formal and informal surveys, I found the causes of non-engagement to be everything from greater household and sibling responsibilities to families actually being affected by COVID to isolation and depression to “didn’t think this quarter would count” and video games.  With my students at least, it seemed like our computer crew had done a good job closing any tech and internet access gaps.)  Many days, online teaching consisted only of the drudgery that normally goes along with regular teaching—gradebook, phone calls, emails, admin data reports—without any of the joy of being in front of the kids.  Other days though, Oscar’s comparison to the 1918 flu or Guadalupe’s reflection after attending a #blacklivesmatter protest, of her own volition, made up for that drudgery.  I preferred the live “synchronous” lessons and so did the students.  However, because many of us teachers are also parents and because some students had other, new responsibilities and/or initial tech issues, my school did not require regular synchronous lessons.  I tried to sneak as many live lessons in as possible, but I am grateful that they weren’t required or every day or multiple a day.  I would not have been able to balance that and taking care of then-10-month old Caroline, as Whitney, a public defender, was (is) also working from home.  (We are fortunate enough to both have our jobs still and to have four grandparents two hours away on standby babysitting duty, but we didn't want to potentially expose them to microbes floating in North Jersey.)  I did most of my “teaching” during Caroline’s naps and after she went down at night: recording lectures for content and teacher-model videos for skills, picking apart evidence and analysis in essays, and planning the next days’ lessons.  All in all, I had it relatively easy though.  Yes, I work in a school affected by all the issues that go along with poverty, but I teach an AP class at an “academy” (i.e. a magnet school) and in history.  I can’t imagine teaching science at a time like this—how do you do labs, which are crucial?—or being a special ed teacher, or working as a counselor, as COVID certainly increased stress for our already hormoned and psychologically taxed teenagers.  Or, thank god I am not an elementary school teacher.  How do you do that, regularly, on Zoom or Google Meet/Classroom?  

            Tangentially, as Caroline is now 13 months, we did not have to also monitor her own online learning or tell her that she can’t see her friends or that she can't have a normal graduation.  For better or worse, she doesn’t know the difference between COVID and before.  As Whitney is in virtual court or virtual jail visits with her clients, Caroline and I are playing in the next room off-camera, and she is usually cute and loud.  On screen, Whitney's client meanwhile is stuck between so many rocks and hard places: addiction, the rigors and yet slightly lessened rigor (because of no in-person meetings) of treatment; jail and COVID; prison and COVID; homelessness or a family member willing to take them in but who is immuno-compromised; unemployment and the pressure to find employment but so little employment out there, even in a non-pandemic, and employment only in COVID-risky jobs.  Some people have had it really hard.  

            As I wrapped up the school year, I presumed and hoped that we would be back in person in September.  Yes, I presumed that we would have to follow some CDC guidelines but that we would be in the building.  The news was sort of improving.  We had “flattened the curve.”  People were outside and sort of living.  Masks seemed like something practical we could do—should do—so that we could have some normalcy.  But for the past several weeks, the news hasn’t been very good nationally and even in New Jersey, where like much of the Northeast, we had shut everything down to get a handle on it.  Every teacher I know wants to be back, with their kids, in their physical classrooms.  I haven’t actually been in the classroom since December because I was fortunate enough to take a three-month paternity leave, and I am craving to be back.  I miss my kids, and after six years of teaching, I finally know what I am doing.  It is work, but I have a lot of fun doing it. 

We as a nation, however, have done almost everything wrong to contain this disease, and we stubbornly continue to do almost everything wrong.  To be sure, there are fair criticisms of the Chinese government, and there are even fair criticisms of the WHO, and many other countries have made major missteps.  But, a country with our wealth and capacity should not lead the world in COVID cases and deaths.  From downplaying the disease in the beginning to even now still not doing enough testing and contact tracing to, most frustratingly, people at the highest levels of government giving mixed messages at best and peddling conspiracy theories at worst, we truly are exceptional.  Let alone the lack of basic PPE and ventilators in our lean just-in-time, for-profit health care system, insurance for which is tied to employment, and thus the millions who have lost their insurance.  Let alone the scant economic support, more generally: meager unemployment benefits, whereas some countries in Europe, for instance, are paying businesses 80% of its staff salaries so that people can live and because even when the disease ends the economic recession will continue; housing foreclosures and evictions; huge corporate giveaways in lieu of supporting small businesses; all the while, massive Pentagon and police budgets approved, with bipartisan support.  Let alone Jeff Bezos and other oligarchs whose wealth grows exponentially each day of COVID and whose fortunes are built on the back of public investment and underpaid labor and yet who are not taxed nearly enough. 
            Meanwhile, the Trump administration saw who was dying and grossly, inaccurately declared COVID defeated, and Jared Kushner, czar of the pandemic (and of Middle East peace), had his W. Bush-fighter-jet-landing-aircraft-carrier “Mission Accomplished” interview on Fox.  This malfeasance from the top—combined with everyday people (of all ages and political stripes) feeling invincible or apathetic or “I’m so over this” and mixed with that stubborn, perverse, selective, fetishized version of “freedom” that refuses to simply wear a mask even though that would help other people—is killing us.  We are rogue nation, if we are not a failed state.  This all has set up both false choices and real, bitter choices.  Between the “economy” and “the cure,” as if the “economy” is just the stock market or some neutral operating system out there that does not include actual people.  As if the economy doesn’t include the elderly.  This has pitted small businesses against governors.  It has pitted some parents against teachers.  And, as people of color disproportionately die from COVID, it has pitted some black people between "die from COVID" or "die at the hands of police" and their deputized vigilantes. 

Now, with this rush to get back to normal (without having done any of the work to really be in that position), we have the false and bitter choice between safety for schools/teachers/students and the “economy.”  As if schools, teachers, and students are not part of the economy.  Because facts on the ground have been trending so badly, as we get closer to September, many teachers are having second thoughts about going back.  I am conflicted myself.  I think we should follow the CDC guidelines at a bare minimum, but I have a hard time imagining what that would look like in school.  Windows?  Ventilation?  Bathrooms?  Cafeteria?  Mask enforcement?  Social distancing?  Once again, thank god I’m not an elementary school teacher.  Nothing we do will be entirely risk-free, of COVID or other dangers, but the CDC guidelines seem like a good (science-based) place to start.  I am willing to enforce them in my classroom, in the hallway, and elsewhere.  I am willing to innovate, modify, accommodate, teach outdoors, and reimagine, or jump onboard with leaders and peers who are more creative and better at problem solving than I.  I understand everyone’s desire to get back to some degree of normal.  I understand parents’ wanting their kids to get the most of out of their education and that that necessitates being in the classroom.  I understand parents’ maybe needing just a little space from their older kids for the first time since March.  I especially empathize with working class parents who cannot afford to stay home and provide child care.  But if we cannot--or chose not to-- follow the CDC guidelines and if cases continue to climb, we shouldn’t go back to school.  If I didn’t have a one-year old myself, I might have a different opinion or a different take, at least, on my own personal risk.  I hope conditions on the ground improve very soon so that I can happily be proved wrong or alarmist and so that I can change my mind back to where I was just last month.  I hope a sudden influx of money, energy, and political will arises to build alternative, hybrid, and safe learning spaces.  I really do want to go to back. 

In recent weeks, this aliterate president and his Amway-billionaire no-previous-experience-in-teaching Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, have been insisting that all schools will open in person in September—that everything will be fine.  They are threatening to cut off funding to school districts that do not start back up in person.  Some governors and school districts will go along in lock-step.  Ron DeSantis of Florida says we can do it right with the schools because we did it with Home Depot and Walmart.  Some better governors and school districts will go along too but with great reservations.  Some even better ones, I hope, will not go along.  That is, until there are new facts on the ground and guarantees.  And in localities that have suppressed the virus—“live in a community that doesn’t have a big disease outbreak.  That’s how you open up schools safely”-- and are able to follow CDC guidelines, some will rightfully (gradually, I hope!) open up.  With rich irony, Trump and his sycophants note that other countries have opened up schools and therefore so should we.  They leave out the part where those other countries have actually taken this pandemic and accompanying economic fallout seriously.  As John Oliver put it, interpreting DeSantis and others, "We were really dumb then.  The only fair thing is also to be really dumb now."  What will we teachers do, then, if it is still unsafe and we are ordered back into the classroom? 

Enter the big bad teachers’ unions.  Growing up, I heard on the news and in casual conversation, "Oh Pennridge teachers are on strike again.  What do they want?  Another month in the summer off?"  There are the familiar refrains: "unions protect bad teachers...they protect teachers' cushy hours."  Republican and Democratic school reformers alike and their documentaries and nonprofits remind us, "Teachers' unions are an adult interest group, serving teachers not students....  They get in the way of needed reforms....Tenure means lazy teachers whom you can't fire."

Like any institution, a teacher’s union is only as good as its members and its leaders.  Some critiques might be true here and there (just some “bad apples”?), and where there is valid criticism, we must listen and do better.  But, I reject this general vilification.  I am a proud member of a teachers’ union: the Education Association of Passaic (EAP), affiliated with the NJEA and the NEA.  I worked for a year at a charter school in Newark that had no union.  The hours, tangential responsibilities, and data reporting requirements nearly broke me (I am not always efficient, but I am no slouch).  We had to be at school for a minimum of ten hours a day, and then of course at home, I worked another three hours each night.  Most of the weekend was tied up with work as well.  I noticed that, at 35, I was the third oldest teacher in the building.  Most of my colleagues were in their mid-20s and minded less working all the time and sleeping little.  (I already did that lifestyle in my 20s—it was called the navy.)  Six teachers quit between August and December and did so not because they couldn’t handle the “inner-city kids” but because the expectations of teachers were not sustainable.  If one or two quit, you think it might be those individuals.  Six, and it's probably your labor practices.  I almost quit myself in January.  I don’t harbor ill will or regrets.  I loved my students, I became a stronger teacher due to the training I received, I made some good friends, and even though I am “pro-traditional public school,” I am not ideologically anti-charter school.  Unlike some other fly-by-night charters, this one has been around for a while, and I wish it continued success.   But after a year, I was done. 

Historically, teachers’ unions have protected academic freedom, have been a force for women’s equality, and have provided other benefits and protections.  Most practically, my teacher’s union protects my hours.  I was able to have a kid, and I am able to see her.  I was able to take paternity leave.  Most teachers I work with still put in the hours after class at school because we love the work.  It’s just that we don’t have to, and that is a nice "perk" because teaching six 45-minute blocks to freshmen is exhausting (insert my line here about thankfully not being an elementary teacher).  Yes, I have July and August off, but I work almost every evening and most Sundays.  Any teacher who does not want to get owned by a roomful of teenagers the next day has to do much regular work outside of school hours, but I can catch my breath and see my wife and daughter in between, which is a nice perk.  This is not meant to be another “teachers don’t get enough respect; here’s what we actually do” gripe essay.  There are plenty of those out there already, and I think we mostly get the right amount respect (and in another breath I don’t care what some people think).  Especially in COVID, other occupations have it much harder: ER nurses and doctors; hospital cafeteria workers and janitors; police, EMTs, and other first responders; farmworkers; grocery store clerks and food service workers; postal workers, delivery drivers, and all other newly and cruelly deemed “essential” workers.  Finally, from daily high fives in the hallway to graduation hugs, we get a lot of regular positive feedback—much more than those other occupations.  This is all to say that despite warranted criticisms of unions in specific situations, I am grateful I am in one.  Who else would be looking out for me at a time like this?  And ultimately—because I believe a well-rested, well-trained, and compensated-enough teacher is an effective teacher—looking out for the students?

Should there be a confrontation, nationally or locally, between administration(s) and teachers, I am not sure what we should do.  Would it come to a strike?  Admittedly, despite my aspiring radicalism, I have always been less comfortable with teachers’ and public sector strikes.  The opponent is less clear—there is no Boss Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, or Bezos.  If we were to go on strike, would we be striking against the Passaic Board of Education, i.e. the semi-hands-tied board of an already cash-strapped city and thus against its lower-income property tax base?  Would it be against the principal?  Superintendent?  Governor and NJ Department of Education?  All of the above?  And, would that pit us against our parents, many of whom have had to work throughout this time and many of whom are searching for work?  Have we done our “homework” to build coalitions there so that the narrative in the local news—never much one for nuance—doesn’t portray us like those Pennridge teachers, when I was growing up?  Especially since many of us don’t live in Passaic.  Could it potentially pit us against our students, who do want to go back?  I honestly don’t know the right answer, but I hope the answers are based on science, public health, and—yes, I agree with the pediatricians who say that in-person schooling is needed especially for the youngest ones—the growth and development of our students.  I hope these decisions are not made based on efficiency or the “economy” alone.  A month ago, when the teachers’ unions initially started pushing back, my first thought was, “I want to go back.  Are we [the unions] being obstructionist here?”  But the more I read about COVID updates, the CDC guidelines, what other countries have done, and what we most definitely have not done, I think “obstruction” is good here.  Could not a strike or other confrontation be against the larger system that has left us with these bad choices in the first place? 

Should there be strikes or other disruption, stand by for the usual union blasting.  See the Chris Christie (NJ) or Scott Walker (WI) playbook.  The powers-that-be, including many a liberal commentator and lawmaker, will attempt to pit parents against teachers, private and charter schools against public schools, and private sector workers against public sector workers: “Look at these lazy teachers with their pensions and summers; now they’re insisting we follow these CDC rules or they’re not going to teach your kids!”  Don’t be fooled, though.  They want you angry at us (or postal workers, but not police officers—those particular public workers have been exempt from this long economic and culture war) instead of being angry at the hoarding rich.  In addition to my day-to-day hours’ being protected, I am glad there is an organized, powerful voice on the left, even though not all of our unions are that left or organized or powerful or have always been on the side of justice.  I am grateful that we are an obstructionist wrench in the wheels of neoliberalism’s forty-year march.   

The Chicago, Los Angeles, and West Virginia teachers have changed the narrative in the past several years.  They have organized, mobilized, and struck when necessary not just for member benefits but for the common good.  They have reminded us of these truths: not everything need be for profit; public goods are worth saving; and efficiency is not the only value.  This fight is about teachers, yes, but by extension, it is about our students.  It is about adequate housing and health care for their families and about desegregation.  It is about challenging systemic racism in education (there are not just some “bad apples”—we have a lot of antiracism work to do ourselves).  It is about environmental justice and fair taxation.  It is about stopping the "economic draft" of disproportionately low income kids of color into the military.  It is about moving some of those endless dollars earmarked for policing, incarceration, and the military toward social, human needs.  A. Philip Randolph’s auto workers were not just concerned about the auto plants.  Eugene Debs’ railway workers were not just concerned about the rail lines.  We teachers are concerned about life inside and outside the classroom, as they necessarily feed each other.

“Why make it political?  I was (sort of) just interested in your stories from the classroom?”  But, if the political and economic—and biological and public health—conditions do not support education, then there are no stories from the classroom, at least no happy ones. 

Paideia: the ancient Greeks sought deep education that formed whole persons.  At-large philosopher and social critic Cornel West regularly channels the Greeks and also Saint Paul in his speeches, encouraging teachers and students to “die daily.”  That is, die figuratively, spiritually to our fears, to our prejudices, our pride, our old theories and methods, our old habits and mistakes and sins, our own psychological bondage.  “I tell students when they come to my classroom, they come to learn how to die,” West regales.  That process doesn’t happen very often if we’re being honest and certainly not with every student, even on our best days.  But, it happens enough to make teaching worth it, and I believe it happens best in person in the actual classroom.  However, if actual, physical, premature death lurks too closely—because of a virus, yes, but also because of our nation’s refusal to undergo its own paideia and spiritual “dying”—it is not worth the risk.  We are not as helpless as we thought, when those bereavement notices were piling up.  We can still do things right.   

*all names changed

Catching the Fever: On Baseball and Its Absence

Twenty-five years ago this summer—September 6, 1995 to be exact—the “Iron Man” Cal Ripken, Jr. played in his 2,131st consecutive game, breaking the “Iron Horse” Lou Gehrig’s previously held record.  The game, against the California Angels, was nationally televised on ESPN.  It was difficult to watch out-of-town teams in those days, but for this special occasion, even non-baseball fans tuned in.  (Also, in those days, they were not the “Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim,” and there were only two ESPNs.)  When the game became official, after the top of the fifth inning, a twenty-minute standing ovation for Ripken ensued.  For good measure, Cal had hit a home run in the fourth inning.  The fans, the commentators, the players agreed: Cal “saved baseball.”  

The 1994 strike and cancelled World Series had embittered many fans—why are millionaires who get to play a game for a living on strike?—and many Americans had forsworn Major League Baseball.  It’s not like it used to be.  I’m done.  But, this moment with the “streak” had, according to the pundits, redeemed all that bitterness and selfishness, and “baseball [was] back.”  As for me, yes I was confused about the strike and upset that it abbreviated the ‘94 season and delayed the ’95 season.  However, I was too young and too obsessed with playing and watching baseball for me to do any forswearing myself.  If I was an Expos fan—their only chance at winning it all was in ‘94 (and I don’t count the Washington Nationals as the same team)—I might have held a longer grudge.   

Even though I lived in the Philadelphia exurbs and was a loyal Phillie fan, a chance encounter with Cal in a 1988 sticker book had turned me into his number-one fan.  Over time, my bedroom became the “shrine” to Ripken, as my dad called it.  And so, Ripken-obsessed in non-Oriole-country in 1995, I felt I was able to own, to some degree, that break-the-streak moment, and it felt very nice.  That is, aside from having to share him with my best friend Fran, Cal was uniquely mine in central Bucks County.  (Fran was obsessed too, and we would regularly debate who liked Ripken more or who liked him first.)  Mrs. Fogel, our eighth-grade teacher and no huge baseball fan as far as I knew, knew about the impending Ripken moment and knew to ask me about it.  (I don’t know whether she asked Fran.  Probably not, as she liked him less.)  She congratulated me for that moment I had been working so hard for.  So did Uncle Rich, Mr. Cassidy, and other family members and friends.  Watching that game in the basement with my parents, hiding tears, I concurred with the baseball intelligentsia: Cal had saved the game and, by extension, naturally, had saved America.  

Twenty-five years later, here in 2020, the Major League Baseball season is delayed again.  Perhaps, it will never get off the ground.  Meanwhile, the revelation at the end of last season of the Houston Astros cheating scandal embittered many fans, not unlike the strike did.  (The Astros, American League champs in 2019 who lost to the Nationals, admitted to using technology to steal signs in the 2017 and 2018 seasons, but they deny cheating in the 2019 season and postseason.) 

Who will save baseball, and by extension, naturally, America this time?

*

I recall the 1990s fondly.  It was a beautiful time, especially for a middle-class, white, suburban kid like me, who was lucky enough to be sheltered from both trauma and heartbreak.  On the surface political scene, Saddam Hussein had kicked off the decade.  Then, there was Rodney King and Waco, OJ and Oklahoma City, Lewinsky, and Saddam some more.  But, we didn’t think about any of that.  We didn’t have to think about any of that.  More important, especially in the summer, was Letterman, Seinfeld, AOL Instant Messenger, Sportscenter, the Jersey shore, the Outer Banks when we got too good for the Jersey shore, Baseball Tonight, and baseball in general.     

At the time of Cal Ripken’s saving the world, I was still at the age when many boys think they’re good enough to make it to the big leagues.  Because I was good enough to make all-star teams as an eighth-grader, I would be good enough to play in high school and in college and, maybe, even beyond that.  That’s why Fran, Billy Ganter, Mike Agnew, and I would go to baseball camp each summer at Allentown College (now DeSales University): to work on the fundamentals that would elevate our play and to “network” with college coaches (the first time I was encouraged to network although I don’t think I used the word).  That was the beauty, or the trick, of playing in Chalfont.  It was a small enough world—there were nine boys in my graduating 8th grade class—and we felt, rightfully, that nothing could stop us.  At school recess each day, we played a blacktop version of the game, with stuffed whiffle bats and tennis balls.  In between school and TV games and actual games, I worked on the batting tee (later to be replaced by the “Solohitter”) in our sizeable backyard and made my younger brother field grounders with me until we couldn’t see the ball anymore and one of us got hurt.  “Baseball is Life.  The rest is just details.”  Mr. Agnew had bought that shirt that a lot of dads wore, and then we all bought that shirt.  Ours was that magical Sandlot boyhood life, but even less walkable than the LA suburbs and even whiter and without Benny (i.e. no Latinx kids and no one—spoiler alert—good enough to actually “make it”).

In the 1990s, there were clear heroes.  Cal Ripken, of course.  That improbable ‘93 Phillies team of washed-up, joker, has-beens: Darren Daulton, Lenny Dykstra, John Kruk, Mitch Williams, Pete Incaviglia, and crew.  Especially compared to the superstar-curated rosters across the league, we loved that Phillies team and their unlikely ride that year.  Before the wild card and the “LDS” (League Division Series) were things and before interleague play was a thing, those Phillies surprised the baseball world by winning the NL East and then defeating the Braves for the National League pennant.  (In those days, Atlanta was in the “West.”)  I tuned in to each postseason game early because I had envied those Tim McCarver and Bob Costas dramatic-voice-over-classical-music-slow-motion preludes, and finally, I was able to watch them for a team I liked.  Sure, the Phillies lost to the Blue Jays on Joe Carter’s World Series-ending home run (only the second time in history), but like "Roy Hobbs" (Robert Redford) and the Knights in The Natural, they had won the pennant and that was what mattered.  (There is not even a World Series in The Natural).  And, that is what we choose to remember.  

There were other heroes, too, who weren’t on my favorite teams but who were benign enough to warrant admiration: Kirby Puckett, Ken Griffey, Jr., Tony Gwynn, Craig Biggio, Nolan Ryan, Ryne Sandberg.  Away from the TV, out on the actual fields of our lives, there was that improbable ‘96 Saint Jude’s team that made it to the Region 20 playoffs—farther than a Jude team had in years.  They were heroes, too, even though they lost to Our Lady of Mount Carmel in the semi-finals.  That is what we choose to remember.

In the 1990s, there were also clear villains.  Joe Carter, yes, but he was more a blip on the radar.  The Braves were always around, and so I hated them more: Greg Maddux, John Smoltz, Tom Glavine, David Justice, Chipper Jones.  Tom Glavine, especially, was a villain because not only would he get a ridiculously generous strike zone from most umpires but also he was a player-union rep, and therefore, I had associated his millionaire pretty face with all that baseball not being played during the strike.  My friend and class/teammate Brian Smith was villainous, too.  That is, he liked the Braves.  Why does he like the Braves?  He isn’t even from Atlanta.  And Tim Whelan, a year ahead of us—he liked them, too.  So did Alex Moore, who lived down the street.  Not only did Alex like the Braves, but he also rooted for the Cowboys, the Bulls, Duke basketball, and Nebraska football.  He apparently lacked a soul and jumped on every bandwagon he could find.  Despite the cultural appropriation and it being a Braves’ thing, I admittedly was jealous of the Atlanta fans’ “Tomahawk Chop” and thought the Phils’ “Whoomp There It Is” was a valiant effort but just couldn’t match in its rallying power, even though “Whoomp” beat the chop in six games.  Then mid-decade, the Yankees re-entered the scene and played their role as perennial villains, with their burgeoning payroll, their history of winning, Steinbrenner, and the whole Yankees apparatus, right down to the twelve-year-olds in the stands who cheat and then are treated as heroes.  My buddy Jon Hassinger liked the Yankees.  He insisted on being them every time we played whiffle ball, and he definitely was not from New York.  Sure, I wasn’t from Baltimore, but I rationalized, I love the Phillies, but I also "need" an AL team, and Baltimore is the closest.  Plus, I started liking Ripken first (before Fran Lang did) in 1988, when the O’s were terrible, and they’re still not that good.  I have since looked it up:  Baltimore’s Camden Yards was farther from my home than Yankee Stadium was.  But still, Jon, the Yankees?  He and I would patch up any hard feelings each evening by watching Sportscenter at least three times and Baseball Tonight at least twice.

On the actual field, Mount Carmel in Doylestown were our Catholic league villains, with their bigger homes and larger school enrollment, and Souderton were the secular league villains, who made us forfeit a playoff game only after we won it soundly because “our ump” didn’t show up (an example of when adults get in the way, especially "their adults").

More than any Yankee or Brave or Mount Carmelite, though, JD Drew was the ultimate villain of the 1990s.  JD Drew?  Someone whose contributions or career did not change history that much, compared to some of the true hegemons of that decade?  Yes.  In 1997, with the second overall pick, the Phillies drafted Drew out of Florida State, where he was the top player in all of college baseball.  But with the advice of his agent and baseball’s Iago, Scott Boras, he refused to sign for anything less than $10 million, even though he hadn’t played a game of professional ball in his life.  The Phillies offered him $2.6 million, which he refused, and he went to play independent-league ball for a year.  Then, he re-entered the draft in ‘98, and the St. Louis Cardinals selected and signed him for $7 million.  Here was this unproven, hotshot, Sun Belter college kid, who thumbed his nose at the organization, at the city of brotherly love (and at the suburbs), and the Phils had nothing to show it—for that top draft spot, which they had earned from all that losing the previous year(s).  That did not sit well with the phaithful, and so when Drew, with the Cardinals, finally made his way to Philly in ‘99, he sat out the first game citing “injury,” but we knew it was fear and guilt.  He even switched jerseys with the bullpen catcher, but the fans found him anyway and booed him mercilessly.  The Phillie Phanatic dumped bags of fake cash in front of him.  The next evening, when Drew actually played, the fans booed and jeered and cursed him, and some freedom fighters even threw batteries at him (yes, batteries, don’t ask why or what significance there is).  The following year, I had the opportunity to attend a Cards-Phils game and boo Drew as well.  I left the batteries at home—plus, we never sat close enough for our batteries to have reached him—but I donned a home-made t-shirt, with “JD Drew” in the “no”/strike-through symbol on the front and  “© The JD Drew Sucks Company” on the back, which at the time I thought was both clever and just.  I received compliments from fellow fans—I don’t remember the score of the game, it doesn’t matter—including from one gentleman who said I had made the best shirt ever and that he “would have Adolf Hitler over to [his] house for dinner before [he] would have JD Drew over.”       

In the 1990s, it was a black and white world, and JD Drew was on the wrong side.

*

In the summer of 2002, home from college, I sat down to write a different unsolicited essay on baseball.  I don’t recall the specific impetus for writing it.  There was an on-the-field incident, or an off-the-field incident, or another huge contract signing, or some player on TV wearing his uniform pants loosely around his ankles as if they were wind pants, which was not how I was taught by my baseball camps and coaches to wear them.  (I used to wear mine tightly, pulled up to my knee, showing off my stirrups, like I was Ozzie Smith in the '80s, or something.)  In that essay, titled “Where Have You Gone, Jim Eisenreich?” I wrote down everything I thought was wrong about baseball and the few things I found right about it.  Jim Eisenreich was a journeyman outfielder who played for the Phillies between ‘93 and ‘96.  He had (has) Tourette’s Syndrome, and fans admired him for overcoming that and for otherwise being a “class act” and showing “hustle” and “grit.”  Like Simon and Garfunkel’s Joe DiMaggio, who was also “gone,” I saw Eisenreich as a hero of the past—four years into the past, that is, as he only had retired in ’98—and the kind of player and, presumably, person we should all hope to be.  In that self-righteous manifesto, I decried the influence of money, the lack of team loyalty, fights, hot shots, players not running out fly or foul balls, JD Drew, the designated hitter (the DH wasn’t new, but I believed it was a longtime harbinger of baseball’s downfall), bad attitudes, more money, and steroid use, presuming that Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, and Sammy Sosa all used them.  I was, however, less interested in whether my favorite players juiced.  I am grateful that I cannot find that essay today.            

In the 2000s, college classes and then later the navy kept me pretty busy, and therefore, I began drifting away from the game, unintentionally.  I recall 9/11 and my roommate from Staten Island, Tom, who thought that the Yankees should have, poetically, been the World Series champs that year, instead of those Sun Belt-newcomer Diamondbacks, with their swimming pool beyond the right field fence.  Tom did not appreciate it when I said in return that the Yankees were the reason the terrorists hated us.  Then, there was Steve Bartman, that hapless Cubs fan who in 2003 interfered with a potential foul out and ruined—or so unofficial pundits said—the Cubs’ chance at their first World Series win since 1908.  (They would have to wait another 13 years.)  There was Curt Schilling’s “bloody sock” and the rest of the Red Sox, who finally broke their own curse in 2004, sweeping the Cardinals in the Series, after coming back from three games down against the Yankees in the ALCS.  But over time, the Red Sox became the new Yankees, with their young hotshot general manager, Theo Epstein, and their big names and multiple titles.     

Around the same time—March 20, 2003 to be exact—the US illegally and immorally invaded Iraq.  In April 2003, the National Baseball Hall of Fame disinvited Tim Robbins, who was supposed to participate in an event at the Hall for the 15-year anniversary of Bull Durham.  Robbins had spoken out against the war, and the president of Hall, Dale Petroskey, did not like that.  From Cairo, where I was studying abroad, I wrote an email to Petroskey, siding with Robbins and against the war.  I still await his reply.  When I came back from Cairo, it seemed as if the flags were getting bigger, and the national anthems were getting longer, and there were more “God Bless Americas” slipped into more seventh-inning stretches, and the broadcasters were all wearing more and bigger flag lapel pins each day, and there were more fighter-jet flyovers and more yellow ribbon magnets and more troops being honored on the field, and that every time you watched a game, or especially if you went to one, you had to consent to war in Iraq or war somewhere—it did not matter where.  And honestly, it seemed like we Americans were very insecure people, internally, and that therefore we were projecting all this stuff, externally.  Or, maybe it had been this way all along and I was only noticing then.  Or, maybe I was the one projecting.  Due to these associations—baseball and America had long before become one and the same—I started enjoying baseball less.  

I did stay around long enough to watch the Phillies win the World Series in 2008.  It was the first time a favorite team of mine or a team I was on had won any title, and it felt very nice.  I also stayed around long enough to watch the Phillies go down Red Sox lane the following years—’09 , ‘10, and ’11—buying up big-name players and getting very big for their britches and yet, not winning another title.  I saw the 2009 World Series from Uganda, where I was a volunteer teacher, waking up at odd hours to watch it on the priests’ satellite TV across the street.  The commercials and the bunting—not the sacrifice-move-the-runner-over kind but that red-white-and-blue-hanging-up kind—and the Tim McCarver melodramatic voice-overs and thinking about the million-dollar contracts and the God Bless Americas provided a little reverse culture shock each night that I watched the series from East Africa: Ah right, that’s where I am from.  It was about then when Major League Baseball and I went our separate ways.  Plus, I had already got what I needed in ‘08.  The league, in my mind, had become—or was always?—a microcosm of the larger US conspicuous-consumption, capitalist culture, i.e. of a world gone wrong, i.e. worse than baggy uniform pants this time.  Meanwhile, in my first year of teaching in the States, I happened to teach a couple baseball players who happened to be assholes.  Then, I looked back to my own high school days and thought about my classmates who were good enough to go on to play in college at least and remembered that they were assholes, too.  And, I presumed that when they didn't make it all the way, they found jobs with hedge funds, alongside my old bandwagon neighbor Alex Moore.  By extension, I thought that most professional baseball players must be assholes, too.  I had heard from a friend of a friend of a friend, who rode with a cab driver one time who happened to be overweight and who, another time, had given champion Phillie second-baseman Chase Utley a ride, that Utley was an asshole, having made a joke about the driver’s obesity.  That seemed like evidence and proof enough.  And then, I thought back to Lenny Dykstra and the current “libel-proof” train wreck that he is and the ‘93 Phillies and all that “grit” of those guys we would have liked to “have [had] a beer with” and wondered if they would be wearing MAGA hats today, or at least flying the "Don't Tread on Me" flags somewhere.  Maybe not—and in another breath, Who cares? That is quite the jump, by the way, and also, unfair—but, I was revising my own histories and redrawing my own categories.  

Extending this train of thought, I also revisited my own particular hero-worship and, aside from JD Drew, I questioned my selection of earlier sworn enemies.  I blasphemed and even reconsidered Ripken.  Ripken, in 1995, was seen as the everyman hero, like your dad going out to the factory every day, so said Costas and the pundits.  But, C’mon in 1992, Ripken had signed the largest baseball contract ever and was making $6 million a year that September when he saved baseball.  Your father was not making $6 million a year going to the factory, or even to his consulting firm (as the factories were all gone by ‘95 anyway.  And while we’re on factories and blue collar personas, sure, Springsteen’s dad worked in one, but Bruce, at an overall net worth of $500 million, certainly does not work in one alongside Ripken and your dad.  And while we’re talking about Bruce and baseball, why would he write, “He could throw that ‘speedball’ by you”?  What the hell is a “speedball”?  Has Bruce ever even watched a baseball game?).  True, Cal's never missing a game was a feat, but that blue collar working man persona that McCarver-Costas beautifully sung I came to see as late-stage capitalism’s mystification over, one, the actual gross inequality between the haves and have-nots and, two, your own actual social immobility while you continue to believe in the mythical American-dream social mobility, or something like that.  Additionally on the foreign front, Had Ripken become, as ambassador of baseball in his retired days, part-tool of US empire?  I was leaving no stones unturned.  To be fair though, “baseball ambassador” was much softer and less harmful than some of the other things W and Condi cooked up in their time, and if I were offered the job, even by this current State Department, it would be hard to turn down.  Meanwhile, I was also taking aim at the changing corporate names of stadiums and other easy, conspicuous targets.  At Yankee Stadium, for one, you could buy a “Legends Suite” ticket for up to $2,500 and have five-star dining in the Legends Suite Club and not have to interact with (slightly) lower-class fans.  Even in stadiums less plutocratic than Yankee, you have to drop at least $35 on fried food to get full.  And, while I sat with a friend in his corporate law firm’s box seats, at no cost to me—I surely couldn’t turn him down!—I contemplated the people working those concessions and how they almost definitely do not make enough between that and their second or third jobs to enjoy a night at the park themselves or even to survive in cities like New York, San Francisco, Boston, and DC with their unaffordable housing—or now more and more, even Philadelphia.  And, how those workers are disproportionately people of color, while the fans in the stands and even the players these days are getting whiter and whiter.  Finally, on the steroids question, I assumed it wasn’t just McGwire and the Roger Maris-chasing-gang who were juicing.  I presumed most sluggers were, and many pitchers, too.  I blamed them, but I also blamed the DH rule and TV ratings and viewers drawn by the home run only, i.e. fans not worth winning over anyway.  Few aspects of the game were safe from my new analysis.      

Not only did I go back to reexamine my ‘90s heroes and villains, I went back and reexamined my own ‘90s innocence and also that early 2000s ("Eisenreich") lens that led me to see the world in black and white.  Yet at the same time, I had the luxury of not seeing things from a different “black and white” perspective when maybe I should have.  How and why did I employ “grit” and “class act” for certain players and not others?  Why did I like Gwynn or Griffey, or, away from baseball, even Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods, but I did not like when Bobby Bonds talked about his son Barry and race or, away from baseball, when Venus and Serena Williams’ dad talked about his daughters and race.  Why did he bring it up?  We were having so much fun.  I didn't see it.  How did I not see it?    But meanwhile, Griffey was thinking about race himself, as other black players must have been.  How could he not?  He was kind enough to us white fans just to not bring it up.  I knew why I liked Ripken, but when the great Eddie Murray returned to the Orioles in his twilight days, why did he come off as angry to me and why did I want him to "smile more"?

To try to atone for these old but newly manifested sins, I went back and appropriated new, different heroes—not replacing Ripken but standing alongside him: Jackie Robinson, Roberto Clemente, Ichiro Suzuki, or Paterson NJ native Larry Doby.  I tried to support independent league baseball where it existed—the Camden Riversharks and the New Jersey Jackals—against the Sherman-Antitrust-Act-exempt, monopolist MLB.  (I highly recommend Netflix’s The Battered Bastards of Baseball, which is about a Portland indie team in the '70s taking on that monopoly).  I pretended to be interested in girls’ softball, to make up for my gender gap. 

Here in 2020, aside from Bryce Harper, I cannot name a single Philadelphia Phillie, and I only know his name because of the astronomical 13-year $330 million contract he signed last year.  I cannot name a single Baltimore Oriole.  I say that with neither pride nor shame.  It is just where I have landed.

*

In 1905, the baseball executive A.G. Spalding began a commission to investigate the game’s origins.  There were some die-hard American-baseball purists, especially in the late Gilded Age shortly after the Spanish-American War, when the US had joined the big boys’ club in overseas empire-building and was feeling very good about itself.  They wanted to prove that baseball was a uniquely American invention.  Most people who considered the question seriously, however, thought that the game had just evolved from the older, British “rounders.”  Spalding’s sophomoric commission purposefully excluded any supporters of the rounders theory.  Since initial evidence was very lacking, he solicited letters from the public that would serve as his evidence.  One such letter claimed, dubiously, that the future Union general of the Civil War, Abner Doubleday, had invented the game in Cooperstown, New York in 1839.  Spalding thus had all the evidence he needed and declared baseball as America’s self-made sport, and that became the official history.  Most baseball historians doubt this account and believe that it just evolved from rounders.

*

In 1995, as a know-it-all eighth grader, I looked way back into the past, to 1993, when baseball still had its ostensible pre-strike innocence.  But in 1993, adults around me were already looking back to previous decades when the game was less about the money.  And, I presume the parents of those adults had looked back to an even different time when it was a “purer” game.  Did that purity include the 1919 Black Sox scandal or racial segregation or Babe Ruth’s very high salary (for his time)?

In 2002, as a know-it-all college sophomore writing that terrible essay, I looked back on ‘95 when baseball was great, before it was then ruined by steroids, money, hotheads, and baggy pants.  I wanted the game to be great, again.  In the 2010s, I looked back at my 2002 self with disdain, precisely for looking back on the ‘90s with such schmaltz, and at the same time, I looked back at my ‘90s self only with the critic’s lens, seeing only a sheltered kid with his fake heroes.  I threw out many babies with the proverbial bathwater.    

But a couple weeks ago, here in 2020, walking in the park with my daughter and my mask, I heard the ping of an aluminum bat from some other, presumably sheltered kid in his (or her) backyard working off the tee (or Solohitter).  I felt bad for this kid I did not see because his own baseball season has been cancelled and because he does not get to watch his heroes, obscenely overpaid or not, on TV or at the ballpark.  And I must admit, here in the United States of COVID: I miss Major League Baseball.  I haven’t sat down to really watch a game in eleven years, but I feel its absence, acutely.  The game is supposed to be on TV in the background like it was growing up, with Harry Kalas giving the play-by-play.  162 games is a long season—there was never any pressure to watch whole games and certainly not every single one—but you’re supposed to at least stop in the living room, here and there, to watch a couple innings at a time.  Better yet, it’s supposed to be on the radio, like when, due to some archaic broadcast rules, the TV couldn’t carry it.  Or because Aunt Helen didn’t have cable.  Or because that’s how Bernie Sanders’ family and many Jewish families in Brooklyn, in my historical imagination, followed their Dodgers (before the team got too big for its britches and left for the Sun Belt).  Tim McCarver is supposed to be bloviating on a Fourth of July day game broadcast—who can help him and better yet who can help being drawn into his melodrama?  I can’t.

The ‘90s were indeed wonderful, at least for me, I must admit.  Maybe there was some ugly stuff in those years I didn’t see, but it wasn’t all crap—not at all, not even close.  I must say that I am now grateful, in a way, for that lovely blindness of 1995 and even for that different, “Eisenreich” blindness of 2002.  I am grateful for that angstier blindness of 2009 and, even, for that trite anger of 2019.  I am grateful for the original heroes and the original villains, including JD Drew, even though I understand the world to be a little grayer now (and even though Drew shall remain a villain, along with the DH and hedge funds). I am grateful for the schmaltz that was called for and even for all the schmaltz that was overdone.

Some myths and mythologies are harmless, I believe.  The Doubleday baseball creation myth, for instance, is probably one example as long as it doesn’t prevent historians from sharing the actual record alongside it.  Some mythologies may even be helpful or have a positive effect, and some heroes and icons are worth saving, at the same time that they’re worthy of criticism, loving or otherwise.  I will keep Ripken (or Eisenreich or, tangentially, Springsteen) as my “hero,” even if that word is grossly overused.  Some imagined pasts, I guess, can peacefully coexist next to actual history, as long as we know the difference.  

However, some characters in other myths should not be hailed as heroes because they were, in fact, murderous conquistadors or greedy sociopaths or, often, just run-of-the-mill grifters.  Or in some cases, they were slaveholding generals in a rebellious army that fought to keep slavery.  (Doubleday may not have invented baseball in 1839, but at least he chose the right, or less wrong, side to general for in 1861.  Robert E. Lee turned down Lincoln's offer for a spot on the Union side and chose "Virginia" instead.)  Some mythologies continue to be exploitative and homicidal, long after the "heroes"' departure.  Therefore, I believe, some imagined pasts and mythologies must be crushed, as they necessarily carry with them presents and imagined futures that are lethal. 

I spent a lot of time as a kid arguing that baseball was not boring, that it was the best game ever, and that if you couldn’t appreciate it, that said something about you.  I argued that Ripken was the best player ever and was being selfless—not selfish, dear pundit or naysayer friend—for playing every day.  But, I realize now those were moot arguments to moot questions.  All that mattered was that it was the game I loved and that I admired Cal.  And, as baseball and America were natural extensions of each other, I spent a lot of those same years assuming--in many cases, arguing--that we were the greatest country, ever.  Then, in recent years, I have spent a lot of time thinking how we most definitely are not the greatest and might even be the worst country in many categories, especially in regards to exploiting black lives at home and exporting violence on brown lives abroad.  These are important topics, but questions dealing with superlatives and absolutes--"best? worst? ever?"--now seem moot as well.  It’s the only country that most of us call home, we should know its actual history, and we have a duty to make it more just and equal.  How?  As Lenny Dykstra put it in that ’93 home companion video we watched so many times and which I just re-watched and loved again--how could I not?--“Whatever it takes, dude.” 

People will come, Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. "Of course, we won't mind if you look around", you'll say, "It's only $20 per person". They'll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they'll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They'll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they'll watch the game and it'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. 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. - "Terence Mann" (James Earl Jones), Field of Dreams

On that Iowa land from where indigenous peoples were pushed out to make room for white homesteaders and where the cash-strapped and bank-bullied "Ray Kinsella" mowed his crop to build a baseball field--buried in Mann’s sentimentality and wishful thinking--might be some truth.  If we don’t ignore the very rough edges, that wishful thinking might even serve us, if it doesn't blind us or make us complacent.  Or as Tim Robbins put it to Dale Petroskey , "Long live democracy, free speech and the '69 Mets [sic or, the '93 Phillies, rather]; all improbable glorious miracles that I have always believed in."  

Notes:

1.      “Catch the fever” was the 1993 advertising slogan for Major League Baseball.  Enjoy:

a. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1siRWxkoyf8

b. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_JLbdNLds4

c. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku22Mqz4r1M

2.      Do not purposely catch other fevers.  Help stop COVID.  Wear a mask.